Lucy Clayton on Agatha Christie. One of 121 stories from Brand Stories from Brand Champions, which I devised and curated for The Store, WPP.
I love Agatha Christie.
Not because she is the bestselling novelist of all time (only Shakespeare & The Bible beat her for readership and I confess I am rather less familiar with those works) but because her stories are told and retold today with as much enthusiasm as when she first wrote them. The constant adaptations give a freshness to the tales but it is their familiarity that gives them longevity; the comfort of repetition. I've loved them since childhood, spending many hours replaying audiobooks on tape until the sound started to hiss with stretching. And nothing soothes a hangover like an early 90s ITV Poirot you've seen a hundred times before. I'm not sure I've ever seen the end of a Poirot, I tend to fall asleep somewhere in the middle so to be honest I never really know whodunnit. I love that her work is constantly being repackaged , from beautiful reissued books to lavish Hollywood movies. The same stories dusted off and given a new lease of life. As period pieces, they allow us to enjoy the eternal appeal of art deco; everything is so refined and gilded and precise, even while there's claret splattered all over the walls. I've always thought Miss Marple is a fashion icon. No one does knitwear like her. Geraldine McEwan's wardrobe is my favorite, she had the most flair – lots of lace collars and layering.
We think of authors as brands quite naturally these days, we know modern writers must do the rounds of the literary festivals and public speaking, we expect perfect Instagramming to accompany each new publication. But Agatha Christie was better than that, bashing out novels while starring in her own (unsolved) mystery in her personal life. Her shocking eleven-day disappearance made the front page of the New York Times and Conan Doyle took one of her gloves to a medium to try and solve the thing. We don't know if it was a stunt but if it was it was genius.
It was after visiting Mrs Christie in 1934, at Exeter St David's station bookstall, that Allen Lane came up with the idea for good books at a price everyone could afford, going on to democratize literary fiction and start a paperback revolution with Penguin Books. Perhaps her legacy is far greater than simply the gentle art of murder.
Lucy Clayton Lucy is CEO of Community Clothing, a social enterprise with a mission to sustain and create jobs in the UK textile and garment manufacturing industry, where many of the workforce are at risk from the closure of factories. Together with Founder, British Fashion Designer Patrick Grant, Lucy has focused on delivering the company’s social impact, collaborating with organisations working with the long-term unemployed. So far the brand has created over 11,000 hours of skilled working hours in UK factories. Lucy’s career began at a fashion startup in New York and has taken her on a diverse journey from the pages of The Lady Magazine to the Playboy Mansion. Before Community Clothing, Lucy was a Board Director at J. Walter Thompson, running the Graduate Recruitment and Training programme and working with Rimmel London, Warehouse, Glamour Magazine Coty Fragrances, HSBC, Pfizer & Unilever. Passionate about discovering and mentoring talent, Lucy regularly gives talks in schools and colleges. She is part of the charity “Speakers 4 Schools” a committed network of leading figures who want to give back to young people in state schools. She regularly speaks on industry trends at events including WGSN, AdWeek Europe, The Crowd, Fashion Revolution Open Studio Week etc. She is number 22 in the Financial Times and HERoes inaugural list of top 50 Women Role Models in Business, 2017.
Years ago, when I was a very young man, there was a TV program on about wine from Italy, and there was a guy on it called Simon Loftus, who was the wine buyer for Adnams. They're a small, regional brewer in Suffolk, and I'd never heard of them. I was interested in wine so I sent off for their wine list, and this was back in the days when the wine list was typed on a piece of A4 with corrections in Tipp-Ex. It was fearsomely expensive and I lived in a tiny flat in Leytonstone so couldn't afford to buy anything, but along with the list they sent me publicity material about their hotels, The Swan and The Crown. I thought they looked lovely and hoped that one day I'd be able to go there.
I was living with my girlfriend at the time and decided it would be quite nice to get married to her, so I booked a mini-break at the Swan in Southwold. Obviously, it's quite a nerve-wracking experience asking someone to marry you, so I went to the bar and had several pints of Broadside, which was Adnams' winter ale at the time, so I could pluck up the courage. I did the deed and she said yes, and we've stayed connected to Adnams ever since.
We moved to Suffolk full time in 2006, and Adnams is the brand that first introduced us to that part of the world. I have a deep love of Suffolk , the landscape, the skies, the whole aesthetic feel of the place just really suits me. We go to Southwold regularly, and I still buy all my wine from Adnams.
I think those guys do an extraordinary job of branding. There's something about the sense of place, the romantic Edwardian image of Southwold, the lighthouse and all of that, they do that beautifully. They know who they are and who their customer is, and the executions are lovely, inspiring and just right for that brand. It's had an emotional place in my heart and has been in and around my life for about 30 years. It's a brand that's helped me get married, for crying out loud!
It's amazing that 30 years later they still have such a clear sense of themselves, there's this continuity and uniqueness about them which I suppose goes back to the place that they come form and the fact it's a well-understood, well- executed brand. I'm still married to my wife, Jacqui, after 27 years and we have four children. The power of Broadside!
David Boynton David Boynton is CEO of iconic British brand The Body Shop, where he has responsibility for the company’s business strategy, execution and growth in more than 65 markets worldwide. He took the role in December 2017 following the acquisition of The Body Shop by Brazil’s best-known beauty brand, and sustainability leader, Natura Cosmeticos. David previously held senior positions at a number of major high-street retailers, most recently as CEO of menswear retailer Charles Tyrwhitt. He was also formerly at natural beauty brand L’Occitane for 10 years, his last role at the group being Chief Executive of the US region, where he was operationally responsible for a geographically diverse group of over 600 boutiques. He has also held a number of senior management roles across Asian markets. David has over 22 years’ experience in the retail sector and has expertise spanning operations, real estate, e-commerce and CRM, brand-building, operational marketing and sales development. He is passionate about unearthing talent, driving positive change and building businesses.
Alcoholics Anonymous at first sight: ruby-haired, sultry Susan Hayward (playing torch singer Lillian Roth) drinks too much in the 50s movie "I'll Cry Tomorrow." She drags her mink coat along the floor while wailing/ slurring "Sing, You Sinners." Helping her rise from collapse, stalwart Eddie Albert (as Burt McGuire, once also brought to his knees by whiskey), offers a steadying cup of coffee, guides her to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. More meetings follow. When renewal, along with a happy, sober life results, Susan changes her tune, sings "When the Red, Red Robin …" in a clear, majestic voice:
Wake up, wake up, you sleepy head Get up, get out of your bed Cheer up, cheer up; the sun is red Live, love, laugh, and be happy*
Affected by Susan/Lillian's transformation in my raw youth, the power of Alcoholics Anonymous lodged in the back of my mind though I hadn't even gulped the first of many gin and tonics, nor dragged my own coat across a dance floor. Time passed, destiny danced, quietly waiting in the wings hovered the cost-free fellowship that remains apolitical, international, multiracial, interdenominational, intergenerational. As it had for Susan/Lillian, its long open arms remained ever-ready to enfold all in need of help. Including oneself.
Begun in 1935 by a failed stockbroker and a doctor, AA has since provided sanctuary for many millions of shaky folks in more than one hundred-eighty different countries around-the-world. The organization's covenant with privacy/anonymity at a personal and public level discourages self- identification, but, as "Sing, You Sinners" warns, if one is
…wicked and depraved And you've all misbehaved If you wanna be saved **
earthy Alcoholics Anonymous, its waiting empty chair, its offer of support by those who came before, the never-empty pot of coffee, is there. In the same way that a Life Saver promises a fruit- flavored circular candy, Alcoholics Anonymous (its triangular Brand logo – service, unity, recovery , enclosed within a circle), envisions a life raft upon a tumultuous river; its Brand reflects the culture, aims and overall integrity of an ego-free, self- help organization.
I've been a witness to AA's miracles, seen ruined lives salvaged, the sick get well, watched the hopeless find hope, outcasts come in from the cold. Had it not been for the modesty of anonymity, I might describe the pale-yellow silk lampshade I once wore on my head, the golden child I once neglected because another martini took precedence, the amorous inappropriateness undertaken on the S.S. Christoforo Columbo, the seizure had in a Greek island pine grove, but, I needn't. Suffice to say –
Sobriety is a jewel That I do much adore; And therefore keep me dancing Though drunkards lie and snore O mind your feet, O mind your feet Keep dancing like a wave And under every dancer A dead man in his grave.***
* “Red, Red Robin” words and music by Harry Woods, 1926. ** “Sing, You Sinner” music by W. Franke Harling, lyrics by Sam Coslow, 1930 *** “A Drunken Man’s Praise of Sobriety” by William Butler Yeats, 1869 – 1939
Alison Leslie Gold Alison Leslie Gold is the author, with Miep Gies, of Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family, an international bestseller that has been translated into 23 languages. Gold is also the author of Fiet’s Vase and Other Stories of Survival, Europe 1939-1945 as well as the novel The Devil’s Mistress, nominated for a National Book Award. She has recently published a new memoir titled Found and Lost: Mittens, Miep and Shovelfuls of Dirt.
Written in a personal capacity. This is commentary on brand strategy, not investment research, and it is not advice to buy, sell or hold any security. I hold no position in any company named here. Trading and financial figures are as reported by the Financial Times, Reuters and CNBC and in Shein’s listing documents, as at 3 September 2026.
A share price that needs its own bank to hold it up is not really a price. It is a bid. Whether Shein’s has been one is a question the market cannot answer until October.
Shein listed in Hong Kong on Tuesday at HK$48.56, raising about $1.7 billion and arriving at roughly $26 billion. It fell as much as 10 per cent within minutes, then closed near the offer price after a rush of late buying. On Wednesday it closed nearer HK$46. On Thursday it fell as much as 10 per cent again, touching HK$41.24 and taking the company down to about $22 billion, before recovering to close at HK$42.00, worth about $23 billion. Goldman Sachs underwrote the listing and is also its stabilisation agent, a permitted and disclosed role that allows the bank to buy shares in the market to steady the price after a float. Whether it has actually bought any is not public yet. Reuters reported that the first day’s late rally was the result of stabilisation, on the reasonable ground that a stock which falls 10 per cent in the morning and closes at its offer price has usually had help. Alicia Garcia-Herrero of Natixis, quoted in the Financial Times, summed the week up in four words: “Basically it’s a disaster.”
There was a second signal on day one that got less attention. Hong Kong’s exchange launched options on the stock immediately and allowed investors to take short positions. Three days into its life as a public company, one of the liveliest questions in the market about Shein is how to bet against it.
None of which is a solvency story, and it is worth saying so plainly. Shein told investors it holds $15 billion in cash and short-term securities. It can afford to be unloved for a very long time. The question is not whether it survives. The question is what it is worth while it does.
On that, the answer keeps shrinking. Shein was valued at close to $100 billion privately in 2022 and $66 billion in the round after. It has arrived on the public market at about a quarter of its high, and spent its first week below even that. In Shanghai this year, the chipmaker CXMT and the robot maker Unitree both rose more than 400 per cent on their first day. Investors are not cold on Chinese listings. They are cold on this one.
The obvious explanation is cost, and it is a real one. Shein’s 2025 revenue was $41.8 billion, up about 8 per cent, but profit fell almost 39 per cent to $2.1 billion and the margin halved from 8.7 per cent to 4.9. The first quarter of this year produced a $99 million loss. America scrapped the rule that let parcels under $800 enter duty free, Europe closed its own €150 version on 1 July, and goods that used to arrive untaxed now carry tariffs of between 10 and 87.5 per cent. US revenue fell in 2025 and dropped 14 per cent in the first quarter. Europe, which is 35 per cent of the business, went from 33 per cent growth to 9, and then to 2.
The second explanation on offer is that shoppers everywhere are getting weaker, and that investors have lost interest in consumer companies altogether while they chase technology. There is something in that. But it does not survive the obvious test. Inditex, which owns Zara, sells clothes to exactly the same weakening consumer, and set a record market value above €180 billion last month. A tired shopper does not explain why one clothing company is at an all-time high while another falls as much as 15 per cent below its own offer price in three days.
Hold the two side by side, because the comparison is the whole argument. In the same money, Inditex sold about $46 billion of clothes last year and Shein sold $41.8 billion. Near enough the same. Inditex made about $7.2 billion of profit against Shein’s $2.1 billion, and the market values it at about $203 billion against Shein’s $23 billion. The same sales, three times the profit, nearly nine times the value.
The same clothes. A ninth of the value.
Shein against Inditex, the owner of Zara. Each row is drawn to its own scale.
InditexShein
Inditex figures are its 2025 full-year results and its market value, converted from euros at 1.16. Shein’s are its 2025 accounts as filed in the listing prospectus, and its market value at the close of its third day of trading.
That difference is not manufacturing. Shein’s supply chain is the more remarkable machine by some distance. The difference is what people think of the name on the parcel.
WPP BAV data puts numbers on it, and the shape is the same in all three of Shein’s biggest Western markets. Every figure below is a ranking against all the brands measured in that country, so 90 means only ten brands in a hundred score higher.
At the top for fashion. Near the bottom for regard.
Shein’s ranking against every brand measured in that country. 100 means top of the market, 0 means bottom.
Seen as fashionableAdmired, by peopleAdmired, by the AIA local rival, admired
WPP BAV, most recent full study in each market, so the UK and the US are 2026 and Germany is 2025. The AI reading is Aura, June 2026, which asks the same questions of the large language models rather than of people. The rival in each market is a mainstream clothing or general retailer, shown on the same admired measure and left unnamed.
In Britain this year, Shein is the single trendiest brand in the country. No brand BAV measures there is seen as more of the moment, and 96 brands in a hundred are seen as worse value. Then the other half. On trustworthy it beats only 13 brands in a hundred, on high quality six, on authentic three. Its esteem, which is simply how much a brand is admired, sits in the bottom tenth of the market. After more than fifteen years and $41 billion of sales, that is a remarkable thing to be true.
The tempting reply is that this is just what cheap looks like. It is not. A discount clothing chain selling to the same British shoppers is admired at 59, on the highest relevance and awareness in that market. Selling inexpensive clothing does not require being held in low regard. It is an outcome a business can influence, a quarter at a time, and nothing in Shein’s numbers suggests it tried.
One more reading is worth having, because it shapes the next decade rather than the last one. BAV now fields the same brand survey at the large language models as well as at people, through a product called Aura, since a growing share of shopping journeys now starts with an AI answer rather than a shop window. In June, the machines put Shein’s esteem at or near the floor in all three markets. At the same time they know the brand extremely well, ranking its familiarity around 70 in each. Familiarity is not the problem. Whatever benefit of the doubt a shopper might give a bargain, the machine is not giving it.
So the price on the screen this week is not yet the settled one, and this is where the calendar matters. Shein’s own listing announcement puts the end of its stabilisation period on 26 September, and within seven days of that the stabilising agent has to publish what it did: whether it bought at all, the range of prices it paid, its last purchase, and how much of the over-allotment option it took up. That document, not the daily chart, is the one to read. Before it lands, Shein joins the Hang Seng Composite index at the close on 14 September, which obliges every fund tracking that index to buy whether it wants the shares or not. One of those is support and the other is obligation. Neither is demand. The number worth writing down is the one that settles after both have gone.
The Roth Read. Shein has proved that you can build the fastest supply chain in fashion, sell as much clothing as the company that owns Zara, and still be worth a ninth as much. The market is not discounting the clothes. It is discounting the brand, and it is doing so in every market at once. So the question for anyone running on price is not whether your costs are competitive. It is whether, when the discount stops working, there is anything left that people would still choose you for. Shein spent fifteen years being wanted and never got round to being trusted. Wanting is rented. Trust is owned. Only one of them shows up in the valuation.
A car company does not raise nine hundred million dollars for a robot because the robot is ready. It raises it because the car has stopped paying, and everyone in Shenzhen can read the same balance sheet.
This week Xpeng’s robotics unit raised more than $900 million at a post-money valuation above $6.3 billion, in a round led by IDG Capital with Tencent, Alibaba and Gaorong Ventures alongside. The company calls it the largest single private financing ever recorded in China’s embodied AI industry. It is not alone. AiMOGA, the robotics arm of Chery, is reported by Reuters to be preparing an IPO. BYD has unveiled a humanoid called Xiao Di. Changan, GAC, Li Auto, SAIC and Seres are all, per industry reports, building humanoids of their own.
The Western press files this as China chasing Tesla. Read the quote that matters instead. Michael Dunne of Dunne Insights, a man who has spent his career inside this market, told TechCrunch why Xpeng’s founder moved: “He sees razor-thin profit in cars on the near horizon. Robots look much more promising.” That is not ambition talking. That is a man doing arithmetic.
Now the part worth arguing with. A car is not naturally a commodity. It became one for these companies because they let it become one. A brand is a feeling, a badge, a way of being read at the school gates, and every point of that feeling is a point of price you do not have to give away. In China’s EV war some manufacturers gave it away anyway, quarter after quarter, until the only ground left to fight on was cost. Once a company reaches that ground it is no longer a carmaker. It is a contract manufacturer of batteries, motors and control systems on wheels, and a humanoid is the same components in a different shape. Which is exactly Dunne’s point: “They have all the hardware to get the job done.” Batteries, actuators, motors, the control stack, all of it flows straight out of a mature EV supply chain that the West does not have and cannot conjure in a quarter.
So the structural lesson is this. When your product is treated as a commodity you cannot defend the margin, so you move the factory to the next product that still has one. The supply chain turns out to be the asset and the vehicle was only its current shape. A country that owns the batteries and the motors can change that shape far faster than a country that owns only the software.
But look at what a brand actually buys in that story. It buys the choice to stay. The manufacturers whose badge still commands a premium are not scrambling into robotics, because their cars still pay them. Brand is the thing that stops a category collapsing into cost, and it is the cheapest insurance a manufacturer will ever hold. The Chinese groups now pivoting are not proof that brand stopped mattering. They are proof of what it costs when you stop investing in it.
The other gap cuts both ways. Dunne names it plainly: the question is whether they can catch Tesla, and by extension the American labs, “on the AI side of the equation.” Hardware is China’s, for now. The brain is still contested. But notice which problem is easier to buy your way out of. You can hire researchers. You cannot hire a decade of battery plants.
For anyone running a store, the read is sharper still. The moment a humanoid works on a shop floor or in a stockroom, the retailer’s biggest line of cost stops being staff and starts being units. That is not a labour story you can hand to an HR memo. It is a question about what your store is for when the person who once greeted the customer is a leased machine amortised over three years. The answer is the same one it has always been. People go where they are known, and a machine on the floor only frees your people to do the part a machine cannot.
What to Watch The IPO, not the demo. AiMOGA filing to go public is the real signal, because a prospectus forces the question every backflip video dodges: where does the money come from, and when. A robot that can dance is a hobby. A robot with a revenue line is a business. The market is about to make several of these companies write the number down.
The Roth Read. Stop watching China’s robots and start reading China’s balance sheets, because the carmakers already have. The humanoid is rarely the threat. It is the tell: somebody with a better cost base is about to enter your category wearing a new shape, and they can only do it because that category let its brands become interchangeable. So ask which of your rivals owns the supply chain. Then ask the harder question. If your badge came off your product tomorrow, would anyone still pay more for it? That answer is the margin you are actually defending, and it is the only one nobody can build a factory to take from you.
For years the story from China’s robotics labs came with a soundtrack: a whir of servos, a crowd gasping, a humanoid landing a backflip. Impressive. Also beside the point. The signal this week is quieter and far more consequential. In an underground lab in Beijing, and on a training floor in Hefei, China has stopped asking whether its robots can dance. It is asking whether they can work.
A Chinese robotics firm, Gaobot, put the case plainly to camera this week: for decades industrial robots have done one thing, thousands of times, on a fixed program. Bolt here. Weld there. Repeat. What China now wants is a machine that can handle the mess of a real factory, the odd angle, the dropped part, the job nobody bothered to write a routine for. On 6 August, at a pre-training ground for embodied intelligence in Hefei, 83 robots from different companies were put through more than thirty replicated real-world scenes: the home, the shop floor, the warehouse. Not a demo. A rehearsal for employment.
The numbers behind this are not modest. IDC expects China’s spending on embodied intelligence to climb from 1.4 billion US dollars to 77 billion over five years, a compound growth rate near 94 per cent. Embodied AI has, for the first time, been written into the national government work report. Unitree, which shipped 5,500 humanoids last year, more than anyone on earth, has filed to go public. The language coming out of the sector is telling: 2026 is being called the year of mass-production commercialisation, the year the work leaves the lab.
Here is why a retailer should read this over their coffee, not skim past it. The West has spent this year debating the humanoid as spectacle and as threat: will it take my job, can it fold my laundry, is it safe. China has quietly reframed the question as a supply-chain one. A machine that follows a fixed program is a tool. A machine that learns a new task from watching, that adapts to a scene it has not seen, is closer to labour. And labour, unlike tooling, scales into every corner of an economy: the stockroom, the loading bay, the shop floor at closing time.
Notice, too, where these robots are being sold. Unitree and AgiBot are not just filing IPOs; they are opening shops. A flagship store in Beijing. An Agibot deployment inside a JD MALL in Shanghai, fitted out as a retail complex, around five million yuan of investment in a single store. The West imagines robots arriving through the factory door. China is building the retail entrance first, letting the public meet the machine over the counter, where familiarity, and demand, are made. Dobot has gone further still, launching a humanoid pitched at the young family and the home.
The mechanism matters, and it is not magic. China’s edge is structural: the batteries, the motors, the rare earths, the assembly lines sit inside the same borders as the labs. When the New Yorker’s Kai-Fu Lee says the two countries are now “two different universes,” this is the concrete meaning of it. One universe is arguing about what the robot might mean. The other is collecting the training data, thirty scenes at a time, and pricing the shelf space.
What to watch. Watch the training grounds, not the trade shows. WAIC gives you the polished demo; the Hefei data-collection floor gives you the roadmap. When a single site is running 83 robots across warehouse, shop and home scenes, the next headline is not a better backflip. It is a purchase order.
The Roth Read. Stop watching Chinese robots for the trick and start watching them for the task. If your competitor’s stockroom is being rehearsed on a training floor in Hefei this year, you do not have a technology question, you have a cost-base question, and it is already being answered without you. The West is grading these machines on whether they can amaze us. China is grading them on whether they can be hired.
Every retailer who watched three Chinese labs ship video models in seven days filed the news under marketing. Cheaper ads, faster content, a problem for the agency. Wrong drawer. What landed last week was the perception layer for the machines that will one day walk your shop floor, and it landed open, and it landed cheap.
The launches came within days of each other. ByteDance’s Seedance 2.5 now generates thirty seconds of video with sound in a single pass, holding characters, scenes and camera logic together across a whole narrative rather than one lucky shot. MiniMax’s H3 does fifteen seconds with stereo audio generated jointly rather than bolted on, and on 3 August MiniMax put the weights on Hugging Face for anyone to download. Alibaba closed the week with Qwen3.8-Max, 2.4 trillion parameters, which now sits second in the world on the public leaderboard for reading images and visual material.
So run the telescope the other way. A model that keeps thirty seconds coherent, objects that persist behind an obstacle, weight that falls the way weight falls, a cup that is still on the table after the camera moves, has not learned to draw. It has learned how the world behaves. Generation is only the exam. The syllabus is physics, permanence and consequence. And the same weights that let a machine imagine a scene let it read one.
Reading a scene, fast, in bad light, with a person moving through it, is the entire job of a robot’s eyes.
That is the triangulation, and it is why this is a retail story rather than a media one. China already holds the other two legs. By industry counts it ships the overwhelming majority of the world’s humanoid robots, and TrendForce expects Chinese output to nearly double this year, with Unitree and AgiBot taking around eighty per cent of shipments. It holds the motors, the batteries, the rare earths, and the appetite to put machines in public before the ethics committee has finished its report. What it lacked was sight worth putting behind the visor. It is now building that in the open and giving it away.
Price finishes the argument. DeepSeek’s V4-Flash update, the least photogenic of the week’s launches and probably the most consequential, costs roughly three cents to run the full Artificial Analysis intelligence battery, against $3.15 for the Western frontier. A robot has a battery, not a data centre. Perception has to be almost free before it can live inside a body on a shop floor, and last week it became almost free.
A caution worth keeping. None of this means the machine understands anything. Video models still get physics wrong in ways that are amusing in a clip and unacceptable in a machine holding a bottle near a customer’s child. A convincing picture of a grasp is not a grasp, and that distance is where the next two years of the argument will be fought.
The direction, though, is not ambiguous. The robot that eventually watches your shelves, greets your customer and judges whether that customer is confused or annoyed will not be running perception you bought from a vendor you can name. It will be running weights someone downloaded, most likely trained in China, tuned by a supplier three tiers below the name above your door. And it will still be your brand doing the looking.
What to watch. Not the next video demo, and not the next leaderboard. Watch for the moment a Chinese maker ships a robot whose perception layer is one of these video models, and says so. When those two industries start sharing a checkpoint, the cost of machine sight collapses the way the cost of machine text already has, and every question retailers assumed they had until 2030 arrives early.
The Roth Read. Stop treating AI video as a marketing line item and start asking who supplies your machines’ eyes, because you are about to buy vision the way you buy electricity: from someone else, invisibly, with no say in how it was made. Put that question on your risk register this quarter. The machine watching your customer speaks for you, whoever trained it.
At STREAM Commerce in Miami I interviewed a number of the key speakers and participants as part of my “In Conversation with…” series. I am very grateful to everyone who graciously participated in the recordings and were so generous in sharing their insights. Over the next few days I will publish here the individual interviews as well as the consolidated live broadcast that we took pace each day.
Todays “In conversation… is with Garrison Macri, Global Business Development, Superup
At STREAM Commerce in Miami I interviewed a number of the key speakers and participants as part of my “In Conversation with…” series. I am very grateful to everyone who graciously participated in the recordings and were were so generous in sharing their insights.
Todays “In conversation… is with Brian Shuster Founder & Chief Innovation Officer actv8me.
The BrandZ Most Valuable German Brands 2019 was launched recently. I never shared on my blogs some of the key insight short films I narrated for the 2018 brand rankings. So before I share some of the 2019 insights, over the next few days, I will post these videos as the core insights within them are as sharp and as relevant for today. This one is about Social and TV in Germany.
