You don't need to go shopping ever again — Felix Hoffmann @ 7Learnings

Felix Hoffmann has been inside Zalando's pricing engine. Now he's building the tools retail brands need to survive the AI.

We talked about what agentic shopping looks like these days, why European platforms are dangerously slow to react, and why asking "how do I use ChatGPT in my company" is completely the wrong question.

In this episode:

- Why 30–50% of online purchases already start with an AI conversation

- The real reason OpenAI paused agentic shopping (hint: Amazon)

- How product decisions — not just pricing — will be shaped by what AI assistants recommend

- Why Zalando is losing to Amazon

- The offline retail impact nobody's talking about yet

- Why predictive pricing beats LLM-based pricing for explainability and trust

- The chess computer analogy: why specialized AI beats general AI for enterprise use cases

- What a €500M investment commitment would actually look like for a European platform to win

Felix is one of the clearest thinkers on what AI actually changes in commerce versus what's just noise.

Timestamps:

00:00 - The Future of AI in Shopping

03:47 - The Role of Discoverability in Retail

06:47 - Personalization and Production in Fashion

10:58 - The Impact of AI on Consumer Behavior

13:59 - 7Learnings: Optimizing Retail Decisions

16:48 - Consumer Readiness for AI Shopping Assistants

19:35 - The Offline Shopping Experience and AI

22:50 - Luxury Brands and AI Integration

27:43 - The New Gatekeepers of Retail

28:57 - The Competitive Landscape of AI in Shopping

31:02 - Opportunities for Independent Brands

32:14 - Navigating Uncertainty in AI Adoption

36:14 - Strategic AI Investments for Retailers

37:56 - The Risks of Inaction in Retail

40:55 - Pricing Strategies in the Age of AI

46:28 - Trust and Explainability in AI Systems

51:07 - The Future of Decision Automation

Felix - https://www.linkedin.com/in/felix-hoffmann-7learnings

7Learnings - https://7learnings.com/

─── sounds good. — a podcast with Anna Nadeina soundsgoodpod.com

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