Tech giants like Google and Amazon and major retailers like Walmart and Target are all launching AI features to drive sales this holiday season. Daniel M. Wagner, CEO and Founder of Rezolve Ai, discusses how AI is impacting sales with Bloomberg Tech’s Caroline Hyde.
Transcript
Ahead of Black Friday, we want to understand how ecommerce is being driven in many ways by generative AI.
A company that’s been leading the forefront of that for many years now before generative AI became cool. I’m talking about Rezolve AI.
CEO and founder is here with us, Daniel Wagner, who has been helping companies understand the opportunity when it comes to customer services perspective, when it comes to really relating with those who are going to make a purchase.
What are you seeing in terms of shifts for this particular era of spending that we’re about to come across?
Daniel Wagner: Well, I think the first thing to say is that, you know, we have approached this whole utilization of this AI capability by trying to drive growth and revenue momentum rather than looking to reduce cost. So that’s unusual: to look at an ROI proposition for AI outside of a sort of cost reduction.
Our technology is designed to improve what we think is end‑of‑life ecommerce experience, which I think is awful.
I think the whole experience of navigating ecommerce, which partly I was responsible for in previous companies of, you know, navigation on the left and a search — 140 items, 40 items, 40 items — that’s not a way to shop.
And we’re changing that to a conversational engagement — the same kind of engagement you would have if you walked into a physical store and were fortunate enough to deal with a great salesperson. In those situations you say, “I’m looking to buy this or that,” and the salesperson engages with you in a warm and friendly way and helps guide you through the order process to get you the product you want and sell you the product.
And that’s what we’re bringing to digital channels, which suffer from 70% attrition or cart abandonment today — a problem that’s existed for two decades and everyone’s been scratching their heads trying to solve. And that’s 100% converse to walking into a physical store where 70% of people do end up buying a product.
I think we know what the problem is: it’s a lack of information and a lack of guidance in getting to the product you want.
Caroline Hyde: When you’re interacting — when I would perhaps unbeknownst to me be interacting — with Resolve AI, are you doing it within an individual brand? And how is that coming under some stress or duress as generative AI products want you to shop within them? I mean, we’ve already seen cease and desist for Perplexity versus Amazon, for example.
Daniel Wagner: Yes, the future is going to fall into two camps, we believe.
The complete renovation of the way in which we interact with digital channels today, which is instead of this whole horrible navigation, a normal conversation — “You know, welcome to my store, how can I help you?” And then, you know, an engagement which results in a purchase.
Caroline Hyde: Like I’m doing with Rufus AI, for example, on Amazon.
Daniel Wagner: Well, Rufus…
Caroline Hyde: Rufus, yeah.
Daniel Wagner:…but much better than Rufus.
Of course, Rufus AI has some limitations and we overcome those. But nevertheless, the point is, you’re right — it’s much more of a conversation, as if you’re talking to an expert who knows all about the products, who can help guide you to the right product for your particular needs. And that also covers services as well — like hotels and travel and all sorts of things.
The second way is that actually the retail site will be interacting with an agent — with a digital programmable bit of code — that will come to the site and interrogate the site on behalf of an end user that might be talking to Siri or might be talking to ChatGPT or Perplexity.
So I’m having a conversation with ChatGPT about where I want to go on holiday or what bag I want to buy or whatever it happens to be, and they in turn are sending agents off into the internet to interrogate sites.
Now, there’s a great opportunity there — of course it makes for convenience and everything else — but from the other side, from the retailer side, if they open their doors and allow these agents in, it’s like opening their warehouse to a whole load of rogue, you know, marauders who are going to come take stuff off the shelves. There’s no control, and they lose control. So they need to put in process to control the conversation with these agents.
And that’s the second thing we do. So we provide two solutions: one which is engaging with the customer who arrives at the site to give them a wonderful experience, and the other is to protect the site when talking to digital agents that inevitably will come to the site to have a conversation on behalf of a user — maybe interacting with a service like Perplexity or ChatGPT.
Caroline Hyde: So push us to maybe Black Fridays in years ahead. Will it be my agents talking to the retail agent — is that the inevitable path? Or will we see these frictions where companies don’t want to lose that personal relationship with me?
Daniel Wagner: Well, I think that if they put in place technology like ours that has this agentic interface that can talk to these agents from Perplexity, from ChatGPT, from Siri, from Google Assistant, from Gemini and from whoever else — and control the narrative…
Think of it as a bouncer standing in front of the warehouse, you know, allowing these agents in to see what they want them to see and not what they don’t want them to see, but at the same time requesting of them, “Who are you talking to? Are you talking to Dan Wagner? He’s a great customer — give him an upgrade,” you know, and so on.
That’s absolutely essential when dealing with these agents, because they’re just the same as dealing with the customer direct — they’re just agents on behalf of that customer. So we’re providing both solutions.
And I think a lot of retailers are rushing into this, you know — they don’t want to miss out on the new wave of interactions that we’re clearly seeing, with people interacting with digital channels with, you know, assistants like ChatGPT and others.
At the same time, they must protect themselves, because remember what happened to Toys “R” Us when they put all their stuff on Amazon and ended up going bust because they lost control of their customers. And that’s a real worry.
Caroline Hyde: Can you just articulate how much penetration there is already in this? We’re talking time and time again about the opportunities of generative AI, the infrastructure build‑out, but many still are reticent and wonder how much it’s actually working on the ground — how many companies are adopting it and pilots are working.
How much have you managed to already penetrate? How much do you think eventually it will build in?
Daniel Wagner: OK, well this company is taking off. It’s been nine years up till now in the making, and making sure that we don’t hallucinate and all the issues associated — on our own LLM, on our own proprietary technology, and so on — now supported by Microsoft and Google, who recognise we have something unique in the market and [are] selling it into their customers as well.
But what we found was at the beginning of this year — meaning the beginning of 2025 — we had no revenue at all. And we have told the market that we’re exiting this year with 150 million in ARR, meaning that if we stopped selling on January 1 of 2026, we have 150 million of revenue.
We’ve also told the market, which is also a fact, that we’ve signed over 100 enterprise customers — big names like H&M and The Container Store and Dunkin, and many others. And these customers are now in the process of deploying our technology, testing it, and exposing it to their customers.
And I’ll give you a prediction: mid‑2026, this will start to become prevalent on websites, and suddenly you’ll see an inflection point of retailers saying, “Well, we can’t go back to the old way — it’s a dead, awful experience. The new way is this wonderful, human‑like interaction where we can give our customers the best experience.”
And that’s how it’s going to go — it’s going to be a complete displacement of the old way.
