26 Predictions That Will Reshape Commerce In 2026

[00:00:00] Richard Gaffin: Hey folks. Welcome to the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffin, Director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread Collective, and I'm joined here. We're sitting here on Monday, December the 29th, right before the turnover into 2026. I'm sitting here with Taylor Holiday, our CEO here at Common Thread. Fresh year, fresh haircut as well.

[00:00:18] Richard Gaffin: How are you doing, Taylor?

[00:00:19] Taylor Holiday: You know, I was critiqued by my friend Dave Huffman the other day, that my reputation as the Madonna of Ecommerce was kind of falling flat. 'cause I hadn't changed up my hairstyle in a while. So figured it was time to, to get lean, you know?

[00:00:33] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Yeah. And speaking of which, you, so what, what are some of the other Madonna of ecommerce styles you've had? I know you bleached your hair that one year and then you did shaved and bleached I

[00:00:42] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. Yeah, we did. We've done bleach, we've done shaved and bleached. We've done, yeah. The long and flowing we've done. Keep it short, you know, it's just, there's a real, real quest for identity over here. Richard's really the key is that I've, I've yet to find one that I really like, you

[00:00:56] Richard Gaffin: That's right. Well, let's, here's hoping 2026 is the one for all of [00:01:00] us. So, part of what we're talking about here, or the main thing we're talking about rather, is your. Annual predictions list. And so we have 26 predictions, 4 26 here. We're dropping this blog. The link for it was gonna be on the show notes.

[00:01:11] Richard Gaffin: It's on our site as well. Common thread code.com. So check it out. But we're not gonna necessarily go into any of the specific items, although they will come up rather than, I think we're gonna talk about some of the overall. Themes here in terms of what's coming for us and for ecommerce in 2026.

[00:01:26] Richard Gaffin: So, Taylor, I mean, I think the, the main thing that jumps out to me anyway, skimming through the list, is a lot of this is about the way that AI is going to fundamentally change. The way we do everything in the upcoming year. Obviously it's already changed some of those things and, and the, the seeds have been planted in the last couple of years.

[00:01:44] Richard Gaffin: But it sounds to me like you're kind of thinking a lot of these things are gonna come to fruition. So let's talk about like, what are a couple of the things that you wanna draw out in terms of how AI is going to change ecommerce?

[00:01:55] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. I think it's. It's really important to just start with [00:02:00] acknowledging that there's nothing novel about saying that AI is the trend of the moment, but I, I think the thing that I'm experiencing and I keep sort of retweeting things and saying like they're coming for all of it about chat CBT and it. I think this really underlies what I believe about this idea of AI is that it's closer to akin to the internet than it is to meta or an app or a something on top of the internet where what I see chat GBT doing is they're like. Like I, I imagine a world where I use and interact with the AI interface of an LLM chat and everything in there, similar to how I use the internet, right?

[00:02:38] Taylor Holiday: Like in the way that mobile apps, I think were like sort of this extension of a separate ecosystem entirely, and that's why I experience. LLMs to be. What I see chat GBT doing is they're sort of consuming everything. They're building a browser and then they're building this and they're building that.

[00:02:53] Taylor Holiday: Like, so I think a lot of times people think of it as like, oh, I need to get AI optimization to drive traffic from the [00:03:00] LLM to my website. And that's a perfect example of where I go, no, no, no. That's not it at all. The LLM is the store. Like it's gonna happen there. It's not going. To drive you external.

[00:03:11] Taylor Holiday: It's consuming all of it. And so I think that that is what I see about AI is that it's just AI will just be, it will be the foundational layer on which everything exists, all of our work, all of our shopping, all of our discovery, all of versus this idea that it's gonna be this. Destination that you go to sometimes and then you bounce back to the internet and then you bounce back to apps.

[00:03:31] Taylor Holiday: Like, no apps are gonna be built on the ecosystem. Like, so it's, it's the new platform on which everything exists and I think it's just hard to even conceptualize the total service area that it represents.

[00:03:43] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Well, so one category that it sounds like we have a little bit more of, a concrete sense of is the way that it's going to and has already begun affecting creative. So a couple of the points here. You have point 19 a. Entitled AI Unchained which essentially is a comment on the way that AI models are sort of [00:04:00] changing the way that we think about brand standards.

[00:04:02] Richard Gaffin: But then just generally speaking, in, in point 20, the death of the creative strategist which is. This is really interesting because it kind of fundamentally shifts a lot of the way that we had been predicting over the last couple of years about, you know, whatever creative is king, the creative strategist is the linchpin.

[00:04:17] Richard Gaffin: Now we're sort of saying that AI is kind of ending all that and fundamentally completely changing what creative is in the realm of advertising. So can you speak to that a little bit more?

[00:04:26] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. So I think one of the, the, this idea, and this is, this is sort of, I think a really challenging idea because it really gets at the heart of who are we as humans and

[00:04:38] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Oh yeah.

[00:04:39] Taylor Holiday: the world, right? Because, so in this podcast it's from Eric Seifert, and there's a study that they referenced that a group of researchers attempted to see if the AI could outperform humans in a couple of different factors.

[00:04:54] Taylor Holiday: The first idea was could humans interacting with the AI in this sort of way that I see it happen most [00:05:00] often right now, which is that the AI might be given a set of constraints. A set of definitions, a set of messaging prompts, a set of whatever, and then it works to create an output. It's sort of a revision cycle, and it almost acts as an like outsourced graphic designer in the middle of your workflow.

[00:05:17] Taylor Holiday: That was like, I think how people started treating the idea of generative AI initially, and it turns out like that was like worse than human, just humans doing the whole thing like that, that made worse work. But when the third way, which was that the humans didn't participate at all. Not in the prompting, not in the definition, not in the standards.

[00:05:35] Taylor Holiday: And it was given total open-ended freedom to explore relative to the outcome. It outperformed the humans. And I think this is really what meta slowly always moves people towards, which is that like. Hey, at first we give you the check this box if you wanna allow us to part to change some things up.

[00:05:51] Taylor Holiday: And then eventually it just says like, we're just gonna do this now because it's better for you. And the idea is that humans imposing [00:06:00] their biases about what they believe works onto the process, makes the process worse, especially around this idea that we think of, which is like creative diversity, which.

[00:06:11] Taylor Holiday: It's a buzzword. Yet at the same time, it's something so far from what any of us individually are capable of producing because our, like experience set defines our like creative spectrum in many ways. Side note on this, have you seen Sinners? The movie?

[00:06:26] Richard Gaffin: I have not seen it yet.

[00:06:27] Taylor Holiday: Okay, so you gotta watch it, but there's this scene in the beginning.

[00:06:31] Taylor Holiday: Where this old man is talking to the young musician who's like kinda the star kid of the show and the kid says, I play the blues. And the old man sort of laughs and is like, what does a 9-year-old know about the blues? Right? And they're driving in the car and, and the next scene. And this old man starts telling this story about his own suffering.

[00:06:49] Taylor Holiday: And though it's this connection back to this idea of like, you wanna know why I'm the best at the Blues Delta Slim, why I, let me give you my suffering. That that this music comes from [00:07:00] that is so real and powerful and it was like this really cool way they connected these two little scenes. But that's sort of the, the point and problem of us is that like we are simply like.

[00:07:12] Taylor Holiday: Making meaning and extraction out of the limited experience that we have. And so when we need to create creative diversity, we struggle to pull from that, what we don't know that, which isn't us, you know? And so like, how could I speak well to the lived experience of, you know, a a 70-year-old man in 1930s, Mississippi, like, I couldn't create from that place.

[00:07:36] Taylor Holiday: But maybe in an ai could, you know, have you seen pluribus? Do you watch Pluribus yet?

[00:07:40] Richard Gaffin: yeah. PLU

[00:07:41] Taylor Holiday: Okay, so Right. So what is, what is the idea of like the shared consciousness of all people at all times and being able to create out of that place like, and so I think there's something that we're learning about what that access is that is still.

[00:07:57] Taylor Holiday: Sourced ultimately from human knowledge, [00:08:00] but it's just the spectrum of, it's so broad that it will create the grandma in the true classic outfit that true classic themselves would never make. And, and the end result is I think that, that, that unlocks better outcomes and I think it will. And I think it's just way too powerful for any individual to

[00:08:16] Richard Gaffin: Well, let's let expand on the true classic example for those who don't know what you're talking about, because I think it's like a really good illustration of this.

[00:08:23] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, so I, so Brian Canoe shared an image where they had turned on AI generations, or hadn't turned it on. I don't know the exact circumstances. And it, it created this grandma. In their sweatsuit. And if you know true Grassley, it's like a brand focused on men like my age men, middle aged men, younger men.

[00:08:40] Taylor Holiday: And so this was like a violation of all brand standards. Now I wanna be really careful here 'cause I have no evidence that the grandma would have worked

[00:08:48] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:48] Taylor Holiday: at all. That's not actually my point. At all. But when I see everybody's reaction to the grandma, what is so obvious to me is that that like a human actually would've been [00:09:00] so bound by all the priors of the brand standards and the expectations that it would never have produced that outcome.

[00:09:07] Taylor Holiday: And so I think of, I think of created performance as just simply a distribution of possible choices. Like, and, and so whoever can cover the broadest spectrum of potential trials can create the largest bound. Outcomes in either direction. Now, maybe the grandma would've been terrible. I, I, it's not really the point.

[00:09:23] Taylor Holiday: The point is the exploration of the unknown and the not yet attempted that it begins to allow for those that will grant it the permission.

[00:09:32] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, it's interesting to think about that. The true classic example combined with kind of the example from, or, or, or the, the illustration of pluribus that you were mentioning, which is to say like what AI is, has sort of proven itself to be, is this. Intelligence that is unbound from the, our sort of human emotional chains if you wanna get poetic about it.

[00:09:54] Richard Gaffin: Right. The idea that like the AI would do that and a human would never is 'cause a human would be afraid that they [00:10:00] would get in trouble with Brian or whoever else

[00:10:02] Taylor Holiday: And obviously would, and they'd be right about that because it was very clear that he was very dissatisfied with that result.

[00:10:07] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, it'd be an insane thing to do, and yet because of its intelligence, it's able to make a choice. It has way more inputs into what choice might work and might not work, but then also is just unafraid of anything, and so it just becomes more effective in every possible way.

[00:10:21] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:10:22] Taylor Holiday: Right. And I, I think a lot about this in like, God, we could go forever on this. Like, but what is school and what does it teach in people? It's this like capacity to follow a set of predefined rules that may or may not produce good outcomes for you and aren't really designed, they're designed to like, make the teachers live possible, is really what it feels like.

[00:10:40] Taylor Holiday: And so I think about like, yeah, there's just this from a very young age, we are wired to operate. On a very structured set of inputs that are pretty limited in all honesty. And so it doesn't surprise me even in the least that the open-ended exploration that AI can produce would lead to a [00:11:00] broader distribution of outcomes.

[00:11:02] Taylor Holiday: That ultimately when optimized towards a specific definition, like CTR or ROAS or whatever you would give, it could optimize more effectively for that thing.

[00:11:11] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. So one other thing that I think is, is. Because it, it's, this is a good kind of encapsulation of it's number 23, which is the shift of prompting from prompting to proactive agency transfers to the machine. So this is like one thing that we would talk about when we talked about AI is that, hey, you know.

[00:11:29] Richard Gaffin: Like we kinda mentioned at the top of this, it's like what's leftover for humans to do? And the answer to that was it had something to do with agency, the idea of making choices, coming up with strategy, and then the AI becomes your assistant who essentially executes for you and executes better than a human could do whatever.

[00:11:44] Richard Gaffin: But part of what this seems to be saying is that essentially the best choices are also going to be able to be made by AI as opposed to humans. Generally, the strategy should maybe be set by ai. So you right, you're right here that the table stakes in [00:12:00] 2026 are systems tell you what to do, then do it for you and only notify you if something goes wrong.

[00:12:05] Richard Gaffin: What moves into the background? New ads launched automatically. Email and SMS deployed based on inventory pressure, PDPs reconfigured dynamically, prices adjusted budgets, reallocated POS issued without human approval. Human approval becomes the exception, not the rule, which essentially is like there's no work left.

[00:12:21] Richard Gaffin: I guess only ownership of assets. I have no idea.

[00:12:24] Taylor Holiday: And there are two versions of, I, I wrote, like when I write about AI in the future, there's, I'm very compelled by like the abundance idea that like all work does go away and like you're sort of left going. Okay. What now? Hobbies? Like, like on my first million the other day, they had a guy who's a stock trader and he's, he's like, for 19 straight years, he's performed at a 75% annual.

[00:12:47] Taylor Holiday: Like he's outperformed this art in, in this. And he does it basically it through what he calls observational methodology, which is basically like I read TikTok comments and identify trends before they happen. And I traded on the sphere 'cause I saw the Eagles were sold out. [00:13:00] Well, like kind of vibe, like things like that.

[00:13:03] Taylor Holiday: And one of the things he talks about is like he has this big bet that basically COVID when we were locked up and there was all this money got sent out, and what all the human behavior that surrounded that moment is like a really good bet on what the future's about to become.

[00:13:17] Richard Gaffin: Interesting.

[00:13:18] Taylor Holiday: What would we all do if we just had to figure out hobbies all the time?

[00:13:21] Taylor Holiday: And so he is like, so travel outdoors, camping, like all these things. He's like, I have a huge bet on that in the future. And so there's this whole version of the world that is like the abundance future where yes, all this work goes away. And there's this question of what do you do in light of that? And so I think that's one spectrum of possibility.

[00:13:38] Taylor Holiday: The other is sort of the more negative version. Where these things all sort of like just continue to be less effective than we want them to be. And they, you know, they don't quite work in, in, in that, in that spectrum or, you know, something in the middle, which is what, like Andrew is probably in the background yelling.

[00:13:53] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. Taylor, it'll be probably be something in the middle. But but I think the, the, the, when I think about the creative example we just used. There's no way that [00:14:00] principle applies exclusively to the selection of creative anymore than it does to the selection of your PDP or in my world, the biggest thing that I am absolutely certain, certain is like horrific process is media buy.

[00:14:13] Taylor Holiday: Like the decision making structure that exists in the media buying world for why people are doing what they're doing is so bad. It is so wrought with error and bias. And, and, and I mean this everywhere, including at CTC in any organization that I go, like, there's just no way this persists, so there's no way and ordering inventory, all of it is, is sort of that same thing of like, why do we do that?

[00:14:40] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:41] Taylor Holiday: It is just like flying a plane. Like at the end of the day, we all kind of went like, oh yeah, autopilot that. That's actually what we want. And the landing thing. But eventually it's like same thing with cars. It's like, oh yeah, like we should stop doing that. Because we don't make good enough decisions. So [00:15:00] why do we think like the complexity of driving a car in the dynamic world environment will be solved autonomously.

[00:15:07] Taylor Holiday: But like inventory ordering will still be a guy with a calculator. Like in what world is that true? You know? So I just, I think it's really hard for anything that is a probabilistic estimation of the future in particular to be done by people who are really poor at that kind of thinking.

[00:15:25] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Interesting.

[00:15:26] Taylor Holiday: Like Exactly. So our producer just jumped in.

[00:15:28] Taylor Holiday: I hope you're leaving that in Corey. He just won his fantasy football draft on auto draft. Really noble, noble quest. But it's, it's true. It's better than Corey. Corey played in the league for 20 years, never won, making the decision himself.

[00:15:38] Richard Gaffin: Yep. Right. And the moment he auto-draft, he crushes

[00:15:41] Taylor Holiday: Champion.

[00:15:41] Richard Gaffin: It's not even close. Okay, so I, I think like, man, what's so fascinating about this is, is we've done a version of this pod probably the last three or four years, and almost always it, it breaks down to something like. You're gonna have to tighten up your margins.

[00:15:57] Richard Gaffin: And here's a couple of novel ways you could do that, [00:16:00] or maybe it's, you know, during COVID or whatever, it's be, Hey, it's spend, spend, spend. This is like a weird moment. Here's how you execute on that. This set of predictions feels so completely different than the ones that we've done in the past.

[00:16:11] Richard Gaffin: Basically, what you're saying is like the, the world, the fundamental paradigm of the world is going to change almost completely, not just in ecommerce. And I think part of like how we're sort of framing this blog is 26, 26 predictions for ecommerce. Drop the E, in other words, 26 predictions for commerce in general.

[00:16:26] Richard Gaffin: And this is what this, this is what this feels like. This is you, you're making predictions for the way that kind of markets work changing kind of fundamentally the way work is changing fundamentally, all these types of things. I was gonna point out,

[00:16:41] Taylor Holiday: and I think it has, like, I,

[00:16:42] Richard Gaffin: yeah, yeah.

[00:16:42] Taylor Holiday: so even I think about like, I don't know how much you interact with like the streaming world. Like, but, but, but there is like a large collection of the Youth of America. I don't know as much about that. Like is walking around with a camera on themselves like [00:17:00] all the time.

[00:17:01] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:17:01] Taylor Holiday: Large portion is probably too overstated. What I mean is there's a large portion of people watching people do this. And like, you'll go to places, especially I live in LA and so you'll, you'll like encounter this every now and again where somebody like, I don't, and I, Corey, I know I live in Orange County, just south of la.

[00:17:14] Taylor Holiday: Same, same, same. But the idea is like you'll see people like walking around and there's. They have a camera and they're just doing things or, and like the biggest stars that generate the largest impression count and volume right, are all these kinds of humans. And so this idea that we're like perpetually in the matrix, so to speak, is like very real.

[00:17:35] Taylor Holiday: Like, and I think that the world is, is very different. As a result of these things. And so, so therefore, then the way that we shop and discover, I think about like this idea of live shopping was everyone could see that like this, like there we did this on tv, like we had, you know, a, a channel that was the home shopping network that you could go to.

[00:17:54] Taylor Holiday: And then so, so everyone felt like live shopping was gonna happen on like, social at some point. Like we, we, we talk about it in [00:18:00] China, but then like, sort of what was missing was like people just being live all the time. As a normal thing to do because being live felt weird without that layer. And so it was like we, we jumped abstraction just one too far.

[00:18:14] Taylor Holiday: But now all of a sudden it's like people are live all the time. Like that's just, that's just like a state of being is live. And, and people tune in. So, so this idea now that what'll start to emerge live shopping is like, whoa. Yeah. Yeah. That'll just be like part of the live interaction versus being the whole thing.

[00:18:31] Taylor Holiday: It's like, so I, I think that there's gonna be brands that are, like, one of my predictions is that. I think we're gonna see the first like 24 7 live brand. It's a brand that, the whole premise is like, you can watch the brand, be the brand live all the time, and they're gonna do drops in moments. And there's the manufacturing floor and there's the office and there's the like, and it's just a live brand that you interact with all the time.

[00:18:54] Taylor Holiday: And so I think about like what marketers want, which is this like, we wanna be at top of mind all the time. We wanna [00:19:00] create eight impressions a day. Well it's like, or eight hours. Impressions a day of like, you're just there, you're omnipresent in the, in, in the sphere of the world, you know? So, I think that's all, all pieces of it.

[00:19:14] Richard Gaffin: No. I mean, yeah. Yeah. The change has already been underway, but I think it's like the, the addition of, of AI and the way that AI has even developed in like the last year to the mix creates like the level of intelligence to actually execute on creating the matrix basically, which is what we're kind of in the

[00:19:29] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, it makes it all possible in this

[00:19:30] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:19:31] Taylor Holiday: that seemed overwhelming. So like I even talk about how I had created my, prior to my CT C life, I worked at a company that is now Vayner Commerce and I, I built this like labs division and we spent a long time trying to build this product called My Story.

[00:19:45] Taylor Holiday: And the idea was S-T-O-R-E-Y. Like it was it was Richard's store basically. And the idea was connect your Instagram count, we'll auto tag all the photos and build a store of everything that Richard owns and I could go shop Richard's store. And the idea was like to try and layer [00:20:00] on this social graph on top of the product feeds of the internet.

[00:20:03] Taylor Holiday: So I could see like, who are all my friends that own product X and, and like sort of get and source data that way because I've always believed that like. I've, I had, I've had this phrase that I've used for a long time, which is this idea, the two greatest influences are purchase decisions are price and a recommendation from somebody you trust, right?

[00:20:19] Taylor Holiday: So it's like, Brian Skanky, who I sit next to is an iron Man and high rock star. So I want to know like what shoes he wears when he. Runs, you know, like that, that kind of influential decision. But there's no good source data for that other than talking to Brian. And sometimes it's kind of embarrassing to like, ask them what they want.

[00:20:37] Taylor Holiday: You just wanna be able to kind of get it. And so that seems missing for me, but. What I think is like, the reality is that it's not actually Brian, that's the right source. In this case, it's chat, GBT because chat GBT is actually way better than Brian, and I am so wildly open with chat GBT in a way that I'm not with anyone else in my li life.

[00:20:56] Taylor Holiday: Not a single person, not my wife, my children. No one gets the level of [00:21:00] transparency and so for, for somebody to be able to curate. A set of things that I want and need at all times to where like every day I wake up to a dynamically populated store that knows everything about me and is suggesting and recommending things all the time.

[00:21:14] Taylor Holiday: Feels very real that I should have my own store. That Taylor's store should be real.

[00:21:19] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. And eventually that store makes the buying decision for you, and then it's just AI's buying things from ai and it just shows up to your door and.

[00:21:27] Taylor Holiday: Right. Like, like yeah. It's just cra and, and that's why a big part of this is that I think that. for the Shopifys and Amazons of the world is that the differentiator of, in my store, which product shows up is a big question. Right? Is it from the brand? Is it from a retailer? And I think at that point, the huge leverage edge becomes like atoms in the world, which is the, the network of fulfillment.

[00:21:49] Taylor Holiday: Is that the answer is whoever can get it to me the fastest because I the idea that in the future I'm going to be like. Wanting something and that the idea is that [00:22:00] it's 10 days away is like crazy. It's crazy. Like I am already immune to the fact that I order things from Amazon and they're at my door in two hours.

[00:22:09] Taylor Holiday: It's it that is absurdity like, but it is so normal. And the idea that that won't be the preferred choice for the people involved is that wherever you are, instantaneous drone delivery of the item to you is gonna happen. Like, you're gonna like push a button and then it's gonna be like pluribus. It's like literally pluribus, is it?

[00:22:28] Taylor Holiday: It's like you call the operator and it's like

[00:22:31] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:32] Taylor Holiday: drops it on your door five minutes later. And eventually you're gonna be impatient with the five minutes. Like that's just what it's gonna be.

[00:22:40] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. That's fascinating. So a couple of other things that are like. Along this kinda line of thinking the, the, I think the rise of the universal feed is an interesting thing. 'cause this is a, a good question of like, okay, so the, the, the last question or the last decision left is like, how do I allocate media budget across different platforms?

[00:22:58] Richard Gaffin: So that then begs the [00:23:00] question, why not just automate that as well, which is kind of what you're positing here, right? Is the idea that there's some sort of universal feed. That, just like, okay, this needs to be on meta. We need to bump spend on meta. We're gonna put more creative there. And then actually we're gonna shift some over to Google.

[00:23:12] Richard Gaffin: We're gonna shift some over to Apple Love and whatever. How, how realistic do you think that is? In the next year?

[00:23:18] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. So I think it's a question of whether the platforms want it and whether they would allow it. I think that's, that's the big question, is that like, do they allow for something like that to be built on top of them as distribution engines? And there's a real conflict there in terms of the potential incentive because that may move dollars more to one location than the other in a, in a way that could be harmful to the market leader, preferential to a competitor or vice versa.

[00:23:41] Taylor Holiday: It's just. I think that this idea, what I try and look for, are all the places that I see humans making these allocation decisions in highly inefficient manners. And one of the major ones is like budget allocation by channel. It's, it is horrific work, horrific, and like mms are [00:24:00] like an evolution of it.

[00:24:02] Taylor Holiday: But I still see so much like intermediation where humans still inject themselves on top of it. And like budget allocation is a perfect example of an area that is just like humans, like caveman, whacking, hammer, like clubs. It's like awful. Relative to what's possible. If you could get. The decision where the optimization at a measurement layer that you agree to is actually allocating according to it.

[00:24:27] Taylor Holiday: That would be really ideal. And so I think, I think there is opportunity for that if it's not prevented by the platforms themselves.

[00:24:34] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Okay, let's let's kind of step back for a second there and, and say like, o of these 26 items, if you, if you could pick one that feels the most urgent or the most sort of immediately actionable, what do you think that is?

[00:24:50] Taylor Holiday: I think that, like, there's, there's pieces on here where I, I'm like, you have to go listen to that episode, that podcast episode, and you gotta decide what you believe. Like, do you think it's wrong? Do you think it's right? Because your [00:25:00] creative system is probably predicated on that. I think app loving, I, I believe that there's gonna be continued growth in that.

[00:25:06] Taylor Holiday: So I think you should play in that area. I think that understanding your distribution strategy relative to Amazon is another question that I would certainly answer for the coming year. Is that like, what is the reason why that fulfillment network isn't a place that I need to have? To try to win market share in and be present in like, what do I believe about the future of that platform.

[00:25:26] Taylor Holiday: And then TikTok shops, I think are the areas where it's like for 2026 in Q1, you need to decide strategically what you think about should we be on TikTok shops? What do we believe about creative strategy in the role that AI plays in it? And what was the third thing I said? Amazon creative strategy. TikTok shops, those three things. Amazon Creative strategy, TikTok shops, those like, I think right now you need to decide, in the first two weeks, you should spend some time and decide like, what do we believe about the need for presence in those things? Is your website gonna be irrelevant in Q1? It's not like, that's not the point.

[00:25:58] Taylor Holiday: I would also, like, I would [00:26:00] try to write a list of like, what are the things that I think humans are making decisions about inside of my business that are done highly inefficiently and they're wrong about all the time. And could I replace a human with that decision? What would need to be true if I did?

[00:26:13] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. All right, cool. Well, so I think, yeah, I feel like, like the overall theme there is just sort of this idea of the continuing. Or, or maybe it, it just sort of feels like everything about like the way work has been automated in the past, the way algorithms have been affecting our life will sort of come to a head in 2026 or at least kind of come to some sort of beginning of a culmination or whatever to the point of we're really going to have to start making decisions about what can a computer do and what can it not do.

[00:26:44] Richard Gaffin: And the answer seems to be more and more, it can do pretty much everything we need it to do. Yeah.

[00:26:49] Taylor Holiday: And so like I, so Tuesday I'm gonna be recording an operator's pad with Sean and.

[00:26:54] Richard Gaffin: Yep.

[00:26:55] Taylor Holiday: We were having a conversation. One of the things that I was like, that I'm thinking a lot about right now is [00:27:00] another and a question. I was like, how do you, how do you determine if your people are performing at the appropriate capacity relative to today's possibilities?

[00:27:06] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:27:07] Taylor Holiday: Like, what is, what should my expectations of output be for content in 2026? Like in a world where you could make a thousand images in one second, you could write. You could ask Chad GBT right now, Richard, to write 300 blogs

[00:27:25] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:27:26] Taylor Holiday: and it would write them all, we could, we could fake record podcasts of audio with my voice.

[00:27:31] Taylor Holiday: Like what should the appropriate expectation for how many pieces of content we make next year be, and I feel my, I feel disoriented about the answer. Like I, I don't understand, but I do know that I come with a bunch of legacy expectations based on how we've done it. In the past that my fear is that somebody without all those biases, without all those previous systems and processes.

[00:27:58] Taylor Holiday: Are going to just run [00:28:00] me over with a tank because I'm gonna be like, we are going to record a podcast once a week. Like think about what we do. It's like I had to leave my home drive to the office to put on this headset and talk to you, and yet someone could have read the 26 Predictions, PO Commerce in My Voice, and in 40 People, others voices in every native language of every country in the world, and published it today on their own without me.

[00:28:25] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:28:26] Taylor Holiday: And I don't know what to do with that. I don't know where the appropriate scale of expectation is for how we as a team behave.

[00:28:34] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Well, I think that's a good, that's a good overall kind of a takeaway from this is like, Hey man, we never know, but we really don't know this time. Which means maybe It's a good question, a good question to ask chat, GPT maybe

[00:28:45] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Maybe just plug these into chat, GBT and ask them if they think it's gonna

[00:28:50] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. If it's gonna happen or not.

[00:28:51] Taylor Holiday: decide if the article's useful to you.

[00:28:52] Richard Gaffin: That's interesting. All right. Maybe we should do that. Alright folks, well I think that's gonna wrap it up for us for today, for the year. Happy [00:29:00] 2026 everybody. It's gonna bring a lot of interesting, scary, strange, but also exciting things. So we look forward to it. Taylor, why don't we have you, if you have a link to that podcast that you referenced that I think everybody needs to listen to, let's throw that in the show notes.

And then of course, the link to the blog that we've discussed today will be in the show notes as well and up on our site com thread co.com. And of course. If you wanna work with us as we think through these things, hit that hire us button. We would love to chat with you if you're an eight or nine figure brand.

All right folks thanks for joining us. Happy 2026. Take care everybody. And we're.