Your New Customer Is Not Human with Adam Fabian and Jacy Davis of Crimson Agility
Scott Ohsman of Always Off Brand and I recorded our Slightly Off Commerce collaboration at Shoptoberfest in Nashville on September 15, and the Crimson Agility conversation ran longer than any other at the table. Jacy Davis is their director of sales. Adam Fabian is the one who does the technical download, and by the end of it Scott had renamed him Example Adam, because he never makes a point without one.
Adam started by refusing the vocabulary of his own industry.
“We build solutions, but I hate using the word solution these days,” he says.
“I think a solution is a band-aid. It’s not a system. System-level thinking is where we try to stay these days,” he says.
That pushed the four of us into a run through the words this business has cycled through, agentic now, personalization before that, digital transformation before that, omnichannel before that. Adam’s tagline survived the cull.
“We’re building commerce systems for the future,” he says.
Three Kinds of AI, and Only One of Them Is New
Jacy said the conversations they are having are about AI readiness, and when Scott asked what that means, Adam split the category into three.
The first two are familiar. Internal AI that makes fulfillment and data processing easier, and customer-facing AI that still lives on your own property, chatbots and site search. The third is the one Crimson Agility is built around.
“But now there’s the third player, which is now the AI external to the website, which you’re entering a new arena. You’re now competing with other people outside of your control, and you have to play by their rules,” he says.
He is insistent that two words people use interchangeably are not the same thing.
“They say AI, they say agentic. They actually think they’re interchangeable. They are not,” he says.
What makes the third category interesting to him is that it is not a marketplace.
“It’s a brand new place for you to compete and become recommended without having to play by, let’s call it marketplace rules,” he says.
The Line That Makes People Sit Up
Adam has a sentence he uses deliberately for effect.
“There’s one line I like to use and it kind of makes people sit up a little bit, is that your new customer is not human,” he says.
His explanation is an analogy any manufacturer will recognize. You cannot buy a car at Ford.com. The site configures a vehicle and then routes you to a dealer who completes the sale.
“That is the same concept as AI these days or agentic commerce in the future,” he says.
“Agentic commerce will facilitate the transaction and they will execute the transaction and they will complete the transaction. But they’re not the source of data. The source of data is the seller, the manufacturer, whoever is actually selling that product,” he says.
And then the inversion that is the heart of his argument. A storefront spends the entire session earning enough trust to get a card entered. An agent does the opposite.
“Agentic starts on the other side of that fence. I won’t even show you anything unless I can trust who you are, what you’re selling, where you’re selling it from, why you’re selling it, and how to execute that transaction,” he says.
The Hard Drive
The best part of the conversation was a shopping trip that went wrong. Adam wanted a drive for his Tesla’s sentry mode, asked ChatGPT for the best price, and got Walmart at a good number, in stock.
“Click on the ad, go to the website. It’s out of stock and it’s $279,” he says.
He went and found out why, and the mechanism matters more than the story.
“What happens there is that the first time that a query matches that product and it finds it, it puts it into its catalog mechanism where it indexes it until it’s forced to go again and check the data or it finds that that data is incorrect. It doesn’t go grab it,” he says.
So he answered his own question about whether anyone is really shopping through these tools yet.
“So in reality, is it shopping really on the AIs? No, it’s kind of an out-of-date piece,” he says.
Pressed on how he eventually bought the drive, he admitted he went to Newegg directly, the old way, which Scott enjoyed considerably. Adam’s read is that the near-term prize is not transactions at all.
“The question is more about visibility. That’s really what people need to want,” he says.
Are You Selling the Way You Sell
Crimson Agility does a lot of work in regulated categories, and Adam used firearms to make a point that reaches well beyond that category. Call a manufacturer to buy a gun and the person on the phone will interrogate you, handedness, caliber, intended use, experience level, size.
“Is that data on your website? Everything you just asked me, is that a data point that I can search by?” he says.
Then the accusation underneath it.
“Because you’re telling me how you sell, but you’re not selling it the way you sell it. You’re, you’re forcing customers to shop in a different way,” he says.
Filters and search only help a buyer who searches the way you anticipated. The reason he thinks this changes now is intent.
“But what if they search in the way they want to search, which is why AI bridges the gap. It’s the context, the intent of the actual query,” he says.
Which is how he defines the new job of marketing.
“Marketing changes into context data now. That’s what it becomes. It becomes why should my query match you and his shouldn’t?” he says.
He claims a measured result from doing exactly that for a retailer. By deepening the retailer’s data and fixing its schema, Crimson Agility moved the retailer from two percent of traffic out of ChatGPT to twenty two percent in six weeks.
“And the reason being is only because we deepened their data and built their visibility,” he says.
He also thinks the economics shift rather than vanish.
“And it doesn’t mean that marketing dies. It just means that paid ads dies,” he says.
Where He Thinks the Real Money Is
Asked which segment this hits hardest, Adam did not hesitate, and it was not retail.
“And the bigger win, I think the industry portion that’s going to make the most impact is by far and away B2B. Hands down, no question asked,” he says.
His example is a hospital buying gloves by the tens of thousands, where price matters enormously and the buying universe is small for a structural reason.
“They only know the people they’re contracted with, not what’s possible for them to contract to,” he says.
“And most B2B companies have websites that don’t even allow transactions. You have to call them,” he says.
Bulk quoting through an agent would expose a buyer to suppliers they had no way to encounter, which he ties back to the search habit nobody has.
“That’s page 10 of Google. That’s what they’re doing for you. They’re bringing it all to the forefront,” he says.
Somebody Will Define Your Data
The warning Adam ended on is about ownership, and he used a brand nobody would call obscure.
“If they were to not define their data, not participate in agentic, or even AI at all, somebody else will define their data and own it. And they will become the canonical source of truth,” he says.
He has reason to think manufacturers already feel this. He asked a room full of them whether their dealers represent their products the way they would want.
“And the answer was overwhelmingly no, if not 99% no,” he says.
He is equally wary of platform tools that manufacture context on a merchant’s behalf.
“You could have 20 data points, but they think you need 40. They’re going to give you 50% context. And maybe that context isn’t even correct,” he says.
His case for Shopware is about what sits between a merchant and the agent.
“But we don’t have a translation layer that changes the context of what it means,” he says.
The One Page Test
The most useful thing Adam said is a test any merchant can run this week.
“My example to you is if you can’t take your data and put it on one piece of paper, everything that the AI would see, print it out, put it in the middle of a table in the mall, walk away, and still have that for any person, period. Be able to purchase it without any questions. Your data is not good enough,” he says.
Because the unit of sale has changed.
“Because it’s no longer the catalog. It’s now the catalog and context,” he says.
For anyone reading this as a reason to stop doing search work, he was clear that it is not.
“And not forget that SEO does still rule the world. It is still the king in the castle. It is not going away,” he says.
What the site becomes is the place people choose on purpose.
“What it’s going to become is it’s going to be the tribal VIP experience. I am loyal to this brand, so I want to go to the website and see it,” he says.
And his closing instruction on where a commerce platform sits among the systems around it is the sort of thing worth writing on a wall.
“Making your e-commerce system the source of convenience, but not the source of truth,” he says.
Crimson Agility is at crimsonagility.com, and both of them pointed at LinkedIn for the AI readiness work they are publishing.
The B2B Commerce Trends and Opportunities Report goes deeper on product data and on selling in regulated markets, with nine experts who advise B2B sellers. It was written and researched by Content Cucumber, presented by Shopware, and it is free at contentcucumber.com.