Post-Death Consumerism

[00:00:06] You're listening to Retail Disrupted, a podcast that explores the latest industry developments and the trends that will shape how we shop in the future. I'm your host, Natalie Berg. What happens in the digital afterlife? Can you still be a consumer from the grave?

[00:00:35] Is this even ethical? These questions might sound wild, but with the advent of AI, it kind of feels like anything's possible. On today's episode, we are going to dive into this topic in more detail. I'm speaking to VMLs Najee El-Arifi and Hugh Fletcher, who tell me that, yes, retailers and brands need to have a post-death strategy.

[00:00:59] Before we dive into what that actually looks like, because I know you are all as intrigued as I am, first, let me say a few words about my guests. Najee El-Arifi is the head of innovation at VML Enterprise Solutions, where he spearheads transformative solutions for businesses navigating the digital landscape. With a robust background in product management and innovation, he's collaborated with an impressive array of companies and startups,

[00:01:28] including DFS, Lego, Domestic and General, Sainsbury's, ShopDirect, Audi, and many, many more. Hugh Fletcher heads up the Demand Content Thought Leadership Team at VML and is an internationally sought-after digital commerce futurologist. As an ex-Audi digital guru, Hugh uses his client-side experience and unique take on the future of commerce to help organizations set up for and implement digital change.

[00:01:58] His areas of expertise include the future shopper, Generation Alpha, digital commerce leaders, space commerce, and peak selling. Najee and Hugh, welcome to Retail Disrupted. It's so great to have you both here. Now, just a little bit of background for our listeners. A few months ago, I received a press release and the subject line was, do you even have to be alive to be a consumer?

[00:02:28] And I get a lot of press releases, but that one definitely piqued my interest. So I thought it'd be good to get you both on the podcast to answer that question. We're going to talk about post-death consumerism. We're going to go niche today. But we're also going to discuss some of the wider findings from your future shopper report. So let's start out with some intros. And Najee, I'll come to you first. Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do at VML. Cool. Hi, everyone. So yeah, my name's Najee.

[00:02:57] I'm director of Marcoms at VML. My background is product management and innovation. And I basically help Hugh to basically write the questions for a lot of these reports, analyze the data, and then, of course, present it back to clients and talk to people about some of the interesting data that we find. So the other half of my job is just looking at new technology and seeing how we can use it to solve problems for clients, which means, funnily enough, at the minute, a lot of AI. I can imagine.

[00:03:27] Right. And I know we're going to talk about AI as well. It's great to have you here. And Hugh, over to you. Yeah, nice to meet everyone. So yeah, my name's Hugh Fletcher. I look after marketing and lots of thought leadership. So lots of research, lots of looking into consumer trends and often getting into some wacky ideas like post-death consumerism. So Nadja and I work pretty closely together on imagining what are the important things to tell people in business and people who strategize,

[00:03:55] and then also some of the more unexpected things, which they should probably know about but perhaps haven't thought about. So I think we're going to talk about some of that today. Awesome. Yeah, we absolutely are. And if we start out with your Future Shopper report, every year you survey over 30,000 consumers across 20 countries. And having sifted through the report myself, I can see there's a number of trends and topics that come up regularly on this podcast. AI, we've just touched on.

[00:04:23] Marketplaces, sustainability, social commerce, you know, the list goes on. What stood out for you this year? What were some of the big takeaways? Yeah, I guess one of the big pieces that came out was a little bit of a return of physical shopping. So we come from a digital background, an e-commerce background. So we're often looking at online trends. But we like to think a bit wider than that as well and see what's going on in the market. And that was one of the things that came back.

[00:04:50] So having had this sort of COVID lockdown years and having seen online shopping boom and more people spend time online, it very much felt like that's where it was going. And this year, for the first time, we started to see physical make a bit of a return. And, you know, people talked about renormalizations back during those lockdown days. And perhaps we're starting to see that now as us human beings crave a little bit of physical interaction and physical experiences. So that was probably the big standout for me. I would say, I mean, I'm a very simple person.

[00:05:19] I like the things that I like. And for me, all the stuff about gaming and the surprising stuff for me around some of the AI data, around like how many people have used ChatGPT, for example, and large language models like that, it's kind of surprising considering they've not been out that long. So for me, I just, I always just, I just focus on those bits straight away. There's plenty there, isn't there? There's plenty to talk about just around AI. I go through the spreadsheet.

[00:05:48] So I've got like millions of points of data, basically. There's 48 odd questions or something. And I've got the data for every single country, different age groups, like city and all that stuff. So there's just so much data. I tend to just, for me, I just love to focus on things I love. So gaming and AI is where I end up going. What's good about me and Najee working on this together is that we are sort of the ying to the yang. So I am not a gamer. I am a total Luddite.

[00:06:17] So we have some quite fun arguments and conversations about what will stick, what will work, what's interesting, what's not. And together we come to some kind of consensus around what we should put into the report. But it's quite fun to come at it from two different angles. Yeah. Yeah. It's good to have different perspectives. Let's talk about the convergence of our physical and digital worlds. We know that consumers today seamlessly transition between online and offline experiences. I often say that in the future, we won't necessarily know where the physical world ends and the digital

[00:06:46] one begins. And I know that does sound a little bit out there, but I don't, I think that is kind of the direction of travel. And I see this with my nine-year-old who, if she had it her way, she would probably spend more of her waking hours on Roblox than in the real world. Right. Like, you know, she absolutely loves Roblox. And I think gaming is a great example of this blurring of worlds where things like digital avatars and virtual goods really hold value for consumers.

[00:07:14] What kind of opportunity does this represent for brands? And do you think they're doing enough in this space today? I think it's a bit of an order, right? Because we kind of had this promise of the metaverse a couple of years ago. And I think we can all agree that we probably have heard that word way too much. And I think every time someone hears it now, they kind of glaze over and go, oh God, do I really have to talk about this?

[00:07:41] But I mean, in my opinion, I think we will end up getting there at some point, but it's one of those technologies that takes so long for it to materialize, right? Like the way I always talk to clients about it is if you think of, you know, the metaverse is supposed to be everything, right? The universe, as it were. I always say, well, universes are made out of galaxies, which are made out of like stars and solar systems and all kinds of stuff. And we are at the point where you've got maybe a couple of planets, you can't travel between them. So you can't use the same login to go to everything.

[00:08:11] They just don't talk to each other in any way. So it's just way too early. And I think we will get there at some point. But the best way to kind of see how it will potentially end up going, I think is gaming because obviously a lot of that stuff is going to be built on that technology. And so we're seeing already how people really want brands that they love to be in the spaces they spend so much time in, right? You know, if you really like Fortnite and you love Nike, you want that product on your character.

[00:08:40] So it makes sense that Nike would be in Fortnite, right? And so I think as more and more brands start to realize this and start to see how much time people are spending in these environments and how much they love it, they're going to change their tune fairly soon. I think the problem that they've got is so many people don't have the skill sets to build a lot of this stuff, right? You know, like building in 3D or having game developers isn't something a lot of brands have and a lot of agencies have, right?

[00:09:10] So we, for example, you know, have a few of these kinds of skill sets to allow us to build some of this stuff, but like it's still not something that everyone has, right? Yeah. But you're right about following the customer because at the end of the day, that's what retailers need to do. Wherever your customer is, you need to be there. And it doesn't mean you need to be in every single channel, but you need to be where your customers are, right? Yeah, exactly. And the thing that's, I think people need to realize is how powerful gaming is to gamers, right?

[00:09:39] And how they feel towards it, right? So a couple of years ago, we got some of this data back from Future Shopper and it was like, whoa, gaming is, you know, super intending. People feel very close to it, right? And one of the things that we found is that 41% of gamers consider their avatar part of their identity, right? Wow. That is like my favorite stat we've ever gotten from any, that's just madness, right? That just shows you how tightly linked people feel towards these gaming avatars before we

[00:10:06] even start talking about the metaverse and like, you know, doing your banking through it, right? So for me, it's kind of amazing. Sorry, Nethal, I was going to say, you mentioned your daughter. I think I've got three kids, so a 12-year-old and a nine-year-old who, I guess to a degree are kind of gamers, but they are a great way of looking at what the future consumer is going to be. And when we think about talking to clients and what they're doing, it's almost useful

[00:10:35] and you get more insight when you've got one of those children in your household and you can see the way things are going and you can see how much they're operating in the real world. And, you know, my son, when he asked for money, he doesn't want cash. He wants fee bucks. You know, he will exchange cash for electronic currency, whatever it might be. He will spend it in game and then he will spend his time in game with his friends in game. So we've done quite a lot of research into what we call kind of generation alpha.

[00:11:01] So the youngest generation coming through is roughly speaking kind of six to 16-year-olds. I think they're a really interesting way of looking at the way business is going to go. And lots of people operating in business now aren't looking at that cohort of consumers, but these are consumers who are going to be there in five, 10 years spending big money, operating quite a lot of their lives within digital. So it's very useful for businesses to know all about these consumers. And certainly one of the areas is going to be how much of their lives they spend in digital.

[00:11:31] Yeah, it is really interesting. And my daughter is exactly the same. I mean, any opportunity she gets, birthdays, Christmas, whatever, she's asking for Robux. You know, she doesn't want a Barbie. She wants Robux because that's, you know, that's how she spends her time. That's where her friends are. That's where she's socializing. So you can see that kind of evolution. Do you think retailers and brands are doing enough, though, to reach shoppers with virtual goods? Do you think that there's an opportunity to go further? There probably is.

[00:12:00] But I think at the minute, the kind of return you're going to get now, I don't think it's like a complete way in which you can think, OK, do you know what? You know, this is going to be this year as big as my online store, for example. Right. It's not going to be that big a channel. I think at the minute it's going to be mainly around testing new ideas, making sure you're set up, make sure you've got the processes in place to create those things, because that's stuff we're helping clients with now. Right.

[00:12:24] Like you're really good, you know, client X at creating physical products. You know, you've got a system in place. You've got suppliers. You've got manufacturing process and all that. You're going to need to do that for digital as well now. And so it's about setting up those kinds of things to make sure that when it does happen, you can, you know, every season knock out something new or something that's related to your physical products to allow people to buy and sell. So I think it will be.

[00:12:53] I think at the minute people, you know, brands aren't probably doing as much. But also the other thing to bear in mind is obviously the kinds of integrations you can do. Right. You know, a lot of the time we're still at the early point where you have to work with, say, Fortnite if you want to implement something. Right. You can probably create your own level. But if you want to be in the game and have like a skin in the game, for example, you're going to need to work with Fortnite. I think if you're in, say, Roblox, you don't have to. Creators can create their own thing and then sell them.

[00:13:22] I think once we get more of that kind of experience, we'll start to see, I think, more and more brands getting involved because they've got that freedom. They've got that ability to create things the way that they want it. Right. Because it's important that a brand gets on board, basically. Yeah, that's a really good point. I want to move on to talk about AI. Now, one stat that I found really interesting from your report was that over 40 percent of global consumers would let an AI organize their lives, including making purchases for them.

[00:13:49] Now, the whole AI shopping assistant trend is really interesting. It's something I'm watching very closely. And maybe we can touch on that here. But first, I'd really like to get your thoughts more generally on this idea of delegating tasks to an AI agent. And I just as an example, earlier today, because I kept hearing that ChatGPT was great for meal planning. And I just thought, you know, that's the kind of thing that's where I could do with some help.

[00:14:16] And so I just quickly put into ChatGPT to create a meal plan that was pretty specific. It had to be quick, healthy, nut free because I have an allergy, low FODMAP. And, you know, if it gives me some recipes for my air fryer, then that's a bonus. Right. So it was pretty like specific requirements. In literally two or three seconds, I had a full meal plan, a grocery list and a ton of recipes. And it was just mind blowing.

[00:14:40] I think it's clear that consumers are getting more comfortable using AI and also that they're starting to rely on it for everyday tasks. So I'd love to get your thoughts on this. How do you see this evolving? And maybe you can also touch on the role of AI in making purchasing decisions. Consumers are a little bit lazy, number one, and trusting, number two.

[00:15:01] So we get these stats that come out each year in Future Shopper and all the research that we do, which just show how much consumers are prepared to subcontract out their decision making to something else. And actually, we've been talking about this for years. So we talked about something called programmatic commerce plus 10 years ago where we thought machines would order on behalf of consumers. It hasn't quite got there. But what we see now is super fast response to very specific questions.

[00:15:30] We see perhaps kind of complex questions being very quickly taken to pieces and returned in a very digestible way. And that just plays into human beings. Human beings want quick answers. They don't really want to do all the research themselves. And so this is the basis upon which we see consumers starting to say, you know what, I'm happy to take the advice from somewhere else. And I actually trust it quite a lot. It's often accurate as well.

[00:15:59] I mean, yes, you do need to do that kind of final quality check, but it's pretty incredible. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty accurate now. And you're absolutely right. The more you know about the subject, the more you can sort of quality control the answer that you get. But in the absence of knowing anything, it gets you to 80% of the way already. And we're talking about technology, which is in its infancy. So, you know, while we're all testing it out now and we're saying, oh, it's pretty good, you know, in a couple of years time with a bit of learning, it's going to be absolutely exceptional.

[00:16:28] So, yeah, it's fantastically useful. And I think the message that we always say, and I've said it already, is just that consumers are happy to take the easy route and they are happy to trust things like AI. So some great stats in there, like you said, about AI controlling lives, AI ordering on behalf of you, including payment and delivery. And actually, if it happens and it turns out to be quite accurate, quite good, then we're going to see a massive amount of adoption. Yeah. Yeah, it's a no brainer, right?

[00:16:57] Who enjoys walking around a grocery store for an hour picking the exact same stuff that they picked the week before? It's not great. And admittedly, I haven't done that in a really long time because I got all my food delivered. But I still have to go through and like click things and like add milk again. The biggest argument in our house is online shopping.

[00:17:24] So it's supposed to be easy, but actually that's the cause of many arguments as well. That's why you just got to not let anyone have access to it and just make an undemocratic decision. Well, the thing is, I think even online shopping, there's an element of it being a chore because even if you're buying the same stuff week in and week out, and I think the stat is around 80% of the grocery items that we buy are the same every week. So it's very habitual. It's something we do every week and we tend to buy the same stuff.

[00:17:54] But even online shopping can be a little bit of a chore. And I know the online grocers have tried to, you know, improve that experience with things like, you know, the one click buy everything you bought last week. And, but it's still, yeah, it's still a chore, isn't it? Yeah. And it's not very smart, right? Because, you know, if I click to buy the same thing again as, as, as last week, what if I bought like a kilo of salt? I probably don't need that again. And it's probably not that hard to just not add that.

[00:18:24] But I think the other thing we're seeing as well is, you know, is people feel very comfortable very quickly with these kinds of things that are quite annoying. And the thing that I saw recently, I don't know if you saw the, the open AI operators that they're launching. So this is a new API that they're going to have. And they've got like Instacart as a, as like one of the first companies they're working with.

[00:18:48] It, their agent basically navigates the website on your behalf, adding stuff to the basket. Oh, so is this like ask Instacart or I think Carrefour has a similar kind of AI chatbot. Is it customer facing or? It's customer facing. Okay. Yeah. And what you'll do is I upload a picture of your, let's say your, your shopping list. It then literally navigates the Instacart website, clicking around, searching, finding the product and adding it to an Instacart basket that you've been logged into.

[00:19:18] So it's like the first time we're now seeing this like more agent-y kind of thing, because you made that, you know, that meal plan. But now you've got to go and add all that stuff to your basket. So the idea is that you're going to be able to just say, you know, I need this food plan. And then it's going to be able to go off, go to Instacart, add all the stuff to your basket, and then you check out with it. And that for me is going to be that sweet spot where we've gotten to really close the gap on some of this boring stuff. Yeah.

[00:19:47] You know, that's, that's cutting out friction and it's just making that process so much more seamless and easy. Interesting. That's interesting. I didn't know that. That feels like the natural progression of things, but that's, that's really interesting. I'll send you the link after this. Yeah. Thank you. And I'll add it to the show notes. Awesome. Well, this leads us nicely into the final part of our discussion, which is post-death consumerism.

[00:20:12] Now, just to explain this to our listeners, this is the concept of training AI to learn a person's financial and shopping habits while they're alive. So that once that person passes on, the AI can control their digital estate and even make purchase decisions. And I'm going to quote from your report here where you say you could imagine, for example, continuing to pay for the grandkids education or sending a birthday gift even after death. So tell us more about this.

[00:20:38] Do you think retailers and brands should be thinking about a post-death strategy? And how do you see this playing out? Yeah. So I think the simple answer is absolutely yes, they should be thinking about this. I think sometimes the phraseology puts people off and makes it seem a little bit sillier than it really is. So I guess just if we rewind a bit and give sort of a bit of background to how this happens.

[00:21:01] So each year we sit down together, myself, Najee and a few of our colleagues, and we try and sort of think about what the future of commerce will look like and what retail will look like. And we come up with lots of ideas. And some of those are very accurate and some of those are very inaccurate. And some of those are very fun and some of those are very interesting. But I actually remember when we came up with this and we were kind of pulling together on a few threads. So we were talking about health. We were talking about death. We were talking about finances. And we sort of thought, well, do you know what?

[00:21:31] There's so much data that exists about us now. It's so easy to understand a person, what they think, how they act, the type of things that they buy. There's so much data about them in terms of what they purchase. So you can kind of get a trend about the types of things that they bought. And then there's sort of the creation of interfaces, I suppose. So a way to actually interact with someone who perhaps is not there.

[00:21:56] And if you link that to a bank account, then in theory, you could make a purchase, which is based on a personality, based on the type of thing that someone would purchase relatively easily. And actually, although this always gets quite a big reaction and people sort of say, oh, you know, this is this is really out there. When we sort of do a bit of investigation, the answer is this is actually quite easy to do. We could do it now. It's just perhaps people aren't thinking about it.

[00:22:25] So. So, yeah, so we came up with this idea. It's called post-ed consumerism. And we sort of said, yes, well, you know, wouldn't it be nice in the event that you couldn't be there because you passed away? Maybe your grandkids or maybe for your for your kids now when they turn 80 to give them a present, but not just to send any old present. Send a present that you might buy that kind of reflects you as a person that considers your relationship with them. Wouldn't that be cool and wouldn't that be interesting to do? And the answer is absolutely yes.

[00:22:53] But the real thread that we're kind of pulling on here is that actually we need to stop thinking about consumers just purely as sort of physical, organic entities. And we'd start thinking about. Consumers as data or as AIs or as avatars. And as Nadu already mentioned, sort of the importance of an avatar in terms of consumers life right now, that's going to get even greater.

[00:23:17] So the concept here is businesses don't necessarily need to think about post-ed consumerism, but need to think about how they're going to market and sell to consumers who aren't necessarily human. And that might be something acting on their behalf. That might be an avatar. That might be an AI. And in future, of course, we're going to have AIs operating on behalf of businesses, talking to AIs operating on behalf of human beings and consumers. And they're going to have to interact and negotiate and decide and make purchase decisions.

[00:23:46] So at first glance, this seems like a bit of a weird concept. And it is. But actually, in reality, it's probably where we're heading to. We as marketers and businesses will in future be selling to not just human beings, but to many other things as well. The one thing I'll add to that as well is you can kind of see it happening now, right? The idea of someone being dead, right? They don't have to be dead, right?

[00:24:16] They could just not want to do it. My family don't do gifts, right? So we don't buy like birthday or Christmas gifts or anything, right? This always comes up. And so I am now horrible at gift-giving, right? Because I just can't do it. It would be amazing if I just kept forgetting someone's birthday. Let's just say I kept forgetting my wife's birthday. Which, you know, hasn't happened yet. This sounds like the voice of experience. Yes. There's a reason why we don't do gifts anymore.

[00:24:44] If I had an AI that I could just load up with, you know, a couple hundred quid and just say every year, you know, it's my wife's birthday. This is the date. Buy something she's going to like. Sign up my name. Tell me what it is before you do it. And we're good. You're good until she finds out it's an AI agent buying her gifts. Yes. But we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. Okay. What about the wrapping? The wrapping? That's a checkbox.

[00:25:14] That's a checkbox. All right. So you can kind of see this already happening. And even right now when we're talking about that operator stuff from OpenAI, right? The website itself is now being navigated by an AI. How is the AI deciding which catch up to get you? Right? Because you've just wrote catch up on the list.

[00:25:36] So now the brand has to have something that can interact maybe with that agent and say, you know, this person really has this kind of preference for a catch up. It's like, okay, well, you know, we've got this one. So now automatically you're starting to have two non-organic entities interacting with each other to purchase a product, right? So it's not that far of a jump to say you could be dead and paying for stuff. Yeah. No, you're selling it to me. Absolutely.

[00:26:03] And also what's amazing, isn't it, is that the number of consumers or the percentage of consumers that are interested in this. So it sounds like a pretty crazy concept. Yeah. And a few years ago we chucked this into our future shopper research and we just wanted to get a sense of who was interested. And the percentages are crazy. So it's about, I mean, roughly speaking, sort of 50% of consumers are interested in this.

[00:26:26] The highest is in Thailand and India, something around 71%, I'm going to say. Wow. 72%, 73%, 74%. Yeah. I often test ourselves on these stats and I'm disappointed that I've let myself down by getting a few percentage off. But 74% of consumers in Thailand saying they would be interested in shopping from beyond the grave. So there's an appetite there, which is really interesting and it's quite consistent.

[00:26:55] And we asked our Thai colleagues, why particularly Thailand? So interesting. They said, oh, well, you know, that's quite a taboo subject in Thailand. We don't talk about it that much. So it could be something to do with that. So there is certainly appetite for it out there, which is quite amazing. That's so much higher than I was expecting you to say. You know, for such a radical idea, something that's so, as you said, it's out there. It's no one's done it yet. But you could see that that is the way that things are moving. What about the ethics here?

[00:27:25] Because, I mean, it's a big question. If you zoom out of retail for a second, look at what's happening in Hollywood, for example, where you have actors and writers being very vocal about the dangers of AI, digital cloning, deep fakes, de-aging, and all this stuff is starting to happen. And I don't, you know, I don't want to sound alarmist, but we are moving into uncharted territory with AI. So what are your thoughts on this?

[00:27:51] How can brands and retailers navigate this delicate issue? There's certain areas where you want to kind of like be careful, right? So, for example, probably have a look at the EU AI Act as a good starting point. So something like this would automatically put you into, I think, the highest category. But as it's quite new, as long as someone understands what they're doing, like you said, it's so new. There's probably, there's definitely no laws about it created yet, if you know what I mean?

[00:28:21] Because, you know, when you're talking about people's private information and private, they tend to be alive. There's going to have to be a whole thing about like, well, how long are you allowed to hold on to this information? And, you know, could you load up an account with like a million dollars and just have it keep giving like gifts for a hundred years down to like your great grandkids and stuff. So it feels like the law doesn't exist yet, but it also doesn't feel like it's that much

[00:28:49] of a stretch for it to be not weird, right? Because if you're making the decision, then like you've got an account set up, you load it up, like you've got some settings in there. It kind of feels okay. And like when you first hear it, it's like, oh my God, like someone needs to make a law making this illegal quickly. But we're not talking about cloning someone and all that. We're only making, you know, very particular purchases. We have no idea how this can be set up.

[00:29:16] Is this going to be your own personal agent sitting in your own cloud infrastructure that goes off to different sites and does it? Or have you just loaded up one brand site with a bunch of stuff? So there's a whole load of questions about this that, you know, obviously need to be worked out and there's ethical, legal, there's also financial, there's just loads of stuff like tax. There's tons of stuff. Yeah. But there's a couple of things that will drive it forward, aren't there? So there's, there's businesses which will understand that they can get money from it.

[00:29:46] So they will drive it forward. And then there's the human beings who actually want it to happen. So even before we started talking about AI, the desire to live beyond your physical years has always existed. And over the last couple of years, you've seen a number of examples of this. So, you know, one example we always used to use is Kim Kardashian's 40th birthday. And Kanye West bought her a sort of a deep fake of her dad talking to her, sort of telling her how proud he was.

[00:30:13] And, and I think, you know, at first, again, the first site, that seems a bit weird, but actually the concept of being able to talk to people who are maybe no longer here or grandparents, you know, actually we'd probably all like to have a go at that. Probably most of us would. Um, and if the, if that exists, if the drive from us consumers exists for it to happen, if there is a commercial benefit to businesses, then, um, chances are that any legal, illegal issues will be, will be navigated in order to make it happen. So, yep.

[00:30:42] I'll give you one more stat from the report. 46% of global consumers said they're actually interested in uploading their personalities to the cloud. Wow. So that they could be brought back to life as an avatar. Wow. So that is a lot of people who kind of want that kind of afterlife kind of experience, no? Yeah. I've seen an altered carbon, but it's like that, it gives me those kinds of vibes. Yeah.

[00:31:10] Think about how quickly sort of your generationally, um, you, you don't know someone. So you're going to need to get a couple of generations back in your family and you really don't know much about somebody. You don't know what they're like. You don't know how they act, you know, how they speak. And in the future, you, you may have a very clear idea. You may be able to interact with them, you know, absolutely knowing that it's not the real person, but in the absence of anything, surely that would be better. And I think, yeah, that'd be, that'd be awesome. You know, you could, you could find out about your family tree by actually talking to the

[00:31:39] person who'd been through it. Okay. So I thought going on to chat GPT and putting in a meal plan was mind blowing, but you guys have proved me wrong. Cause this is absolutely blown my mind. Uh, this has been so interesting talking to you both. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and I'll make sure to link to your report in the show notes. Thank you very much for having us. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Retail Disrupted.

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