OMR Education · OMR Education / Rolf Hermann / Andre Alpar / Tarek Müller

Think with Tarek: Agentic Commerce & KI im Handel mit Tarek Müller

·56 min·4 clips

About You now handles 50% of first-level customer service with AI and generates all editorial website images via GenAI.

1. OMR Education's Think with Tarek format features About You co-founder Tarek Müller discussing how agentic AI and LLMs are reshaping e-commerce, recorded in a studio for the first time. 2. Müller is co-founder of About You, one of Germany's largest fashion e-commerce platforms, and CEO of Scale Commerce, which licenses its technology to third-party retailers. 3. The episode's core thesis is that AI has moved from a thought experiment in e-commerce to a source of real, measurable cost savings and new traffic channels — and that the next 12-18 months will bring even more disruptive changes. 4. Müller reports that 50% of About You's first-level customer service requests are now handled by AI, delivering both cost savings in the millions and faster response times that improved customer satisfaction scores. 5. About You has stopped running traditional model photo shoots for new product listings, replacing them with AI-generated model photos at 90% lower cost per image. 6. By generating 20 AI model photo variants per product instead of one, About You runs A/B tests that almost always identify one variant outperforming the manually-produced original — producing a simultaneous cost saving and conversion rate uplift. 7. Additional AI-driven savings include automated backend processes for translation, product enrichment, and landing page generation, with agents now doing work that previously required multiple content employees. 8. LLM traffic at About You has grown from zero to 1-2% of organic Google traffic in 12 months, converts at the same rate as Google organic, and appears to be partly incremental rather than cannibalising Google traffic. 9. Müller explains that unlike Google SEO, LLM visibility cannot be monitored with keyword tools — brands cannot see what prompts are driving traffic to their pages. 10. He argues that LLM product recommendations are driven by contextual information about a product in the open web — articles, reviews, user-generated content — rather than backlinks, comparing the current state of LLM optimisation to the early days of SEO when simple tactics had large effects. 11. Müller warns that product feeds will need to be enriched with contextual attributes like target group, use case, and intended occasions — fields that were irrelevant in traditional Google Shopping feeds. 12. OpenAI already enables full e-commerce checkout through ChatGPT in the US, charging approximately 4% commission plus payment fees (around 6-7% total), compared to 15-20% on Amazon and Zalando. 13. Google's Universal Commerce Protocol will bring similar LLM-native checkout to Gemini, with a European launch expected in H2 2026 or H1 2027 and commission structures expected to start attractively low. 14. Müller describes how About You's loyalty coin system and customer account data could be paired with Gemini so customers collect coins and see personalised offers while transacting inside the LLM. 15. He identifies a major technical challenge for online shops: the shift from isolated systems (pricing, fulfillment, logistics, loyalty, voucher generation) to a unified real-time API capable of answering all LLM queries simultaneously. 16. The episode addresses whether aggregators like About You, Zalando, Wayfair, and Amazon retain their role in an agentic commerce world — noting that capital markets have heavily punished these stocks due to uncertainty. 17. Müller argues that aggregators still offer value through logistical orchestration, technology scale effects, and cross-brand product recommendation — capabilities that individual manufacturers and LLMs cannot easily replicate. 18. He predicts that the outcome will be category-specific: complex or taste-driven categories like fashion and home living may continue to favour specialised platforms, while factual, research-heavy categories like electronics may shift more heavily toward LLM-native transactions. 19. Entrepreneurs and e-commerce executives who want to understand the practical implications of AI on retail, pricing, and customer acquisition will find this episode rich with data and forward projections. 20. Listeners seeking basic introductions to AI tools, marketing fundamentals, or non-commerce applications of AI will find the episode too specialist.

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