Tobi Lütke: uncertainty

Transcript context

…The future of the internet — when will virtual reality stores matter? That’s a good question. Virtual reality stores — I don’t have a great answer there. I don’t think they will port the exact Fifth Avenue boutiques online, other than having virtual twins for people who specifically want to see those. I don’t think the future of e-commerce is going to be strolling through virtual malls or these kinds of things. I think the exact way this is all going to compose is going to be different. I think that innovations in virtual reality are going to be much more about virtual avatars, or real people having . . . It’s just like talking to a product. Shopify represents mostly the catalog of products that people really want rather than the necessities. The Fifth Avenue boutiques would also be the ones using Shopify for point of sale, and purchasers are a lot more deliberate around this. People often spend weeks thinking about, is this something they would like to purchase? And they’re really looking forward to a package arriving, hopefully very quickly. I think there’re lots and lots of touchpoints there. The place that is probably the most virtual area that we see already is furniture. The placing of a couch in your living room is just better than looking at it in some store, right? I think we see the early beginnings in this, and there are a couple of technologies that we’re tracking, like Gaussian splats, and these kinds of things that are just going to make it vastly simpler for people to make digital twins available from whatever they’ve managed to put together in real life. I think a bunch of this is coming, but I don’t know what the date is and what exactly is the form factor. Not talking about back office, but actual retail — do you see in advance how AI is going to be changing retail? And what does that look like?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.