Eric Seufert just released a counter-thesis to the AI doom narrative — and retail media professionals need to hear it.
Today's post recaps my personal highlights from the first episode of "The Prosperous Society," a new podcast series from Eric Seufert at Mobile Dev Memo, released on February 24. Eric is one of the sharpest analysts covering the digital advertising economy, and he launched this series as a direct response to a report that rattled financial markets last week.
The Citrini Research report, titled "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis," went viral a few days ago by painting a doomsday picture of AI's economic impact. The thesis: as AI agents replace white-collar work, companies cut staff, margins look great short-term, but the consumer base eventually craters because machines don't buy mortgages or vacations. The report contributed to a sell-off in stocks like Uber, DoorDash, and Mastercard.
Seufert's response is essentially that AI doesn't destroy the economy. It reorganizes it around a different bottleneck. And that bottleneck has big implications for retail media.
SPONSOR: MIRAKL ADS
Did you know leading retailer media networks drive 85% of their ads revenue through mid- and long-tail advertisers?
Mirakl Ads provides full funnel ad formats tailored to both 1P and 3P advertisers, leveraging unique AI-capabilities that provide unprecedented levels of relevance and engagement.
Retailers who want to capture ad spend from the long tail of 3P marketplace sellers use Mirakl Ads in their tech stack.
AI Makes Distribution More Expensive, Not Less
Seufert's central argument is straightforward: in every economic era, there's one thing that limits growth more than anything else. And right now, that thing is shifting.
AI is collapsing the cost of building digital products — code, creative, entire product surfaces can be scaffolded with dramatically less capital than a few years ago. But when building gets cheaper, more things get built. And when more things get built, more companies compete for the same finite pool of human attention.
"When more firms compete for a resource that does not scale — which human attention doesn't — the price of accessing that resource rises," Seufert says. "Generative AI is deflationary for content production, but is inflationary for distribution."
This is where the popular narrative about AI gets it wrong. There's a tendency to assume that if anyone can build software with AI, barriers to success disappear. But that assumes production was the primary barrier. In an attention-constrained environment, it isn't. "The savings provided by AI tools in building and maintaining their app are eroded by the cost of getting their app in front of customers, given that every other restaurant on their street is attempting to do the exact same thing," he explains. The savings migrate from engineering into customer acquisition — and get competed away.
The result: advertising platforms, as the infrastructure that routes products to the consumers most likely to want them, become more important in an AI-driven economy, not less.
Advertising Doesn't Create Demand. It Does Something Else
Seufert argues that advertising doesn't create desire out of thin air — it connects people who already want something with the product that best fits their need.
In a retail marketplace hosting a hundred million SKUs, no consumer can meaningfully browse or discover products through casual observation. Seufert's says that advertising solves this by interpreting behavioral signals to match users with products they're predisposed to want. The question is not whether advertising can create demand for an arbitrary product, he says. "It is whether advertising can efficiently route existing demand to the product variant most capable of satisfying it."
This reframes the perennial debate about whether consumers "hate" ads. I've pushed back on this narrative before — most recently when covering the Retailgentic podcast where host Scot Wingo and I debated whether the shopping experience on Amazon has "jumped the shark" due to advertising. Yes, consumers complain. But Amazon's ad business still grew 20%+ because those ads deliver results. Seufert's framework explains why: the problem isn't that ads exist. It's when the routing is bad. A sponsored product that matches what you're searching for is efficient demand routing. One that doesn't is noise.
And wherever there's more products than there are slots to show them, there's competition for visibility. "There will still be more products than any system can prioritize equally," Seufert says. "That's an allocation problem that naturally leads to advertising."
Even AI Agents Need a Catalog
The section of Seufert's episode that should matter most to retail media professionals is his analysis of agentic commerce. The emerging narrative is that AI agents will eliminate advertising by automating product discovery — querying product catalogs and making purchase decisions programmatically, removing discovery from the consumer entirely.
Seufert's counter: even if an AI agent is doing all the shopping, it still has to pull products from somewhere. There's still a list of options, and someone decides what's on that list and how it's ranked. Whether the agent is browsing a retailer's website, hitting an API, or reading a product feed — "someone intermediates discovery, and when someone intermediates discovery, they control allocation."
And wherever there's more products than there are slots to show them, there's competition for visibility. "There will still be more products than any system can prioritize equally," Seufert says. "That's an allocation problem that naturally leads to advertising."
What This Means for Retail Media
Seufert is speaking broadly about the digital economy. But his thesis maps directly onto the disruption I've been tracking in retail media.
The reassuring part: advertising isn't going away in an AI-driven commerce world. The economic function of paying for distribution within a discovery environment is structural, not optional. That's true whether the interface is a search results page, a chat window, or an AI agent querying a product catalog.
The question becomes who controls that distribution layer. Today, retailers control product discovery on their own properties. But as AI platforms increasingly intermediate discovery before consumers reach a retailer's website, that control is up for grabs.
If the real competition in an AI economy is over who controls product discovery, then the winners are whoever sits between the consumer and the purchase decision. Right now, retailers hold that position on their own sites. LLM platforms are building the infrastructure to hold it everywhere else.
The retailers who get this — whose retail media operations are focused on connecting the right product to the right shopper at the right moment — will hold their ground. The ones still thinking about retail media as filling ad slots are going to lose that ground to platforms that do the matching better.
Listen to the full first episode of The Prosperous Society on the Mobile Dev Memo podcast.
Read more from me on this & related topics:
