Asteroids and Dinosaurs: A Moment in Time on AI, Commerce, and CMS with Kelly Goetsch

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Last year, a new word was added to Merriam-Webster's Dictionary called enshittification, a slang term used to criticize the degradation in the quality and experience of online platforms and experiences over time. 

Fun, right?

Er… not so much.

From a website or e-commerce perspective, enshittification typically manifests as an increase in things like ads, costs, or features, but the definition has been expanded to encompass any state of deterioration – even politics and culture.

One might conclude that our world is in a current state of enshittification, but for the purposes of my latest episode of “The Critic's Corner” podcast, we'll stick with the decay of modern digital experiences. Something we're all familiar with. 

On that note: my guest Kelly Goetsch was enshittified upon, something he wrote about recently on LinkedIn. 

If you don't know Kelly, he's what you might call an industry luminary, someone who has been shaping and influencing the DX and commerce landscape for quite some time. He's currently the COO at an outfit called Pipe17, an OSM alternative that's make waves in its category.

In our podcast conversation, Kelly shares more about his recent brush with "abysmal" CX during a retail TV purchase, exposing how online experiences have truly degraded in quality over time as the pursuit of profit takes over. He digs into the prevailing winds that brands face and how a lot of discovery and transacting is happening off-platform and off-site – and that's changing commerce pretty substantially.

“A lot of e-commerce over the traditional web is very, very broken,” he said. “And generally, it's a lot harder to drive people to your brand.com website.”

Maybe this abysmal reality is a sign of the times. 

Simultaneously, AI is dismantling the SaaS landscape before our very eyes. It's now possible to build apps faster than ever with less developer reliance, and there's a conscious move to consumption-based pricing. All this uncertainty is disrupting the roadmaps for software vendors and enterprises, and it's all accelerating at a breakneck pace.

“Value is not created by that which is different, but that which is unique. That's something that took me a while to fully understand, but it's true. There are a lot of legacy platforms, or even newer versions, but still fundamentally legacy approaches.”

When I invited Kelly on “The Critic's Corner," I was hoping to catch up on our alignment within the MACH Alliance. We've been in each other's orbit for several years, and I've watched him drive success at commercetools while building a strong community of interest around composable architectures and practices. 

But our conversation took some intriguing twists and turns. During the episode, Kelly gets real about what’s at stake as consumers seek new and better ways to search and engage with brands – namely, AI-powered answer engines like ChatGPT, where simplicity seems the norm (for now). No more combing through blue links or battling search ads to get a straight answer, and we can expect more ads and transactions to move there as well. 

Of course, this is resulting in a precipitous decline in classic search traffic, which is bad for marketers. 

He likened all this change to the moment an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs.

Dark? Sure. But from the ashes rose new life, and he sees the same potential.

At the same time, as revolutionary as ChatGPT is, Google isn't going anywhere tomorrow. Websites will continue to be relevant for a while as consumers adapt to this new digital reality. You can catch a two-minute snippet of Kelly's observation about “living in the future” right here:

On the content and enterprise software side, we also discuss CMS and its own category challenges. He recently asked in another LinkedIn post if we really need another content management system in an already crowded and mature space. This isn't a problem that's exclusive to our industry, but with hundreds of choices battling it out, it's a common question. 

I ask Kelly how we navigate this commoditization, where platforms – particularly legacy players – are compositionally the same, and AI is shifting expectations. He's focused beyond the legacy “dinosaur” story and looking for real differentiation.

“Value is not created by that which is different, but that which is unique,” he said. “That's something that took me a while to fully understand, but it's true. There are a lot of legacy platforms, or even newer versions, but still fundamentally legacy approaches.”

Asteroids… dinosaurs... could this be the end as we know it? Maybe. But as Kelly maintains, this is where the opportunity lies. So things get a little dark, but there's some light at the end of the tunnel. I promise. 

I have mad respect for Kelly's thinking, and this podcast episode is chock-full of wisdom nuggets. We spend a little time talking about his “origin story,” which colors some of his perspective. That collective experience – and success – might also be why he's firmly grounded despite these seismic changes. 

So strap in, turn up the volume, and watch the skies for falling objects.

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