The Digital Shelf Institute’s Lauren Livak Gilbert - Impact of AI in Winning On The Digital Shelf

The CPG Guys are joined in this episode by Lauren Livak Gilbert, Executive Director of the Digital Shelf Institute, part of Salsify.

Follow Lauren on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurenlivak/

Follow the Digital Shelf Institute online at: https://www.digitalshelfinstitute.org/

Listen to "Unpacking the Digital Shelf" podcast on Apple at: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/unpacking-the-digital-shelf/id1483944522

Listen to "Unpacking the Digital Shelf" podcast on Spotify at: https://open.spotify.com/show/1Qme24wjJjUnqrztQyMkUE?si=b6a0a46a58774fd7

Learn about the Digital Shelf Summit here: https://www.digitalshelfsummit.com/

Lauren answers these questions:

1. How is generative AI changing the way shoppers actually discover and evaluate products online — and is “search” even the right word anymore?
2. With AI-powered shopping assistants and chat-based commerce emerging, how should brands rethink product content that's optimized for an AI intermediary rather than a human scrolling a page?
3. What does “digital shelf readiness” mean in an AI-driven world compared to five years ago?
4. Are retailers' own AI tools (like retail media search and generative product Q&A) creating new data or visibility gaps that brands need to manage?
5. How is AI changing the economics and workflow of content creation — copy, imagery, A+ content — at scale across thousands of SKUs?
6. What early use cases of AI in digital shelf analytics have actually moved the needle on sales or share, versus ones that are still more hype than results?
7. How should brand and eCommerce teams be restructuring roles or skill sets as AI takes over more manual digital shelf tasks?
8. What are the biggest risks — misinformation, hallucinated product claims, brand voice drift — as AI generates more customer-facing content, and how are brands guarding against them?
9. How is AI reshaping competitive intelligence and price/promotion monitoring on the digital shelf?
10. Where do you see agentic AI — bots that shop, compare, and even purchase on a consumer's behalf — heading, and how prepared is the CPG industry for that shift?
11. What's a common mistake you see brands make when they adopt AI tools for digital shelf management too quickly or without a strategy?
12. Looking two to three years out, what's the single biggest way AI will change how brands compete for shelf space and share of search?

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