Rahul Shah, CEO of CommerceIQ, argues that discoverability has replaced shelf position as the battleground in retail, and that keeping retail media and product content in separate teams is now a competitive liability. He and Greg Kihlström get into what replaces the old model.
Discoverability is where the sale is decided. Product quality still matters, but an item that an AI-mediated retail environment can't read, verify, and surface never reaches the consideration set at all.
Retail media and product content are one system, not two budgets. Paid performance should be changing organic content, and organic performance should be changing paid — the separation between them is an org chart artifact that now costs money.
Automation runs at retail speed; humans keep it coherent. Shah on where AI-driven execution takes over from dashboard analysis, what humans have to keep owning as output scales, and how to attribute the resulting lift.
About Rahul Shah
Rahul Shah is CEO of CommerceIQ, the AI-native retail growth partner for brands. Rahul has spent more than two decades building and scaling technology businesses across product, engineering, and go-to-market. He was most recently Chief Product and Engineering Officer at Marqeta (NASDAQ: MQ) and held senior leadership positions at PayPal and GE. He also scaled venture-backed companies including Branch Metrics and Applause past $100 million in revenue. He holds an MBA from Berkeley Haas and a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
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