Lauren Livak Gilbert is the Executive Director of the Digital Shelf Institute, a community of more than 11,000 brands and retailers navigating eCommerce and the digital shelf. She leads research, education, and industry collaboration on emerging commerce trends. Lauren specializes in agentic commerce, product content, citations, measurement, and helping brands turn complex digital shifts into practical strategies that drive customer acquisition and growth.

 Max Sinclair is the Founder and CEO of Azoma (formerly Ecomtent), an agentic commerce platform helping brands improve visibility and performance across AI-powered shopping. He leads company strategy, growth, and enterprise partnerships while advising brands on product discovery, content, and conversion across ChatGPT, Amazon Rufus, Walmart Sparky, and Google Gemini. Max also co-hosts The New Frontier: The Agentic Commerce & Answer Engine Optimization podcast.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [1:30] Lauren Livak Gilbert introduces the Digital Shelf Institute and its collaboration with Azoma on agentic commerce research
• [2:05] Max Sinclair outlines agentic commerce as a growing leadership and board-level priority
• [4:36] What the five C’s framework covers for brands navigating AI-powered shopping
• [8:22] How existing digital shelf foundations support the shift toward agentic commerce
• [11:13] Lauren explains the need for richer product context and deeper shopper understanding
• [17:04] Why citations, trusted sources, and external content influence product recommendations
• [24:01] Max and Lauren examine accuracy, misinformation, and brand control across AI platforms
• [31:12] Max connects agentic commerce efforts to customer acquisition, conversion, and measurable growth

In this episode…

Agentic commerce is becoming a priority for brands, but many teams are still defining how it fits into their eCommerce strategies. Rather than replacing the digital shelf, it expands how AI systems discover, evaluate, and recommend products. How can brands turn this shift into measurable growth?

Digital shelf strategist Lauren Livak Gilbert and agentic commerce entrepreneur Max Sinclair answer by organizing the challenge around five C’s: completeness, context, citations, correctness, and customer acquisition. Their framework shows brands how to strengthen product data, answer detailed shopper questions, build trust through credible sources, and correct inaccurate information across AI platforms. Lauren recommends treating agentic commerce as an extension of existing digital shelf work while developing a deeper understanding of shopper needs. Max emphasizes monitoring the entire category, identifying the sources AI tools rely on, and connecting visibility efforts to conversion and incremental revenue. Together, their guidance offers a practical way to prepare internal teams, prioritize investments, and measure meaningful business impact.

In this episode of The Digital Deep Dive, Aaron Conant talks with Lauren Livak Gilbert, Executive Director of the Digital Shelf Institute, and Max Sinclair, Founder and CEO of Azoma, about decoding agentic commerce through the five C’s. Lauren and Max show how brands can improve data completeness, add richer context, strengthen citations, ensure correctness, and drive customer acquisition. They also discuss AI shopping behavior, brand accuracy, and practical measurement.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Aaron Conant on LinkedIn   
• BWG Connect  
• Lauren Livak Gilbert on LinkedIn
• The Digital Shelf Institute (DSI) 
• Max Sinclair on LinkedIn
• Azoma
• New Frontier on YouTube

Quotable Moments:

• “When you're thinking about agentic commerce, you need to have the right answers to the questions that your shoppers are asking.”
• “So context is providing additional information about your product that someone might be searching for.”
• “You have to play by the rules, and I think you can.”
• “And within five days, the LLMs were surfacing their brand.com versus the influencer content.”
• “You need to be able to understand you've made this change in content, and it's impacted your sales.”

Action Steps:

1. Strengthen product data completeness: Keeping attributes, feeds, metadata, and product details accurate across channels gives AI shopping tools the foundation they need to recommend products correctly.
2. Add richer context to product content: Answering the longer, more specific questions shoppers ask helps AI systems connect products to real use cases, needs, and environments.
3. Monitor and improve citation sources: Understanding which retailer pages, brand sites, media outlets, and communities influence AI results helps brands build trust and improve visibility.
4. Correct misinformation quickly: Publishing clear, authoritative information on owned channels can reduce inaccurate claims and improve how AI platforms represent the brand.
5. Connect agentic commerce to business outcomes: Measuring changes in traffic, conversion, revenue, and customer acquisition helps teams prove value and prioritize future investment.

About BWG Connect...

BWG Connect provides executive strategy and networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution. We network and knowledge share together to better understand and adapt to the newest trends, strategies, and pain points shaping growth in the digital space. BWG Connect, in conjunction with BWG Strategy, has built an exclusive network of 125,000+ senior professionals and hosts over 2,000 virtual and in-person networking events on an annual basis.

In addition, we have had 1x1 conversations with over 5,000 brands and have a real-time pulse on what digital strategies are successful and why. This in-depth knowledge allows our team to operate on the cutting-edge and provide our clients with best-in-class guidance on how to win in the digital world. We have provided free consultations and strategy sessions for companies of all sizes, from start-ups to Fortune-100, to enable growth, resolve issues and make curated service provider introductions that can impact your digital footprint.

We have held to the philosophy of providing high-level insights and actionable knowledge with no sales pitches in order to provide to our network the ability to listen, learn and act to improve themselves as well as their organizations. Our ultimate goal is to be the resource out there to help digital executives find the research they need to excel in the modern marketplace.

If you are interested in getting involved with any of our current or past events, you can find them here. If you are looking for help & would like to set up some time to chat with our team, you can schedule a time or reach out directly to Aaron@bwgconnect.com or Tiffany@bwgconnect.com.

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