Notes from the Digital Floor 6

The Half-Life of Certainty

Certainties have a remarkably short shelf life on the digital floor.

At the start of the year, the matter seemed settled. Anyone in e-commerce who failed to embrace artificial intelligence immediately, and more specifically Agentic Commerce, had already missed the boat. At conferences, on panels and across LinkedIn, the message was delivered with a conviction that brooked no dissent. The train was leaving. If you were still on the platform, you might as well tear up your ticket.

What was remarkable was not the vehemence so much as the precision, or rather, the absence of it. In a surprisingly large number of presentations, it remained unclear what Agentic Commerce actually meant. Autonomous purchase decisions? AI-powered assistants? New modes of interaction between platforms and users? Or simply a fresh name for an old hope: that technology might elegantly dissolve the complexity of commerce.

None of this stopped anyone from passing the message along with full conviction. New vocabulary enters the stage, and with it the certainty that this time, everything will be different. The mechanism is ancient.

Then a few weeks passed.

And suddenly, a rather different piece of news took the stage. ChatGPT announced that it would, for now, be stepping back from its initiative around direct purchases within the platform. A strategic decision, soberly worded. In the digital echo chamber, however, it was an event that immediately produced new certainties.

Now other voices declared that Agentic Commerce had been a misunderstanding all along. What digital commerce really needed to focus on was what customers actually wanted: better prices.

The formula has an unbeatable advantage. It is simple. It always works. And it is technologically far less demanding.

Between these two positions, the overheated vision and the swift disillusionment, lies the real spectacle of the digital floor. Topics are rarely developed slowly. They are driven across the stage, one certainty replacing the next before the previous one has even been properly assessed.

It is worth pausing, occasionally, to consider some of the more famous lines from the history of innovation. Henry Ford once observed that people, when asked what they wanted, would probably have said faster horses. Steve Jobs put the same thought differently. People often do not know what they want until they see it.

The point is less the genius of individual entrepreneurs than a rather human pattern. We imagine improvements within familiar frames. Transformations of the frames themselves tend to appear unnecessary, incomprehensible, or simply too complicated.

Perhaps that is precisely why the digital floor is so susceptible to dramatic changes of direction. Between euphoria and disillusionment, there are often only a few weeks, sometimes nothing more than a new presentation at an industry conference.

Those who spend enough time there eventually notice a reassuring detail. The truly interesting developments rarely follow this zigzag course. They tend to emerge more quietly, more slowly and considerably less spectacularly than the certainties that accompany them.

The half-life of a conviction on the digital floor, then, is a matter of weeks.

The changes that actually endure take considerably longer.