Data vs. Commerce
The podcast that explores the messy middle between database and doorstep.
Every company that sells online wants frictionless commerce. But what does that actually look like in practice? Most businesses have already figured out the #1 rule of cutting out friction in their physical supply chain: all of its parts need to talk to each other, and somebody needs to own it.
Far fewer have figured that out for their digital supply chains. And somewhere in that pile of disconnected projects, data and commerce stopped talking. The most expensive relationship in your business needs work. This is their standing appointment. This is Data vs. Commerce.
Each week, hosts Matt Johnson and Floyd Blaikie sit down with the people who own the data, run the platforms, and pay the price when those two stop playing nice.
All Episodes
Recent Episodes
Start small before you sign a five-year, multi-agent deal | Anatolii Iakimets, Director of Product Marketing, Kibo | Ep. 8
Every pitch for agentic commerce opens with the model. Which frontier lab it runs on, how smart it is, how many PhDs sit behind it. This episode argues the model is the part that matters least. ㅤ Hosts Matt Johnson and Floyd Blaikie of Pivotree 's Data vs. Commerce sit down with Anatolii Iakimets , ...
A prototype built with Claude Code still has to survive your ERP | Ryan Smith, Account Executive, Pivotree | Ep. 7
Every AI conversation in distribution right now assumes the data underneath is ready to be acted on. Most of the time, it isn't. Matt Johnson hosts this one solo, with Floyd Blaikie out of the studio, joined by Ryan Smith , an account executive at Pivotree , fresh off the Applied AI for Distributors...
Using AI in field sales without gutting the sales team | Lauren McCullough, Co-Founder & CEO, Tromml | Ep. 6
Field sales is the part of commerce that data never quite reaches. The rep has the relationship, the context, and forty years of counter knowledge, and most of it dies in a notebook nobody reads. This episode is about closing that gap. Matt Johnson calls in from the AI for Distributors event in Chic...
Hosts & Resident Experts
The data and commerce experts behind the show.
Matt Johnson
Host
Floyd Blaikie
Host
Dan Ornstein
Retail & Industry Expert
Sam Russo
Automotive Industry
& Data Expert
What We’re All About
Every product moves twice. Once through the data layer—the place where it gets named, classified, attributed, priced, syndicated, and made findable. And then again through the physical layer where it gets paid for, picked, packed, shipped, and delivered.
Most companies invest heavily in an orchestrated physical journey, but treat the data journey as a pile of disconnected projects run by a different org on a different budget cycle. The gap between the two is where modern commerce actually fails: the stockouts that aren't really stockouts, the 0.8% integration error nobody's caught, the AI agent that ordered the wrong part, the ecommerce replatform that blew up on data nobody had cleaned in six years.
This show lives in that gap.
If you're responsible for any part of how products get from a database to a doorstep, this is your show. Follow us on LinkedIn and never miss another insight.