Send us a text

What happens when shopping moves from websites to conversations? In this episode of The First Mile Podcast, host Dom Burch sits down with Patrick Harrington, Head of AI and Machine Learning at MetaRouter, to unpack one of the biggest shifts in digital commerce yet — the rise of agentic commerce, where AI agents like ChatGPT drive discovery, comparison, and checkout without ever visiting a website.

From Walmart’s OpenAI partnership to the mechanics of the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), Dom and Patrick explore how “chat meets checkout” is rewriting the customer journey, and what it means for data visibility, attribution, and personalization. Patrick reveals how MetaRouter acts as the first-mile control plane for this new commerce frontier, restoring lawful visibility and intelligence between AI agents and merchant systems.

We cover:

• How agentic commerce changes discovery, attribution, and personalization
• Why traditional analytics go blind when purchases happen inside AI chat
• How MetaRouter bridges the gap between AI-driven conversations and merchant systems
• The role of intent embeddings and policy tokens in powering lawful, AI-ready data exchange
• What “surface fluidity” means for omni-channel commerce and Retail Media Networks

Discovery has moved from links to conversations, and that shift is rewriting how customers find, evaluate, and buy. We sit down with Patrick Harrington, head of AI and machine learning at MetaRouter, to unpack generative engine optimization—what it is, why it matters, and how marketers can align content, consent, and speed to win in an LLM‑first world. Patrick draws on experience across Walmart, Block, and Workday to map a clear path from theory to practice: treat the first mile of data as your control plane, capture consent at creation, and design information that LLMs can confidently retrieve mid‑conversation.

We break down the real differences between SEO and GEO, moving past keywords into the geometric language models use to represent meaning. That means structuring product data, claims, comparisons, and imagery so they form unique, verifiable signals. It also means tightening provenance, third‑party validation, authoritative domains, and fresh timestamps, so models favor your content and users trust the answers they see. Along the way, we tackle hallucinations as a quality problem, the role of guardrails, and why bringing models to your data inside your cloud keeps sovereignty intact while unlocking real‑time decisions that boost ROAS.

Finally, we zoom out to the market dynamics ahead. Expect a push and pull among LLM platforms, retailers and brands, and the advertising ecosystem. The advantage goes to teams that can pass actionable context across channels without surrendering control: durable first‑party IDs, consent‑aware event streams, and omni-channel signals that reflect how people really shop. If intent lives in conversation, optimization must live in the first mile, where you decide to route or suppress, personalize or protect, all in milliseconds.

If this helped sharpen your GEO strategy, follow the show, share it with a colleague, and leave a quick review with one takeaway you’re acting on next.