Brian Beck and Andy Hoar just returned from ShopTalk Spring 2026 in Las Vegas — 12,000+ attendees, 700+ vendors, and the theme “Retail in the Age of AI.”
In this episode of Master B2B Friday 15, they break down what’s converging between B2B and B2C, what’s still fundamentally different, and why the gap between the two worlds is shrinking faster than anyone expected.
FAQ
Q: Why did Master B2B go to a B2C conference? A: Brian Beck and Andy Hoar attended ShopTalk Spring 2026 in Las Vegas — a 12,000+ person B2C e-commerce event — because the gap between B2B and B2C is shrinking rapidly. Research from Lloyd Insights shows 78% of B2B leaders say customers expect more digitized, consumer-like experiences. Millennials now make up 75% of the global workforce and are increasingly moving into B2B procurement roles. As Hoar put it, “Every B2B buyer is also a B2C consumer. It’s not like you watch a movie in color and then go back to watching in black and white.”
Q: What were the biggest similarities between B2B and B2C? A: Four major areas of convergence stood out. First, AI was the dominant theme — ShopTalk’s tagline was “Retail in the Age of AI,” mirroring B2B’s obsession. Second, AEO/GEO (answer engine optimization) was a major topic, with multiple sessions on optimizing for AI search. Third, the importance of digital experience remains central to both worlds. Fourth, operational efficiency — shipping, logistics, supply chain optimization — was heavily represented in both vendor solutions and sessions.
Q: What are the key differences between B2B and B2C e-commerce? A: Several significant differences remain. Speed of decision-making and risk tolerance is the starkest: B2C companies rapidly test new technologies while B2B demands use cases and ROI before acting. The customer relationship is fundamentally different — one B2B customer can equal thousands of B2C consumers, and a B2B “customer” like Caterpillar is really a holding company for many buyers, approvers, and end users. Digital marketing sophistication is far more advanced in B2C. Channel conflict still paralyzes many B2B companies while B2C has largely moved past it. And basic e-commerce functionality can still be a differentiator in B2B, while it’s table stakes in B2C.
Q: Is ChatGPT going to become a shopping channel? A: Not yet for transactions, but it’s already influential. At ShopTalk, session after session emphasized that while ChatGPT and other AI tools aren’t intermediating transactions right now, they’re heavily influencing the top of the funnel and early customer journey. Meta announced it’s introducing product reviews, recommendations, and augmented product details as part of the AI shopping journey. As Hoar observed, “They wouldn’t be doing that if they didn’t know quantitatively that it’s influencing people’s purchases.” The hosts compared it to early e-commerce: everyone wanted to jump straight to transactions, but the real value started with research and information — and transactions followed years later.
Q: Why is channel conflict still holding B2B back? A: Channel conflict — the fear that selling direct or through new channels will upset existing distribution partners — remains a major barrier in B2B, while B2C has largely moved past it. Beck noted that many B2B manufacturers still refuse to sell direct because they’re afraid their distribution channel will revolt. Hoar cited Procter & Gamble’s experience: when P&G announced selling on Amazon, Walmart and Target threatened to pull their products. “Guess what didn’t happen? They didn’t pull the stuff from the shelves.” The lesson: distributors already have their own private labels, competitors are already selling direct, and living in fear of channel partners is no longer a viable strategy.
Q: Should B2B companies be using influencers and user-generated content? A: Yes, and they’re significantly underutilizing this opportunity. While ShopTalk was full of B2C influencers and content creators, Hoar argued this isn’t exclusively a B2C play — especially on the prosumer side. B2B companies like those Tim Lavender discussed at prior Master B2B summits are recruiting handymen and tradespeople to demonstrate product capabilities. The hosts believe B2B has a bias toward content being created through salespeople interactions rather than marketing, and that’s changing. However, B2B does have a trust advantage: in B2C, anyone with a camera can promote a product regardless of accuracy, while B2B requires trusted, verified information — especially when safety is involved.
Q: What happened with OpenAI’s Sora video generator? A: OpenAI shut down Sora, its AI video generation tool, despite having a billion-dollar deal with Disney and technology that could produce near-Pixar-quality video in weeks. The hosts believe OpenAI is refocusing resources on core computing capabilities, particularly as competition from tools like Kling intensifies. The engineering team that built Sora was reportedly repurposed within OpenAI. The shutdown — which would have seemed laughable just six months ago — underscores how rapidly the AI landscape is shifting and how unpredictable the winners and losers will be.
Q: What can B2C learn from B2B? A: Trust. Andy Hoar made a compelling closing argument that while B2B can learn speed, marketing sophistication, and customer experience innovation from B2C, the consumer world has a trust problem. B2C influencers frequently promote products without accountability or accuracy. In B2B, where an incorrect product recommendation could break a machine or endanger someone’s safety, there’s a rigorous trust framework around who’s authorized to recommend products. The ideal middle ground is somewhere between B2C’s “wild west” of content and B2B’s overly restrictive approach where only certified salespeople can discuss products.
PODCAST RECAP
Introduction
Brian Beck
Welcome everyone to Friday 15 with Master B2B. My name is Brian Beck. I’m here with Andy, my partner in this thought leadership series and community of e-commerce professionals in B2B. Andy, welcome to another Friday 15.
Andy Hoar
Yeah, good to be here. Got back from Las Vegas last night. It was 93 in Las Vegas and it was 37 in Chicago.
Brian Beck
Nice. Well, I drove up to Utah and it was 80 here. I’m in the mountains. What the freak? I don’t get it. But apparently, the whole West this year has been just awful with snow and it’s been really warm. Unfortunately the ski industry — they’re shutting down all the ski resorts. It’s not even the end of March. It’s well, it is the end of March. It’s crazy. That’s over a month before they usually shut them down. So, not great for our ski season. But of course, the East Coast got hammered with snow this year. So, I don’t know. All kinds of weird stuff happening, Andy, with weather.
So, we were in Las Vegas this week and that’s our topic today for our Friday 15. We’re going to talk a little bit about what the heck we were doing in Vegas land. But before we get to that, let’s do some breaking news.
Breaking News: OpenAI Shuts Down Sora
Brian Beck
Andy, did you see this? This is fascinating. OpenAI is shutting down Sora, its AI video generator. The app, which many called creepy for how lifelike it felt, allowed conversations that mimicked real human interactions. While it was meant to explore AI companionship and mental wellness, users reported discomfort as the AI sometimes mirrored emotions or became unsettlingly persistent. The shutdown comes less than a year after operations, reflecting broader concerns around AI’s role in intimate human interactions. They had a billion dollar deal with Disney to use Sora, yet they still shut it down. What’s your take on this?
Andy Hoar
I think that says it all. I mean, let’s face it, they’re getting their ass kicked by Kling, and they need to focus on the core capabilities about computing. There’s so much opportunity on that side of the ledger that they’ve decided — and I think to their credit — to really focus on some stuff. They shut down some other businesses as well they had running.
Brian Beck
That’s true.
Andy Hoar
That said, this thing was pretty impressive technology. Billion dollar deal with Disney and that was just the starting point. Crazy.
Brian Beck
If you told somebody six months ago when we all saw this — I showed this video at events where they had almost Pixar-like capabilities that they built in a couple weeks, things that took years and hundreds of millions of dollars for Pixar to do. If we’d said, “Oh, guess what? Six months from now they’re going to throw the whole thing in the trash.” We both would have laughed.
Andy Hoar
Yet they did. Why not just sell it to Disney? I mean, they had a billion dollar deal or something.
Brian Beck
Yeah, I know. Probably though because the engineering team that built it — they’ve repurposed them within OpenAI to do computing stuff. I think it was too intricately tied to the engineering team. Why not sell this to a venture capital firm or sell it to Disney or give it to somebody and let them go play with it? I mean, it wasn’t producing a lot of revenue. I think I read it was only about one and a half million dollars in licensing revenue versus hundreds of millions of dollars in licensing revenue for ChatGPT, but still the potential was there and it’s a business. I think somebody’s going to call them and say, “Hey, can we buy this thing? Can we take it out of the dust bin and do something with it perhaps?”
Andy Hoar
Maybe. We’ll see.
Why Were We at ShopTalk?
Brian Beck
Our topic today — we were in Las Vegas, Nevada this week for ShopTalk Spring 2026. For those of you who don’t know ShopTalk, it is a very large B2C e-commerce show. In fact, they get over 12,000 people at this thing. It’s enormous. There’s a huge show floor. It is really a leading venue for B2C e-commerce. So think about large retailers like your Macy’s of the world and large consumer brands and the folks that run their e-commerce business. That’s primarily who was at this thing.
We wanted to see what some of the similarities and differences are from B2B, which is why we joined the event. But really what spurred our interest was some of the data. Lloyd Insights found that 78% of B2B leaders say customers expect more digitized consumer-like experiences. Millennials are now the majority of B2B buyers — 75% of the global workforce. Those folks are increasingly moving into B2B procurement roles. Millennials make up 60% of their purchases online, up from 47% less than 10 years ago. Two-thirds of millennials make half or more of their purchases from Amazon. 97% use Amazon for at least part of their shopping. So you’ve got these digitized, native buyers.
Andy Hoar
Yeah, and the reality is — I’ve said this for years and I think you have as well — every B2B buyer is also a B2C consumer. It’s not like you watch a movie in color and then go back to watching in black and white and say, “Hey, this is great.” Once you’ve had the experience, once you taste a different kind of personalized, tailored experience — not all of it translates, let’s be honest. But we’ve always known that the more cutting-edge customer engagement takes place on the B2C side.
The old joke about everything starts in porn and gaming, then makes its way into B2C, and then eventually into B2B. But I think the timelines are so much shorter now that we wanted to be there to see what’s going on in B2C. Just like that Sora thing — six months ago people thought it was going to change the entertainment industry, now it’s in the toilet. These timelines are so short now that I don’t think we can count on “oh, it started in B2C, we’ll see it in five years in B2B.” I just don’t think for certain things that’s the case anymore. The gap between those two worlds is shrinking.
ShopTalk Impressions: AI Everywhere
Brian Beck
The number one thing I noticed — even in the name of the show — AI, of course, was all over the place. The theme of the conference was “Retail in the Age of AI.” Well, doesn’t that say it all? Everyone’s thinking about this. As you think about the forward-thinking, risk-tolerant behavior of B2C companies, they’re embracing and testing things at an enormously rapid pace. That was clear from our time there. Not only represented by the people we saw and talked to who are in the B2C e-commerce operator space, but even the number of vendors. This hall was enormous — like 600–700 vendors. It was crazy.
Andy Hoar
It was everywhere you looked there was a vendor.
Brian Beck
The format of ShopTalk includes onstage talks, panel discussions, small meetup booths, and then this enormous trade show floor. What I’ve always enjoyed about the B2C side — I used to be in B2C as you know — is that you could walk the floor and find all kinds of tech and people pushing the envelope. Part of that is because retailers will actually test things and pay to test things, whereas B2B doesn’t as much. They’re more like, “Give me the use case, give me the ROI, give me the business case” — and two years later they’ll maybe test it. B2B is so conservative. B2C is out there doing things. What were your impressions of the vendor floor, Andy?
Andy Hoar
It was enormous. I saw a long tail of AI-focused companies, which you and I were joking about — how many of these companies will be gone in three years? But hey, it’s creative destruction. Some of them, if it follows the venture capital rule, one out of every 10 will be successful and nine will not. But I’d rather be looking at those companies so I get an early lead on the one that could make a difference in my business.
There’s such an advantage for the right circumstances to a first-mover advantage. I think there’s a natural bias in B2B to be a fast follower or even a slow follower, and there’s a reliance on this notion that “our customers have been with us forever, they have the appetite to wait, they’re patient.” Well, that’s an excuse a lot of times, because as soon as something better comes along or a competitor incorporates it, that’s a forcing function. I think these companies need to be more aware of what’s coming. They need to embrace things more. They need to try things more because these life cycles are really short and you could fall well behind.
ChatGPT and the Influence Layer
Andy Hoar
Even B2C gets ahead of itself. This whole thing around ChatGPT a couple months ago where they announced they’re stopping the transactional side — that was perceived by most people as a failure. But some of this discussion at the show indicates that okay, there’s not as much transaction going on, which seems reasonable to me. But I heard it in session after session at this event: there is now a new area between a seller and a buyer where AI is involved.
ChatGPT may not be intermediating transactions right now or anytime soon. But ChatGPT and others are heavily influential at the top of the funnel or the early part of the customer journey. There was a lot of discussion about how do we optimize our presence there? How do we play in AI? Because it’s no longer the case that we can count on people using SEO or coming straight to our website.
Brian Beck
Absolutely. AEO — answer engine optimization, also called GEO — was a huge topic, multiple sessions. And we saw vendors that were serving that community, which again are all new technologies — how to track, how to optimize, et cetera.
Andy Hoar
Meta was at this event, and to the point earlier about where B2C got ahead of itself — this relationship is not going to be transactional, at least not right now, but it is going to be informational. Meta announced that they’re introducing product reviews, recommendations, and augmented product details as a part of this “shopping journey.” So they’re investing heavily in delivering that. Well, they wouldn’t be doing that if they didn’t know quantitatively that it’s influencing people’s purchases.
It feels like the early days of e-commerce. Remember when everybody said, “We’re going to set up a website. We’re going to sell everything through it.” And the smart companies said, “Well, we tried that and people still want to touch and feel stuff in the store.” However, they’re using the website to inform themselves, to research — and eventually look where that ended up. There’s still a vast majority of buying in stores, but increasingly people bought more online to the point where Amazon’s the number one clothing retailer in the country. A couple years ago, people thought it was laughable that people would buy clothing online.
It follows a process, but you can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. I heard a lot of people say, “Well, ChatGPT is not going to be where people make purchases.” Yeah, that’s true. But ChatGPT and others are going to be highly influential about what people buy. So you’ve got to play in that space.
Similarities Between B2B and B2C
Brian Beck
In terms of takeaways — things that were similar at ShopTalk to what we see at our B2B events and from our community:
AI is the focus everywhere — across the board, just as it is in B2B. We heard it at our summit. It’s also on the B2C side — from operational perspectives through top-of-funnel awareness through personalization and optimizing e-commerce experiences.
AEO and GEO and changes in search marketing — that was apparent and very similar between the two worlds.
The importance of digital experience — clearly a longtime focus of B2C, and increasingly critical in B2B.
Technology solutions overlap — Andy and I saw many similar companies or the same companies that are at our B2B events also at the B2C show. A lot of the e-commerce platforms, search platforms, and operational efficiency solutions — shipping and logistics — were represented in both worlds.
Key Differences
Brian Beck
Speed of decisions and risk-taking. You can’t support a hall of 800 or a thousand vendors if your audience isn’t buying and testing new solutions. B2B doesn’t adopt as quickly. Our B2B folks are very conservative. That remains a very stark difference between the two.
The customer is fundamentally different. One customer in B2B equals a thousand or 10,000 customers in B2C. These companies have databases of millions and millions of customers, the big ones. When I was at Harbor Freight Tools, we had three million customers. The same size company in B2B might have 10,000 customers. So there’s a big difference there in how you’re servicing them, and it has implications for loyalty and retention.
Andy Hoar
And what’s a B2B customer? In B2C, it’s a one-to-one relationship. Macy’s sells to Brian Beck. But in B2B, it’s Grainger selling to Caterpillar. It could be multiple divisions of Grainger, but it’s going to be many people at Caterpillar. Caterpillar is a customer, but it’s really a holding company for a series of customers. That’s why personalization is really a different animal in B2B — what are you personalizing for? The person making the purchase, the person authorizing the purchase, the person who’s going to use the product?
Brian Beck
Digital marketing sophistication. It always strikes me at these B2C conferences how many different ways there are to do customer acquisition. They’re testing email, SMS, all the social media aspects — they really push the envelope on how they acquire customers in ways that B2B doesn’t. We’re still talking about e-commerce as a lead gen source in B2B, where B2C is doing all kinds of things with text messaging, databases, cookies — just a whole other level of marketing.
Functionality as a differentiator. In B2C, a lot of companies have moved to Shopify and standard functionality is table stakes. You’re not even in business without it. But in B2B, you could just implement e-commerce and already be a differentiated business based on the basic functionality. That’s how far behind many B2B companies are.
Andy Hoar
There’s an over-reliance on product in B2B — like, “Oh, if we just implement this, we’ll build it and they shall come.” I’ve not really found that to be the case because you can build, borrow, buy, or steal anything these days. But you are right — so many of these companies are so far behind that it’s a differentiator for their business internally, not externally.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
Andy Hoar
One thing I thought was interesting — we saw a lot of influencers and content creators walking around. My first instinct was this is not a B2B thing. That said, I don’t know if it isn’t a B2B thing, especially on the more prosumer side of things.
Yes, it’s taken to an extreme. We have these people walking around trying on makeup and then going on their channels promoting it. But I think there is a role to be played for user-generated content in B2B. Remember a couple years ago Tim Lavender mentioned they’re now recruiting handymen and all sorts of folks to demonstrate capabilities.
I think B2B is underutilizing their customer network to do this kind of thing because they don’t see it as appropriate — they still see a lot of this interaction as being done through salespeople, whereas in B2C it’s being done through marketing. There aren’t salespeople in B2C, so you market to people and create content to do that. I think B2B still has a bias toward “our content is created by our salespeople in the form of an interaction where they talk about their kids and take the order.” And I just think that is changing.
Channel Conflict: B2C Has Moved On
Brian Beck
Channel conflict is a thing of the past in B2C. B2B is still completely hung up on this. It prevents action at many of these companies. “We’re worried about what our distribution is going to do. We’re worried about what our sales team’s going to do if we launch e-commerce.” Come on, guys. We’ve got to modernize here.
Andy Hoar
You can’t live in fear of your customers. When Procter and Gamble announced they were going to start selling stuff online and through Amazon, Walmart and Target got upset and said, “We’re going to pull your stuff from our shelves.” They issued all the threats. And guess what didn’t happen? They didn’t pull the stuff from the shelves.
Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Everybody finds a way to make it work. But what Walmart did is they went private label. So there is a reaction to these things, and it’s a business case argument. You’ve got to decide. But you’ve got to do what’s in your own best interest. Too many brand manufacturers will not sell direct because they’re afraid their channel is going to engage in an uprising against them. Guys, that’s already happening. Distributors already have their own private labels.
What B2C Can Learn from B2B: Trust
Andy Hoar
There is one thing I noticed — there was a lot of discussion at ShopTalk about where I think B2C can perhaps learn something from B2B. And it’s about trust.
All those content people out there — a lot of them are making stuff up. There’s no way to know what’s real and not real. If you try some lipstick from some influencer — unless there’s lead in the lipstick, it won’t kill you. It just might look weird. But in B2B, if somebody says, “Hey, this part’s great. You should try it,” and it breaks the machine and somebody dies — there’s a trust component there.
But there’s got to be some middle ground between the wild wild west — where anybody who’s got an internet connection and a camera can talk about a product — and “no, we only have exactly these people who have to be authorized and certified to talk about these things.” That’s where B2B is. There’s something in the middle, and B2C has to come back to that, and B2B has to move forward to that.
Brian Beck
Yeah, no question. There’s a lot to learn from each side. Good stuff. I’m glad we went, Andy. It was exciting to be there at ShopTalk, and we look forward to continuing the conversation around this whole convergence between B2B and B2C.
Thank you everybody for listening. We’re going to see you next week on our next Friday 15.
