Shoppers expect personalization, guidance and immediacy, but this can be a tall order for even the most sophisticated eCommerce platforms.
“The way in which we navigate eCommerce is not good,” Rezolve Ai CEO Daniel Wagner told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster for the Monday Conversation series. “It served its purpose for nearly 30 years, but it is no longer ideal.”
Anyone who has tried to find a product online knows to enter a search term, wade through pages of results, filter, refine and often abandon. It’s a clumsy proxy for the personalized, conversational experience of a knowledgeable in-store salesperson.
Wagner said he believes that a transformation is underway, one where digital retail, with the help of artificial intelligence, must finally deliver the intuitive, responsive experience consumers have long taken for granted in physical stores.
“When you walk into a physical store, 7 out of 10 times you end up walking out with a product,” he said. “When you arrive on a digital platform, 7 out of 10 times, you do not leave with a product.”
The reason is the fundamental inability of digital platforms to replicate the personalized discovery process.
“You can’t get the answers to your questions,” Wagner said, adding that he believes the future of digital commerce hinges on humanizing the experience.
“If I was to ask my wife to buy a mobile phone for me online, she couldn’t do it,” he said. “She wouldn’t know the difference between iOS and Android, what a megapixel is, or what an OLED screen does. But if she walked into a store, a salesperson would ask her a few questions — and she’d walk out with the right phone.”
Building the Brain for Retail
Retailers’ slow adaptation to the internet in the late ’90s, something Wagner witnessed firsthand, is unlikely to repeat itself.
“ECommerce is now a very well-developed channel,” he said. “Every retailer today has an online presence. What matters most is fixing their 70% attrition rate.”
While early eCommerce focused on direct-to-known SKU sales (a specific model of Nike shoes, for instance), it has struggled with discovery-driven shopping, or the casual browsing and serendipitous purchasing at which physical stores excel.
Rezolve’s solution to injecting that lost “serendipity” back into online retail is what Wagner called the Brain Suite, or a set of AI tools designed to bring three human-like qualities into the digital commerce experience: deep product expertise; empathy; and conversion focus.
At the core is a proprietary language model. Just as brick-and-mortar stores once relied on knowledgeable sales associates to guide customer decisions, the digital world can now lean on AI to replicate and enhance that experience.
“Taking a customer from a query to a purchase is an art form,” Wagner said. “We’ve trained our model on psychographics and closing techniques. We’re giving retailers the best salesman on the planet… It understands not just product specifications but the utility of features like why an OLED screen matters, why a fast shutter speed benefits sports photography.”
Today’s AI retail systems aren’t just responding to queries; they’re anticipating needs. Early digital interactions were clunky and transactional. Basic chatbots offered scripted responses that often led to more frustration than resolution. Fast-forward to 2025, and AI-powered sales assistants are virtually indistinguishable from their human counterparts — smarter, faster and more scalable, he said.
“This is the evolution of digital engagement,” Wagner said. “Today’s online shopping is old-fashioned and ineffective. Consumers will start to demand the new way.”
The Crypto Connection: Reinventing Payments
Rezolve’s ambitions don’t stop at search and discovery. Wagner said he sees a broader opportunity to redefine payment at the point of sale tied to cryptocurrency.
Together with Tether, the issuer of the widely used stablecoin USDT, Rezolve is launching a crypto-enabled wallet integrated into its Brain Suite. Users will be able to store crypto assets, including stablecoins or bitcoin, and pay seamlessly online or in-store via tap-to-pay terminals.
The pitch to consumers? Earn 8% on USDT holdings while parked in the wallet, a contrast to bank savings rates. The pitch to merchants? Zero transaction fees.
“Today, merchants pay 3% to 3.5% in fees on card payments,” Wagner said. “With our crypto wallet, they pay nothing. They will promote it: pay with crypto, get more loyalty points, get a free drink with your meal.”
Importantly, merchants receive U.S. dollars, not crypto, eliminating volatility risk, he said.
“We can take a large chunk of a $1.4 trillion market opportunity,” Wagner said. “This is the most exciting innovation in payments in 30 or 40 years.”
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