AI Agents Will Take 50% of Your Traffic — Is Your Data Ready? | Jeff Lunsford, CEO of Tealium

Craig S. Smith (0:00)

We're still early days in agent adoption by Enterprise, certainly.

Jeff Lunsford (0:05)

The future is gonna be wild, but humans are not going to go away. Your traffic is gonna grow, probably 50% of it by mid next year will be agentic, but it's not, that doesn't mean your human traffic got cut in half.

Craig S. Smith (0:19)

In agentic commerce, there's a gap right now because agents need current state consented context on them. And a warehouse can only offer yesterday's picture.

Jeff Lunsford (0:32)

This agentic traffic is converting at about 38% more revenue per session than the human traffic is. Our customers today, about 20% of their inbound traffic is inbound agents, not humans. Even before AI. 40% of their traffic was bots. What used to be human traffic is now agentic traffic. When you go to a website with your browser, there's a hidden layer of data that the human eye never sees, but that's right where the agent goes to do its thing.

Craig S. Smith (1:03)

First of all, describe Tealium to listeners, where it is in the stack, what it does. I mean, the software that Tealium's making.

Jeff Lunsford (1:13)

Sure, so Tealium is a neutral data collection platform that runs underneath all of a company's customer experience systems, so web, mobile, call center, point of sale, branch store, ATM, kiosk, and above stack from the cloud data warehouses in the backend transactional system. We're basically listening and collection and enrichment and distribution layer, and we position the company neutrally across the industry, so we integrate with about 1300 different vendors across martech, customer experience, data warehousing, transaction processing, and help our customers just listen to all this real-time data, resolve it around identity, create enriched visitor profiles, and then federate those back out in real-time to all these systems that can benefit from that real-time view.

Craig S. Smith (2:04)

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Jeff Lunsford (4:04)

It is an orchestration layer. It's data orchestration. And so, you know, and we can do customer journey orchestration through data orchestration. So as the visitor profile is enriched, you might fire off different experiences through different systems and use this as a data orchestration layer.

And we also, though, are a very open architecture. And sometimes we have companies that just use us for data collection, filtering and enrichment. Other times they use us for identity and visitor profiling and complete orchestration. And in all cases, we're sending data back out, you know, what we call activation of various customer experiences or to various data endpoints that can benefit, which obviously the name of your podcast and the most obvious beneficiary of great data is AI. And so, you know, over the last three years, we've just seen a huge upswelling of customer use for AI use cases.

Craig S. Smith (5:02)

Yeah.

Most of the people have spoken to about orchestration layers or orchestration software are talking about managing agents. But this is broader than that, is that right? Or do you also orchestrate agents within a workflow?

Jeff Lunsford (5:21)

So, we do not grab a hold of an entire agent and orchestrate it. We just feed agents data and context and fresh real time context. So trusted context where you know the, you know, the consent status of the visitor. So what we are doing is collecting data, labeling data, filtering data, enriching data, and then feeding it into AI models. And sometimes that could be an agentic use case. Sometimes it's just a fraud algorithm. You know, sometimes it could be a next best action algorithm.