Whatnot Chief Product Officer Tom Verrilli on why live shopping could reach 15 to 20% of US retail, recorded live at RetailClub AI Festival.

A trillion dollars. That's where Tom Verrilli, Chief Product Officer at Whatnot, sees live shopping headed in the US: 15 to 20% of all retail. Sellers on Whatnot did more than $8 billion in sales last year, and they beat that number in the first half of this year.

Ricardo Belmar and Casey Golden have predicted live shopping would take off in North America every year since The Retail Razor Show started, after watching it explode in China and across Asia. Every year, they were wrong. Recorded live and in person at RetailClub AI Festival in Huntington Beach, this is the conversation they've been waiting for. Tom explains where AI fits in live commerce, from AI personalization to real-time discovery, and why he thinks the growth is only starting.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

•     Why Tom says asking about Whatnot's AI strategy is like asking about its internet strategy

•     How AI takes the grind out of selling so sellers can spend more time live

•     Why live shopping gets double the discovery signal of a traditional e-commerce site

•     Why recommendations on Whatnot have to run in real time, and how AI lets them go deeper

•     Why Tom calls static product pages "legacy" e-commerce (Casey made him explain)

•     How AI personalization on Whatnot uses who you like to buy from as well as what you buy

•     Why 80% of US retail still happens in person, and what live brings online from the store

•     Why Tom says today is 2005 for live shopping (jump to 15:31)

•     How a Pokémon card buyer got live lobsters onto Whatnot (jump to 17:03)

Whatnot has 224 categories live today, from live lobsters to Louboutins, and fashion is its largest category by volume. If you're deciding how much of your channel mix belongs to live shopping, or what AI personalization should look like next, start here.

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This is one of eight episodes we recorded live at RetailClub, rolling out across all four shows on the Retail Razor Podcast Network. Subscribe so you catch every one!

Featured guest.

Tom Verrilli. https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-robertson-042/

Chief Product Officer, Whatnot. https://www.whatnot.com

Tom Verrilli is the Chief Product Officer at Whatnot, where he leads Product, Design and Growth for the largest livestream shopping platform across North America, the UK, and Europe. His teams build tools that help sellers of all products and sizes launch, grow, and scale businesses while delivering engaging, discovery-driven experiences for buyers. Before joining Whatnot, Tom was Chief Product Officer at Twitch, where he led Product, Engineering, and Applied Science across all consumer products. He has also held senior product leadership roles at Twitter, bringing deep experience building global, creator-driven platforms. A proud native of Sydney, Australia, Tom now lives in San Francisco.

Chapters.

00:00 A Trillion-Dollar Prediction: Is Live Shopping Finally Here? 

00:48 Live Shopping's $8 Billion Breakout Year 

04:52 Meet the Chief Product Officer Behind Whatnot's Rise 

05:45 AI's Role in the Future of Live Commerce 

07:27 Is Traditional E-Commerce Already 'Legacy'? 

09:35 How AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Shopping Discovery 

11:51 Why Shoppers Buy on Impulse (And Keep Coming Back) 

13:09 The Real Secret to Personalization: Who You Buy From 

15:31 Why Today Is 2005 All Over Again for Live Shopping 

19:15 Final Thoughts: Stay Sharp, Stay Human, Stay Ahead

Meet your hosts.

Helping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026 and a Top AI Leader for 2027. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail and eCommerce, a Top 25 Thought Leader inCareers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AI, AGI and Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in AI Ethics, Marketing, Digital Transformation and Transformation. Thinkers 360 also awarded him an Elite Expert Certification in Retail, a Master Expert Certification in Management, and named him a Certified Expert in AI, Marketing, and Digital Transformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024, 2025 and 2026. He is an advisory council member at the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! 

Episode Music.

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Overclocked, and E-Motive from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.