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Type “khakis” into a clothing store’s search box and you want pants. Type “khaki” and you want anything brown. One letter, two different shoppers. Vinod Kumar builds software that teaches e-commerce sites the difference. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Syntheum AI, an agentic merchandising startup run mostly by ex-Salesforce people, and on the Unscripted SEO Podcast he walked me through why that one-letter problem is the same one SEOs fight every day, and why ChatGPT just made it harder. Subscribe to Unscripted SEO so the next one lands in your feed.
Merchandisers convert the traffic SEOs send
Vinod drew the line between the two jobs early. Marketers, SEO agencies and consultants are responsible for getting people to the site. Merchandisers are responsible for turning those visitors into transactions, which mostly means showing each shopper the right product.
On-site search is where that matters most. Vinod pointed to studies showing that shoppers who use the search box convert at two to three times the rate of everyone else, because they already know what they want. Then he gave me the khaki example.
Now imagine khaki and khakis, one character difference, but two very distinct results. – Vinod Kumar
Not very different from how you optimize your search results for organic search. Similar principles and concepts apply to optimizing results for on-site search. – Vinod Kumar
If you’ve ever argued about singular vs plural keyword targeting, you already understand his business.
Eighteen chores per product is a job for an agent
Getting on-site search right takes a merchandiser about 18 routine tasks per product: synonyms, hypernyms, keywords in the product description and so on. Do that across thousands of SKUs at a brand clearing $100 million online and you need a team doing nothing else.
But it is so robotic, it is so mechanical that it’s ideal for an agent to do it behind the scenes instead of the human. – Vinod Kumar
His example is a coffee mug. The brand team doesn’t want to call it blue, because blue is boring. They call it ultramarine. A shopper searching “blue mug” still needs to find it, so an agent maps ultramarine to every shade of blue a shopper might type, and the merchandiser spends their time on the art side: which color shows first, which campaign gets a boost, what the brand actually stands for. Syntheum gives them a drag-and-drop interface for that while the math (vectors and semantic relationships) runs underneath.
The business lesson was just as useful. Syntheum takes one customer at a time, and Vinod said the software is close to flip-the-switch. The real time goes into making it fit the customer’s workflows, security requirements and SOC 2 constraints.
So what we have figured out is just solving a problem does not get adopted. – Vinod Kumar
What “agentic” actually means
A good share of my audience has heard “agentic” thrown around without a definition, so I asked for one. Vinod admitted there are several in the market. His is short:
To me, agentic means decision under ambiguity. – Vinod Kumar
Traditional programming needs every condition spelled out or it throws an error. An agent is a tool that can respond sensibly when you didn’t spell everything out, given enough context. That’s why color mapping is a perfect fit: it’s a linguistics problem, and as Vinod put it, “LLMs are great to solve linguistic problems.”
ChatGPT turned shopping into a probabilistic marketplace
Vinod had just seen a report ranking ChatGPT as the fifth most visited website, below Instagram and above WhatsApp, X and Wikipedia. Shoppers now get far down the consideration path inside ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot before they ever visit a store. That raises two questions for brands. First, how do you make sure these engines have the right, current information about your catalog? Second, when your product comes up in a chat, how do you make sure your own site is the source instead of a third-party review site? He used a Dell laptop search as the example.
On Amazon or Walmart, a brand gets an admin console and the marketplace does what it’s told. Chat isn’t like that.
But a GenAI-driven marketplace is more of a probabilistic marketplace. It’s not deterministic. – Vinod Kumar
Even people who say they’ve solved it actually don’t have an answer. It’s more theoretical hand waving at this point. – Vinod Kumar
I told him how this feels from the SEO side: first featured snippets and now AI Overviews have been eating our sandwich, and we’re asking clients to accept fewer clicks for the same money on the promise that the visitors who do arrive convert better. I dug into the agency side of that on SEO Arcade, and into the khaki problem itself on jeremyriveraseo.com.
Running a startup with a content team of one
Syntheum uses agents on its own operations too. Vinod described a content workflow built in tools like n8n and Lindy: anyone on the team drops an idea into a Google Sheet, the workflow picks up the newest row, expands it with OpenAI, drafts a blog post and three LinkedIn posts, and drops everything into Notion or a Google Doc for a human to review.
Like for example, our content strategy team is a big team of one. – Vinod Kumar
Note the review step. Nothing publishes until a person approves it, and anything they don’t like gets declined.
Your one takeaway: audit how AI sees your brand
When I asked for one thing listeners could do today, Vinod pointed to a free tool Syntheum had just launched: AVA, the AI Visibility Auditor. Punch in your URL, and it simulates shopping conversations in ChatGPT and Gemini, then compares what those engines say about you with what your homepage says. It’s built for e-commerce sites, though it will run on others. It shows you which competitors come up in those conversations and which of your own themes never make it into the answers. He was upfront that it isn’t exhaustive. It’s a starting point.
So run your own site through it. Does ChatGPT describe the brand you think you’re building?
Connect with Vinod Kumar
- Company: Syntheum AI
- Free tool: AVA – AI Visibility Auditor
- LinkedIn: Vinod Kumar and Syntheum AI
The Unscripted SEO Podcast is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and find every episode at unscriptedseo.com.
