Dialogue: Fire in the Athanor

At the recent FT Future of Retail 2025 summit, one question dominated the corridors: is conversation becoming the new shopfront?  

The idea marks a turning point in how we discover and buy, moving from shops to search bars and websites to dialogue with AI assistants and chat platforms.  Retailers like Walmart are already embedding checkout directly into conversational interfaces, signalling a future where commerce flows through the same channels we use to talk, not just to click.  The phrase caught on because it captures a larger shift: attention is migrating from places to exchanges, from stores and screens to the ongoing dialogue between people, brands, and machines.

It made me pause. Conversation and dialogue are two words we often conflate and use interchangeably. They are different. Conversation originates in the Latin conversatio, meaning to live and turn toward one another, and Dialogue from the Greek dialogos, meaning flowing through words. Conversation and dialogue together describe more than talk; they mark the meeting point of relationship and understanding, where shared life and shared thought begin to shape change.

We need to tread carefully. The English word brand ultimately traces back to the Old Norse brandr, meaning “to burn.” Its earliest sense in English (Old English brond) referred to a burning piece of wood or a torch, and by extension, the mark made by fire. It’s where the idea of branding livestock came from; literally burning a symbol into the hide to show ownership. The metaphor extended over time from physical marks of property to symbolic marks of identity or reputation. I found myself reminded of it on my recent trip to London while travelling on the Tube and noticing just how many people wore workwear with their employer's brand. Brands want loyalty, but very few offer it in return. Brands to easily become sources of enshittification (Cory Doctorow's book arrived with me yesterday - more when I've read it...)

People are the ultimate creative wild card. Whilst we may find ourselves corralled by economics and necessity, we belong to no one. Conversation and dialogue are what differentiate us; they enable us to form communities, share ideas, and tell stories. Brands are something we may choose to attach ourselves to for a period of time, but they are superficial and replaceable, with reputations that could be tarnished in a moment.

I'm not sure we can have conversations with brands in the same way we can with people, and much as it may have marketers gnashing their teeth at me, Brands are ephemera.

Machines are constructs, whether they are physical machines or processes.

I have always found Roger Martin's knowledge funnel a valuable mental model; the idea that we turn mysteries into heuristics and heuristics into algorithms. We find ourselves in an algorithmic world, focusing on turning heuristics into algorithms to extract more value from what we already know. We seem to spend far too little time with mysteries, trying to turn them into heuristics to generate new ideas and new sources of human value.

So I find the idea of conversations being the new shopfront shallow, a little depressing, and lacking in ambition. Conversation and dialogue are the feedstock of poetry. Thinking of it just in terms of a source of profit is a travesty. There is genius in poetry. Brands abuse it. Machines don't have the spiritual chops.

It does, however, give me another thought for a project for the Athanor. Conversation and dialogue, reducing the raw material of work to its essence and reconstructing it. To create something better.

Conversation and dialogue are the fire that burns in the athanor. Come and add yours to the fire.