In this episode of The Orita Podcast, Aaron Schwartz sits down with Matt Cohn, Technical Chief of Staff at Shopify. Matt started on the brand side figuring out how to get Paw Patrol toys into kids hands digitally. Now he sits in the Office of the President at Shopify reporting to Harley Finkelstein and watching three million merchants navigate the fastest-moving period in commerce history. The merchant empathy he built at Spin Master is still the thing he relies on most.

• Why the CSM role has fundamentally changed and what it means that the Venn diagrams between AE, SE, and CSM are converging

• The great data cleanup: what every brand needs to get right in the next 12 months so they show up correctly in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode

• How Shopify thinks about Universal Commerce Protocol and why structured product data is now a competitive moat not a back-office chore

• What Mattel and Barnes & Noble got right about modernizing without losing what made their brands matter in the first place

• Why coding agents are a bigger leap forward from LLM chat than LLM chat was from traditional search

• The tension both Aaron and Matt see in the ecosystem right now: everyone says they do what the best tools do, almost nobody does it as well

👥 Meet the guest

Matt Cohn, Technical Chief of Staff at Shopify

🎙 Hosted by

Aaron Schwartz, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Orita.ai

🎧 Chapters

[00:00] Paw Patrol to Shopifys Office of the President

[01:46] What Spin Master Taught Matt About Merchant Empathy

[03:35] The Toy Verticals Dirty Secret: Child Consumes Parent Purchases

[05:17] Omnichannel Before It Had a Name: Spin Master in 2017

[07:38] Why Matt Left Brands for Merchant Success at Shopify

[09:44] How the MSM Role Has Fundamentally Changed

[12:25] AI Lowered the Bar for Information Now What Is a CSM Worth

[14:18] Working in Harleys Office: What the Job Actually Looks Like

[16:29] 150 Product Updates: How Matt Actually Keeps Up

[17:46] Rewriting the AI Guide for 2026: What Moved to the Top

[21:04] Sidekick and the Internal Operations Opportunity

[23:08] Iterate First: The Habit That Separates Fast Builders

[27:40] Personalization Is Everywhere Now and Mostly the Same

[29:16] AI Shopping Discovery: How to Show Up in ChatGPT and Perplexity

[34:38] Mattel Adults and Barnes & Noble: What Legacy Brands Got Right

[40:28] Why Aaron Screwed Up His Brand and What He Would Do Differently

🌐 Check out Orita.ai for more episodes of The Orita Podcast, where we sit down with the most interesting operators, marketers, and founders in e-commerce to talk about what’s working right now. Hosted by the Orita team. Orita uses machine learning to help brands send smarter, more profitable marketing, by figuring out who actually wants to hear from you and when.

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