IAB Australia
IAB features Thrad for Retailers
IAB Australia opened its Perspectives on Retail Media series, brought to readers by its Retail Media Council, with a piece on why AI is retail media's next growth engine. Written by Roger Dunn, it argues that AI will strengthen retail media rather than replace it, for the retailers and advertisers who move early.
The starting point is where product discovery is heading. As more shoppers begin with an AI assistant instead of a retailer's own site, the ceiling on retail media growth comes down. Retailers hold the advantage that answers this: they know what is in stock, what each customer has bought and which loyalty tier they sit in, so an assistant trained on their own catalogue and customer data can recommend with an accuracy a general-purpose model cannot match.
The article points to Australian retailers already building those assistants, from Woolworths' Olive, which plans meals and fills baskets, to Bunnings' Buddy, which turns a DIY project into a product list. The next question, it argues, is whether retailers can monetise them. A shopper asking an assistant what they need to build a deck is showing high purchase intent in a brand-safe, first-party environment: “That's not customer service. That's premium ad inventory.”
Thrad for Retailers is cited as infrastructure built for exactly that: native advertising inside a retailer's own AI assistant, integrated into the conversation, so the chat becomes a source of revenue rather than a cost. The piece sees this as the way for retailers to decide how advertising works in AI conversations on their own terms, rather than waiting for the technology platforms to set the rules.
For retailers, the advice is to treat conversational AI as a commerce channel with its own P&L, and to keep product data structured so that AI systems can understand it. For advertisers, it is to write product content that answers natural-language questions, and to measure conversational discovery by its incremental effect rather than by last click.
IAB Australia published the article on 15 April 2026. Dunn joined Thrad as chief commercial officer the following month.