The Next Era of Subscriptions Is Autonomous

When I started Ordergroove, there were 3 brands online offering subscriptions – Amazon, QVC, and Drugstore.com. Our core value prop, besides best-in-class tech and a team of experts, was being able to test and optimize faster with Ordergroove. Aggregate testing and learnings = faster growth for our customers. Brands loved it. VCs hated it because of the manual services element.

Along the way, we found many best practices that became the industry standard for today, including the two-option radio button:

Amazon’s Subscribe and Save offer in 2010

Why does this all matter? Because a brand’s growth has always directly correlated with how fast they can test and learn. Our fastest-growing customers have always been our fastest experimenters — every test builds on the last, and the learnings and revenue compound.

But when I speak to brands today, only a few are experimenting at levels that match their ambitions. And if they have in-house subscription tech, tests seldom get off the ground as their R&D is consumed by building table-stakes features or changing priorities.

That gap, between what teams know they should be testing and what they actually have the bandwidth to test, is quietly costing brands millions in lost recurring revenue each year.

AI is paving the way to remove these human bottlenecks that have stifled experimentation and growth for a decade and this is the problem we’ve been heads down solving for our customers.

The first real leap in subscriptions in 10 years

For the first time in a decade, a step-function change is coming to the subscription landscape and it’s not another superficial AI initiative that checks the Board box.

Agents that accelerate testing velocity and growth by extending your team, designing and deploying experiments autonomously, 24/7, 365.

Today, agents can handle what no team can manage at once — eliminating the manual steps in executing a cohesive growth plan where every experiment builds on the last. Remove manual steps – while keeping the human as the final approver – and a brand’s rate of learning, and its growth, stops being capped by resources.

Not all agents are equal

Plenty of vendors will attach AI to everything this year.

The ones that matter to enterprises will share three things: they’re built on data across every channel to match where your customers actually shop today, they learn from a network of other enterprise brands, and they compress experimentation from quarters to days.

That’s the foundation we’ve spent years building at Ordergroove — the same focus on experimentation velocity and growth we started with, now at a fraction of the cost and exponentially faster.

What’s coming tomorrow

Tomorrow, we’re sharing what we’ve been building to close the experimentation gap for our customers, and where we believe this category goes from here. The brands that move first will learn faster, and those learnings will compound. For the first time, that edge is within reach of every team, not just the ones with the biggest budgets.

Fifteen-plus years ago we created the V1 of this category. I’ve never been more energized to share what’s ahead with V2.

More to come tomorrow!

– Greg