This post recaps key insights from our recent talk at the Miami AI Summit, where we explored how AI is reshaping eCommerce platforms, the customer experience, and the agency model.
In eCommerce, AI is no longer a differentiator: it’s the new table stakes, and it’s quickly becoming as ubiquitous as any other touchpoint in the customer journey. The adoption of AI by both leading retailers and fast-moving disrupters feels less like pure innovation and more like an arms race, with merchants rapidly adopting AI features.
Despite a sometimes-murky ROI and some risks (including implementation and market-fit risks), there is a huge upside to investing in AI for your eCommerce business: smarter pricing, streamlined workflows, and more personalized experiences for customers, to name a few.
AI Is Becoming Foundational
While customer-facing AI has been basking in the digital spotlight, the most powerful innovation has been quietly unlocking margin from behind the scenes: it’s all in the operations. It is here that AI is already driving measurable impact, reducing excess inventory by up to 30%, cutting logistics costs by 20%, and lowering procurement by 15%. (According to McKinsey.)
Backoffice AI may not be the function creating all the buzz, but its use cases are foundational, and mastery of AI in operations can result in smarter demand forecasting, automated deal analysis, reduced customer services costs, and faster responsiveness to customers. There is, however, a catch: these kinds of benefits and their associated ROI are often more difficult to measure up-front. Many businesses face internal friction: a scarcity of talent, unclear implementation roadmaps, or a lack of resources to truly operationalize AI. While the ROI may not be immediate, the cost of not modernizing becomes clear over time.
Consider AI for eCommerce operations as the foundation, creating a strong base as digital commerce moves into its Agentic era, where autonomous AI agents initiate, negotiate, and optimize transactions in real time. In this context, operational maturity and data quality become mission-critical, and businesses that are still stuck in reactive workflows won’t be ready to compete.
Once AI improves internal processes, it shouldn’t stay in the shadows for much longer: as the backend gets smarter, customer expectations are rising to meet it.
AI Is Meeting Customers Where They Are
While brands are using AI to create a more solid foundation in terms of operations, customers (and B2B buyers) are becoming more and more conditioned to expect the benefits of AI throughout the customer journey as well. AI has become a critical part of the modern CX stack, being found at nearly every touchpoint, including search and discovery, chat bots, and dynamic onsite personalization. These features, once differentiators for sophisticated merchants, have become expected. AI is meeting shoppers at every point in their journey to purchase, whether they realize it or not, and the race to accommodate these new expectations has resulted in vendors integrating AI into their products, and merchants are rolling them out rapidly.
Not all AI implementations are welcomed. Last summer, after a short beta period and just in time for Prime Day, Amazon launched Rufus to all of their users across the Amazon website and shopping app. Rufus is Amazon’s AI-powered conversational shopping assistant, and the hope was that it could reduce friction for shoppers by answering questions, providing product comparisons, and making personalized recommendations. While Amazon attributes Rufus to a $700M financial gain since its launch, user feedback tells a different story. Many Amazon shoppers have described Rufus as clunky and intrusive, getting in the way of an otherwise clear pathway to checkout and providing inaccurate information while doing so.
In contrast, Lowe’s AI assistant, Mylow, has been welcomed by shoppers and employees alike, providing seamless support for both customers and associates in-store and online. Mylow compliments the customer journey by sharing content and DIY instructions for customers, then provides employees with quick access to product information and inventory details. Mylow is the result of a partnership between Lowe’s and OpenAI, built around Lowe’s expertise as a home improvement authority, building upon that to create a new kind of experience for shoppers. It is a shining example of how AI, when thoughtfully implemented, can align with a brand’s ethos rather than taking away from it. Mylow doesn’t force upsells or product discovery—it happens subtly, in a very natural way.
While most shoppers might not understand why interacting with an AI is either a comfortable or uncanny experience, most will know if their experience is a positive or negative one. The brands winning the AI arms race for now are the ones who shape AI features to dovetail with their brand, rather than simply adding AI features for features’ sake. This emergence of the “haves” and “have-nots” is not limited to the commerce experiences themselves, but also to the agencies building them.
Where To Go From Here?
AI has already radically changed the way eCommerce merchants do business, and will only continue to do so. The question becomes not if AI should be implemented, but how to do so in a way that supports the brand and the customers. In this way, looking beyond a features-based approach and adopting a more strategic one is key.
This starts with a deep knowledge of not just the brand, but the customer: who are they? How do they interact with your brand? Where and why do they experience friction? Consider the same for backend processes—where are the inefficiencies, and how can automation improve them?
The pressure to implement AI solutions is very real, and not without good reason. However, the rush to bolt-on bots without a strategy behind their triggers and responses, or burning cash on tools that don’t align with the brand or the ideal customer journey can do more damage in the long-term. Leaders in commerce are building strong internal foundations, aligning their use of AI with real-life outcomes, and making choices that scale rather than just create hype.
If you’re navigating where AI fits in your business, let’s chat. We’re helping a lot of merchants think through their AI strategies and how they evolve their digital maturity: strategy first, features second.