We’ve been discussing agentic commerce, AI-driven discovery and composable architectures for some time. From my perspective, the challenge has never been understanding where the market might be heading, or the opportunities it offers, but turning those opportunities into something practical.
Having reviewed the latest product developments across Commerce, including BigCommerce, Feedonomics and Makeswift, what struck me wasn’t any single feature announcement but the cumulative effect of the changes.
Until recently, many of the capabilities needed to support new customer journeys relied on custom integrations, specialist expertise or significant investment. What's encouraging about these latest developments is that platforms are starting to close that gap. Capabilities that once felt experimental or out of reach for all but the largest organisations are finally becoming part of the platform itself.
This doesn’t mean the technical and organisational complexity has disappeared. But it does mean more organisations can begin testing new approaches without building every element from the ground up.
This matters because a customer’s journey no longer always begins on a website as it did at the start of my career. It may start with an AI assistant, a conversational interface or an intelligent agent acting on their behalf. In some cases, the customer may never interact directly with the brand’s storefront until very late in the buying journey, if they visit it at all.
So, while the storefront remains important, it's become one part of a much wider system. And increasingly, the tools needed to participate in that system are being built into the core commerce platform.
What Commerce’s latest developments tell us about agentic commerce
Commerce’s latest developments show how its ecosystem is being adapted to support AI-assisted shopping and product discovery.
BigCommerce has introduced new Model Context Protocol (MCP) capabilities designed specifically for AI-driven shopping experiences, enabling agents to access product information, retrieve pricing, build carts and support more sophisticated buying journeys.
Advancements like these means taking full advantage of agentic commerce is no longer something only available to those with the time and technical expertise to set up custom solutions. It's helping level the playing field, allowing more organisations to adapt to changing customer behaviour without significant custom development.
However, this doesn't mean organisations can treat agentic commerce as simply another marketing channel. Readiness for AI agents is still a genuine architectural concern. It reaches into product data, APIs, security, governance and the way information is exposed across the commerce estate. While the barriers to adoption are starting to come down, the foundations still matter.
Accurate, complete, and useful product data is becoming easier to operationalise
We've always maintained that accurate, complete and useful product data is critical, even when it was just search engines and human visitors that took note. Now, it also needs to be understood by large language models, AI assistants and recommendation engines.
These systems rely heavily on context. A product name and short description may be enough to populate a catalogue page, but they're rarely enough to support a useful recommendation or informed purchasing decision. AI assistants need richer information to understand how products relate to one another, who they're suitable for and why one option may be a better fit than another.
The challenge, however, has never been understanding the value of good product data. It's been the effort required to create, enrich and maintain it at scale. That's why it's encouraging to see Commerce introducing catalogue enrichment capabilities specifically designed to improve AI discoverability and make product information easier to manage.
These capabilities make it easier for retailers to maintain richer product content, improve consistency and provide the context AI systems need to accurately surface products within emerging search and recommendation experiences. In many ways, they're helping to turn what has traditionally been a data management challenge into a more achievable operational capability.
Commerce platforms can now act as copilots
A great deal of the conversation about AI in commerce has focused on the customer-facing experience. But what happens behind the scenes is just as important.
Commerce teams already manage a demanding combination of catalogue administration, merchandising, promotions, performance analysis and day-to-day operational decisions. They often have access to plenty of data, but extracting a useful course of action from it can take time.
Commerce is starting to embed AI assistants into administration interfaces, helping merchants analyse performance, identify opportunities, navigate the platform and make operational decisions, and delivering on the efficiency promise AI has been touting for years.
Instead of navigating a series of reports and assembling an interpretation manually, a merchant can simply ask what’s happening, why it matters and what action deserves attention. The platform helps identify opportunities, highlight anomalies and guide people towards the information they need.
It’s a useful augmentation, helping people explore data, identify patterns and deal with routine decisions more efficiently. And it helps automate areas where consistency and speed are important while keeping people closely involved wherever judgement, originality and responsibility are essential.
Commerce platforms are supporting international growth
But it’s not just for AI that commerce platforms are finally bringing in capabilities that reduce complexity for retail brands.
Global commerce has always required a difficult balance between ambition and complexity. Supporting different languages, markets and customer expectations can lead to duplicated storefronts, bespoke integrations and a growing operational burden. What begins as a relatively simple localisation requirement can become a permanent engineering commitment.
Commerce’s development of native multilingual commerce capabilities across its platforms offers a solution to this complexity. Platforms that support multiple languages across storefronts, checkout experiences, product content and transactional communications reduce reliance on custom integrations and make localised experiences easier to manage across several markets.
So, for organisations that previously decided localisation was too expensive or difficult, this development means some of the assumptions behind those decisions could now be out of date. Stronger native platform support can reduce the foundational work required for a business to explore globalisation opportunities, so I’d encourage leadership teams considering European or global expansion to revisit earlier assessments. The cost and complexity may look different now.
Composable commerce is becoming easier to justify
Finally, for many organisations, headless and composable commerce architectures have promised flexibility while also introducing additional cost and complexity.
Composable models can give organisations more control over the customer experience, flexibility in how capabilities are assembled and a greater ability to evolve individual parts of the estate without replacing the whole platform. But that flexibility has come with additional hosting requirements, more integration work and a greater dependency on specialist engineering skills.
Recent platform developments, however, mean this gap is starting to narrow. Native hosting services, improved content management capabilities and simplified migration paths are making composable commerce more accessible to mid-market organisations that may previously have considered it out of reach.
Visual editing tools are also becoming more capable, which can give commercial and content teams greater control without removing the flexibility engineering teams need.
The choice is now no longer about developer freedom at the expense of business usability. With better tooling and clearer governance now available, it’s increasingly possible to support both.
What these developments mean for commerce brands
These capabilities being introduced across the Commerce ecosystem mean organisations that had been wondering how they can tap into the opportunities promised by AI now have the built-in features to easily operationalise a complex arena.
It means organisations that had previously determined localisation was too expensive or difficult, or that migrating to a composable platform was too complex, costly or dependent on specialist skills may now present a credible business case.
The competitive landscape of commerce has expanded beyond the digital storefront. But a strong website continues to be invaluable and will need to remain a key priority for businesses.
As customers expect digital experiences that are fast, intuitive and engaging – these developments give organisations the confidence that their commerce services can expose useful information safely, that recommendations are based on well-governed data, and that the architecture can flex as new buying behaviours emerge.
A final note from CTO to CTO
What's interesting about these developments isn’t that they provide all the answers. It's that they're reducing some of the cost, complexity and risk associated with exploring new possibilities. Whether it's AI-assisted commerce, international expansion or composable architecture, organisations can increasingly test, learn and adapt without committing to large-scale transformation from day one.
At the same time, the foundations still matter. We need to be confident that our commerce services can expose useful information safely, that recommendations are based on well-governed data, and that the architecture can flex as new buying behaviours emerge.
My advice would be to focus on readiness rather than trying to predict a definitive future. Understand the foundations you already have, the limitations within them and the areas that need investment.
AI is creating new ways for customers to discover, evaluate and purchase products. Our responsibility as technology leaders is to make sure our organisations can be found, understood and trusted wherever those journeys begin.
