This week, we posed ourselves a challenge:

To summarise how key ecommerce customer & technology trends like agentic commerce and AI product discovery are going to reshape ecommerce strategy, team structures & the expectations ecommerce business have of employee capabilities and partner skills.

This episode covers our main observations and insights:

• Treat product data as a growth channel.
• Have AI-native product + engineering leadership.
• Run continuous experimentation with agents.
• Properly integrate marketing + data + tech.

Ecommerce is seeing a step change from:

Humans browsing sites, clicking ads & buying products.

To:

Multi-agent systems influencing discovery, comparison and to a lesser extent checkout. More discovery will take place outside the traditional website, and agents & LLMs guide shoppers through decision paths before handover to commerce endpoints (with the website remaining the primary destination).

👉 This creates three major shifts that we explore in more detail:

1. Discovery evolves from SEO → SEO + AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation); visibility depends on machine-readable product data as well as content.
2. AI agents become a new type of shopper, and ecom platforms need API capabilities to facilitate 2-way data and logic flows; agents can compare, filter and decide based on structured data + trust signals.
3. Commerce becomes API-first + autonomous; some purchases happen inside AI ecosystems (chat, assistants, agents) & there’s a need for seamless handoff between AI agents & conventional commerce.

Find out how this is already having an impact on team structures and skill needs.