You’d be hard-pressed to find a business conference this year without an AI discussion on its agenda. It’s an inescapable topic of conversation for 2024 — and it should be because its capabilities can be (and are being) applied in just about every industry. Though there are still things to be ironed out, AI has already significantly impacted the world of commerce. In his keynote at Elevate — The Global Commerce Summit™, “Unlocking Innovation: commercetools' Vision for AI in Commerce,” Kelly Goetsch, Chief Strategy Officer at commercetools, shared his perspectives on how AI fits into the commerce landscape right now, insights into how our company is leveraging it and thoughts on how it will shape the future.
commercetools' view of AI in commerce
In 2013, commercetools introduced headless commerce, disrupting the technology industry by decoupling backend operations from frontend customer-facing experiences. Dirk Hoerig, co-founder and CEO, recognized that separating the two would give businesses the flexibility to adapt to change in the rapidly evolving commerce landscape. Today, headless commerce enables businesses to run multiple heads to deliver unique customer experiences on a single backend.
Headless was invented to enable any number of customer touchpoints to facilitate a commerce transaction. Back then it was mobile, but it was built with the optionality to add other heads. AI is a great example of a new head that has come along and can be used to facilitate shopping.
CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER, COMMERCETOOLS
Kelly shared two great examples to show how generative AI is “solving the product discovery problem.”
First, he pointed to Google’s Style Finder application which is being rolled out across all of Google Shopping. When a user searches for a fashion item, such as a men's polo shirt or straw tote bag, in addition to receiving traditional image results, the user also gets a style recommendations section. Users can like and dislike a selection of items and after it gets an idea of your style, it delivers a carousel of personalized recommendations based on looks you like. Just click on whatever you want to purchase the item.
Kelly also called out Microsoft’s Bing Shopping Copilot as another great AI use case. Here, he explains how it works to help consumers and businesses make better, more informed purchasing decisions.
How commercetools sees AI as supporting commerce businesses
AI can be used in a multitude of ways to help businesses deliver better customer experiences, streamline operations and improve the decision-making process. To illustrate how we think about AI at commercetools — and in some cases use it to support our business — Kelly created three buckets of applications.
1. Content authoring
Generative AI enables businesses to define their brand voice, tone and rules, enabling the creation of high-quality content at a minimum viable product (MVP) level. This includes product descriptions, landing pages and other essential marketing materials. It helps to maintain consistency in messaging while freeing up valuable time and resources to focus on more strategic initiatives.
2. Decisioning
AI excels in making complex decisions quickly and accurately. This is why it is perfect for fraud scoring for payments and order routing as these tasks require the ability to evaluate multiple variables and make binary decisions (e.g., A or B, true or false). By leveraging AI for decisioning, we can enhance operational efficiency, reduce risks and ensure optimal outcomes for our customers.
3. Enablement
The focus here is on leveraging AI to accelerate time to value. AI allows businesses to iterate quickly and easily. Internally, our sales teams are using AI tools to build product demos while customers are developing MVPs and microsites and in the process decreasing implementation time and costs.
Here, Kelly shares a story of how a business leader leveraged AI to discover commercetools and ultimately, become a customer.
How commercetools supports AI
Since our launch, commercetools' policy has been to deliver transparency. Our documentation is free and open, we offer free trials to allow businesses to test drive our platform and we’ve put code out in the public domain. For example, Dirk never trademarked headless commerce. He reasoned that everyone should have access to modern commerce technology and felt that the industry would benefit more if we didn’t own it.
Kelly explained that as a result, AI works exceptionally well with commercetools. “Any off-the-shelf AI model can easily understand how commercetools operates. For instance, our documentation clearly differentiates between a product and a product projection, making it straightforward for AI models to grasp commercetools-specific concepts. This open approach facilitates seamless integration and enhances the overall effectiveness of AI implementations.”
“A lot of our competitors have put everything behind paywalls and login screens. This has put them at a big disadvantage as they now have to figure out what to do because none of the models know how to work with their respective products. Defaulting to open is a good thing generally. For us it's led to some really substantial benefits. ”
Kelly offered an overview of how some of our AI initiatives are supporting both customers and our employees.
Documentation chat assistant: Available on docs.commercetools.com, it provides users with answers to questions and annotated links to relevant sources. Whether it's a query about authentication processes or specific functionalities, our chat assistant provides accurate and timely information.
Source code copilot: This tool is invaluable in assisting developers in writing efficient and error-free code quickly. During a commercetools pilot program, 95% of developers expressed a desire to continue using Source Code Copilot, underscoring its utility and effectiveness.
Quick-start AI cookbook: This tool was created to support commercetools Foundry for B2C Retail and B2B Manufacfuring and offers step-by-step guidance on implementing AI solutions using commercetools. It allows users to do things like automate the code generation for all standard features and product data for testing as well as create goal-oriented strategic plans.
AI insights to consider for the future
As the leader of commercetools’ AI strategy, Kelly fully believes that at this point, any business ignoring AI is making a huge mistake. It is already reshaping the world and the way business is run, and it's not going to slow down anytime soon. In fact, the pace is only going to accelerate.
Kelly urged the Elevate audience to take action. “A lot of people are just sitting and waiting and watching. I think you need to be assertive and take charge.” Here, he concludes his presentation by giving the audience a compelling task.
To gain more insights, visit Elevate Keynote Replays to register to view the complete “Unlocking Innovation: commercetools' Vision for AI in Commerce,” presentation.
Anita J. Temple is the Corporate Journalist at commercetools. She was a fashion editor at Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) and W Magazine before launching a career as a freelance writer and creative producer. She has written content and worked on a wide range of marketing projects for companies including Dreamworks, Walmart, Coca-Cola, Verizon, and Adidas.