The Future of Commerce: Unified and Augmented by AI Agents

The Future of Commerce: Unified and Augmented by AI Agents

To plan for 2025, leaders will prioritize unified commerce and thoughtful implementations of AI.

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Commerce has always been complex, but as technology advances and new channels, trends, and customer expectations arise, it's becoming increasingly difficult to create cohesive, compelling shopping experiences. In fact, 64% of commerce leaders say meeting customer expectations is harder than ever.

The good news? Necessity breeds innovation. With the thoughtful implementation of unified commerce and AI, companies will tackle these challenges and succeed in the future of commerce. Here's everything you need to know about new innovations for 2025 and how they will help leaders make better business decisions, increase customer loyalty, and grow sales.

Unified commerce will give businesses a competitive advantage

As companies collect vast amounts of customer data, try to move quickly to keep up with customer expectations, and navigate the new era of AI, a unified approach to commerce can go a long way. Unified commerce integrates all of your sales channels, data, and back-end systems into a single platform. With a unified approach, what was once a patchwork of systems, apps, and solutions becomes one cohesive unit.

In the past, disparate, disconnected systems made it difficult to manage complexity and it was a slow, uphill battle to create compelling experiences for your customers. But the future of commerce will require businesses to move fast and leverage all the data they collect across the business to win new customers and increase loyalty with existing ones.

Unified commerce makes this possible by removing silos so cross-functional teams (like sales, service, marketing, and commerce) all have access to the same business and customer data. Once teams are working from a single source of truth, they can create truly differentiated experiences for customers. Marketing teams can create more precise, targeted messages when they have better insights into commerce data, like transactional details and purchasing behavior. Sales and service reps can answer questions and resolve cases faster when they have easier access to data like purchase history, inventory availability, and more. Similarly, commerce teams can create more compelling, personalized shopping experiences when they gain access to sales, service, and marketing data.

Commerce isn't an island - it's a major part of your overall business. With a unified approach, this really starts to feel true.

Here's an example of what unified commerce looks like:
Imagine if you had complete, unobstructed visibility of your stock levels across all your sales channels - physical stores, online platforms, and mobile apps - in real time. The second a customer buys a shirt online, the inventory updates immediately across your entire business, so all your employees from store staff to merchandisers and marketers can see exactly what's available at all times. That's just one example of unified commerce.

A unified approach to commerce is also a game-changer for customers. Imagine a shopper sees a dress she likes on a brand's website. When commerce is unified with your inventory and order management systems, the shopper can easily see whether the dress is available in her local store. If she finds that it's in stock, she can buy it online and opt for in-store pickup - and get the item in hours instead of days.

Personal shopper agents will redefine the ecommerce customer experience

An AI agent is an intelligent system that can understand and respond to customer inquiries without human intervention. They rely on machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to handle a wide range of tasks, from answering simple questions to resolving complex issues - even multi-tasking. Most importantly, AI agents can continuously improve its own performance through self-learning. This is distinct from traditional AI, which requires human input for specific tasks.

By analyzing past purchases and browsing behavior, personal shopper agents can suggest products tailored to each customer's unique tastes. They can even automate cart abandonment outreach with personalized messaging and promotions to increase conversion.

Here's an example of a personal shopper agent:
Let's say a customer leaves an item in their cart without making a purchase. A personal shopper agent can send a text message the following day as a reminder: "Hey Alex, looks like ya left something in your cart! Here's a link that'll bring you straight to checkout." Even better? An agent trained on sales data and past discount performance can send a tailored promotion to sweeten the deal: "Looks like ya left something in your cart - buy it now with 15% off." This helps you increase sales, retain customers, and turn them into loyal fans - all with automation and no real leg work.

AI agents will augment commerce teams

Commerce professionals using AI estimate it saves them an average of 6.4 hours per week. Increasingly, this is thanks to AI agents. These agents can act as an extra team member for your merchandisers, handling everything from site setup and personalized promotions to product descriptions.

Merchant agents assist your teams by automating workflows, using real-time data to provide proactive recommendations that boost product performance, move slow inventory, and increase conversions. Plus, through conversational insights, agents can help you better understand your business and offer actionable recommendations to drive continuous improvement.

In the past, merchandisers were at the mercy of the timelines and resources of other teams. Now, they can automate personalized promotions, use AI to write product descriptions, auto-organize products for better discovery, and more. What used to take hours or days can now be done in minutes. The future of commerce is all about efficiency, results, and autonomy.

Here's a real-world example of AI agents for merchants:
If a merchandiser on your team notices a build-up of excess inventory, they can take charge of the situation with a simple prompt. For example, "I need your help with a strategy to sell slow-moving inventory of winter jackets. These jackets are high-quality but have been sitting on the shelves for too long. Please analyze our current marketing strategies and suggest new promotional ideas that could appeal to customers in geographies still experiencing colder climates."

And viola! An AI agent will reply with a list of promotions that the merchandiser can immediately approve and initiate.

Composable commerce will become ubiquitous

The pressure on businesses to adapt to changing needs and expectations is only rising, but inflexible architecture and strained IT teams prevent them from doing so. To empower IT teams and help them move quickly, businesses are increasingly incorporating composable architectures. With composable commerce, applications or services are built from modular and reusable components like APIs.

Composable commerce fosters innovation and customization by allowing businesses to mix and match components or develop solutions. This flexibility empowers commerce teams to create unique, tailored customer experiences and experiment with new technologies or business models. In the future of commerce, composable will be increasingly embraced as a solution to ongoing pain points around inflexible digital storefronts. Commerce leaders are already taking note: 46% of IT teams have implemented composable architecture, and 43% plan to.

Here's an example of composable commerce:
Want to launch a new product line? Composable commerce makes it much faster and easier. Within the framework of composable architecture, marketing and merchandising teams can quickly launch and A/B test different landing pages, promotional messaging, and more - without waiting for IT to make changes to a monolithic system.

Are you ready for the future of commerce?

The landscape is changing fast and competition is heating up, but companies with the right tools and strategies will find success. As you plan for 2025, focus on implementing strategies that will help you deliver on rising customer expectations, fast. Increasingly, that means unifying commerce with the rest of your business, leveraging AI and automation, and adopting architectures that free up development and IT resources. The future of commerce belongs to organizations that can move fast, iterate, and innovate.

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Lauren Wallace is an editorial lead for Commerce Cloud. She's written for B2C and B2B companies in many different industries - most recently cybersecurity and healthcare. When she's not writing about commerce, you can typically find her outside running or biking around San Diego.