Your eCommerce site isn't ready for an agent
eCommerce needs to focus on the plumbing first
Matt Chmiel
Head of Discourse
Editor’s Note: We invited an AI expert to talk about the future of eCommerce in the agentic era.
Are AI agents coming to eCommerce platforms? Not if you believe the takeaways from this Group Chat. It features a bonafide AI expert with academic credentials and multiple successful ventures (including a new one that we cannot mention now, that is serving eCommerce sites).
This session paired AI optimists with eCommerce realists. It was a good one. Here are some takeaways.
Personalization is a mirage
I think the promise of personalization that we have today on our platforms is not there. There's a lot of personalization that's happening on these sites, but it's not real, and it's certainly not a value to most of us. It's why there's so many rails that are run across a PDP or a PLP because they're like shit, maybe they’ll click on this one for no reason.
The future is better search results, not agents
The conversation was practical; before we let agentics magically interpret our mood and behavior with perfect recommendations, we should maybe focus on search results that properly understand customer intent.
One on hand this feels obvious, on the other hand, as one of our guests admitted, this is not always the case.
So getting customers to feel after getting better search results: ‘Oh yeah, that heard me.’ Like, that's amazing. We have a lot of those insights during gifting moments, whether it's holiday, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Valentine's Day, finding. But all we do right now in gift seasons, the lowest common denominator…
eCommerce tech stack is outdated
The most pervasive issue, and blocking a lot of eCommerce companies from being able to take advantage of this technology is their tech is stuck in 2010. So far what they've done now is build wrappers around this so they've put lipstick on it to make it kind of look pretty but it doesn't function.
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