E-commerce industry shifts toward AI-driven discovery and automation

The e-commerce sector is undergoing a significant shift driven by artificial intelligence and evolving consumer discovery habits. Salesforce has transitioned its Commerce Cloud into Agentforce Commerce, an AI-powered platform designed to integrate commerce data with CRM, marketing, and service ecosystems to provide more personalized shopping experiences.

BigCommerce is also pivoting toward AI-driven discovery. Company leadership noted that traditional search-engine-driven shopping is being challenged by AI tools like OpenAI, Perplexity, and Gemini. As consumers increasingly use these tools for product recommendations, the importance of optimized product data for AI algorithms is growing, shifting the focus from merchant websites to agentic discovery channels.

In leadership news, Native Commerce has appointed former Amazon operations engineering leader Michael Erhard as its new Chief Operating Officer. Erhard, who previously managed global robotics and automation infrastructure at Amazon, will focus on building the operational foundation for the AI-powered unified e-commerce platform.