Apr 14, 2026 | 5 minute read
written by Bryan House
Summary: AI is changing how products are discovered, evaluated, and purchased. Commerce leaders who treat this as an incremental shift will fall behind those building AI-ready foundations today.
For many companies, the biggest innovation blocker is inertia. That’s particularly true in a tough or uncertain economy, where new technology investments are perceived as a risk. Many companies underestimate change as a competitive factor as they position against other companies, settling into the status quo. In effect, they underestimate the pain vs. gain formula of making a software purchase. In no industry is this more true than commerce.
However, some of the most important innovations upended old ways of doing things that were no longer as efficient or effective as they once were. There are hundreds of technologies aimed at solving problems — from OpenAI and Google reshaping how people discover and evaluate products with AI; to TikTok Shop collapsing content, discovery, and transaction into a single experience; to Instacart turning retail data into AI-powered search and retail media. Each of these commerce innovations prove that to remain competitive, companies need to keep moving, rather than settling for how it’s always been done.architectures.
In digital commerce circles, this issue is more pronounced than most. Inertia is pervasive given the top line contributions of commerce. Tolerance for risk is nil. Many companies adopt big, established commerce systems tightly interconnected with other business-critical systems (think OMS, ERP, etc.). In the classic platform approach, no one gets fired for buying [insert big software company name here].
These systems may be “good enough” in many functional areas, but still leave companies restricted in their ability to innovate or respond quickly to changing market dynamics. When the tide is rising, good enough may suffice. But when customer acquisition costs increase and competition stiffens, winners innovate and good enough gets left behind. In 2026, that gap is widening. It’s becoming even more critical to feed clean, structured, machine-readable data into AI systems that drive recommendations, automate decisions, and increasingly act on behalf of buyers. Legacy platforms were not designed for this reality.
As a result of years of effort from commerce vendors, prospective buyers often think replatforming is the only option — and only pursue replatforming when forced. Replatforming events are often a result of industry consolidation (such as SAP Hybris end of life). Commerce software users coping with consolidation spend an inordinate amount of time lagging innovation simply because change seems hard and expensive. However, replatforming is no longer the only option with composable, microservices-based architectures. More importantly, commerce platform buyers are realizing that in order to compete, they need to have an adaptable, AI-ready commerce foundation that can evolve continuously.
Composable commerce allows for a more gradual approach to technology change. A few months back, I wrote a piece covering various approaches to breaking up with your commerce monolith. The best approaches I’ve seen involve solving one problem at a time with technology, or addressing a need with a smaller brand to test new capabilities. This incremental approach has become even more important with the rise of AI, where experimentation cycles are faster and the cost of standing still is higher. Contrary to popular belief, it is possible to replace one component of a platform at a time, without disrupting the entire commerce ecosystem.
In practice, this often starts with the data layer. Modern commerce leaders are prioritizing product catalogs, pricing models, and inventory data as strategic assets. These are the inputs that power AI-driven search, personalization, and autonomous buying agents. If your data is not structured for machines, your commerce experience will not show up where buying decisions are increasingly happening.
Consider the alternative of doing nothing, which can leave you more exposed than change itself. Missed opportunities result from sticking with a commerce platform that is already holding you back from jumping on consumer trends like AI-assisted shopping, conversational commerce, and agent-driven purchasing flows or merchandising in new channels outside of your own. Not to mention the lost revenue that happens when a buyer’s risk vs. reward calculations of adopting new technology are off. It may seem counterintuitive, but a tough economy can be a perfect time to invest in technology that propels your business forward. Even if the change seems small vs. a seismic shift, opportunity awaits for those who are fearless in tough times.
Now that growth-at-all-costs has given way to prove-it economics, there are some simple steps you can take to act on incremental value delivery when the economy doesn’t do it for you. A few ideas include:
Rather than assuming the risk of large-scale replatforming, this incremental approach allows teams to test, measure, adjust, and repeat what works. The companies pulling ahead are not the ones making the biggest bets all at once. They are the ones adopting commerce infrastructure that can adapt and improve continuously. Focus on the business benefit, not the technology, and you’ll be best positioned to win — whether that’s against the competition or the status quo.
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