Elastic Path brings AI directly into the commerce stack by accelerating development, simplifying integration, and enabling AI-driven product discovery and purchasing. Built on a modular, API-first foundation, our AI capabilities help teams automate complexity and prepare for a future where buyers rely on AI to find, evaluate, and transact.
With Elastic Path’s intelligent commerce, you can apply AI where it delivers immediate value — including speeding up storefront builds, structuring catalogs for AI discovery, and orchestrating B2B workflows — while keeping the parts of your existing stack that still work.
Intelligent commerce is a modern commerce approach where AI works across the buying journey to automate repetitive work, improve decisions, and personalize experiences in real time.
Unlike traditional eCommerce platforms that rely on static rules and manual processes, intelligent commerce reacts to data, context, and buyer behavior. It learns from every interaction and continuously optimizes your storefront, promotions, pricing, and content without custom development work.
Intelligent commerce integrates with third-party systems like ERPs and CRMs, using AI to handle translation layers that were once handled manually. It unifies fragmented data and orchestrates logic so merchandisers, marketers, and B2B sales reps can focus more on strategy than configuration.
Elastic Path was architected for composability long before eCommerce AI grabbed the spotlight. That groundwork now pays off: every Elastic Path service is exposed through RESTful APIs, documented in OpenAPI, and orchestrated through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). When AI arrives, there is nothing to rip and replace — only capabilities to ignite.
Elastic Path’s Intelligent Commerce architecture aligns with emerging open standards such as AGNTCY, ensuring AI agents can securely discover, interpret, and act on commerce data without compromising governance or control.
Publish structured, LLM-optimized product, pricing, hierarchy, and bundle data for AI-driven discovery and agentic commerce
Generate storefront components, orchestrate APIs, syndicate product catalogs, and query documentation through MCP-aware tools and IDEs
Model, manage, and deliver content through an API-based CMS with AI-assisted frontend generation
Automate merchandising activities within Shopper Admin
Connect your digital commerce application stack components quickly using Composer
Conversational interface to prompt product documentation and enablement resources
AI-driven semantic and vector-based product search designed for human shoppers and AI agents
Simplify data cleanup and preparation when migrating product, order, and customer data between systems
At the center of intelligent commerce is the product catalog. As buying journeys increasingly begin with AI-driven discovery instead of storefront navigation, the catalog becomes the primary source of truth that both humans and AI systems rely on.
AI agents consume structured product data (such as attributes, hierarchies, pricing rules, bundles, and relationships) to understand what a product is, how it compares, and when it is relevant.
Elastic Path Product Experience Manager makes catalogs explicitly AI-ready, enabling teams to publish structured, LLM-optimized product, pricing, and bundle data to AI answer engines using standards-aligned outputs.
By decoupling products, pricing, and catalogs into independent APIs, Elastic Path ensures the same trusted catalog data feeds storefronts, sales teams, and AI-driven buying experiences without duplication or custom integration.
Generative AI has reset expectations. We no longer browse; we ask. We no longer tolerate delays; we expect instant answers. ncreasingly, buyers turn to answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity to recommend products, compare options, and even initiate purchases.
This shift affects both sides of commerce at the same time. Buyers are using AI to find and evaluate products, while commerce teams are using AI to build, adapt, and scale digital experiences faster than traditional development allows.
In B2B commerce, this shift is even sharper. Complex catalogs, contract pricing, and multi-step workflows once slowed innovation. AI now removes much of that friction, helping teams assemble storefronts, integrations, and experiences in weeks instead of months, while giving buyers faster, more relevant paths to purchase.
AI has also matured past the "nice-to-have" stage. Its real-time capabilities, accessibility for non-technical users, and integration-readiness mean it can now support real commerce outcomes. And as conversational and agentic models become mainstream, AI is shaping how discovery, configuration, and purchasing happen before a buyer ever reaches the storefront.
According to the 2025 Digital Commerce Landscape Report, retailers, manufacturers, and distributors are ready for this shift.
Intelligent commerce makes it possible to address both realities at once:
Here are just a few examples of intelligent commerce at work:
AI generates ready-to-use storefront components, including product listing pages connected to catalog and pricing data.
Co-pilot tools connect ERPs, CRMs, pricing engines, and fulfillment systems using pre-built patterns and AI-guided configuration instead of hand-coding.
Buyer-facing agents interpret natural-language requests, navigate complex catalogs, apply pricing and entitlement rules, and guide shoppers to the right product faster.
Composable commerce laid the foundation. It gave brands architectural flexibility — breaking the monolith into modular services and enabling best-of-breed toolsets. But composability, on its own, still left teams with challenges: integrating APIs, managing fragmented data, and orchestrating workflows across a growing stack of services. That’s where intelligent commerce takes over.
As AI-driven discovery replaces storefront-first navigation, influence shifts from pages and templates to the product catalog and the data that feeds AI systems. Intelligent commerce ensures that composable services don’t just connect, but work together as a coherent, AI-ready system.
If composable commerce is about building the ideal structure, intelligent commerce is about animating it. It connects the dots between services with AI-driven orchestration. Instead of months of wiring, AI agents and co-pilots automate the tedious work of mapping schemas, syncing systems, and testing logic. Developers are no longer bottlenecks — they’re orchestrators.
Many MACH architecture implementations struggled under their own weight. Instead of months of wiring, AI-driven orchestration automates integration, schema mapping, and workflow execution — without custom middleware or brittle custom code. Intelligent commerce delivers on the original promise of MACH, without requiring perfection in execution. It turns your existing composable architecture into a launchpad for real-time innovation.
This transition is already happening. Businesses that embraced composable are now activating AI in commerce to move faster and reduce cost. Those that sat out the composable era — citing risk or resource concerns — can now leapfrog straight to intelligent commerce. For these teams, AI provides a faster on-ramp by assembling, integrating, and optimizing modern architectures with far less upfront complexity.
The result? A commerce environment that thinks, learns, and evolves. It doesn’t just enable agility — it automates it. And it ensures that every investment in composable infrastructure pays dividends in flexibility, performance, and innovation.
In practice, this means teams spend less time maintaining brittle code and more time driving business outcomes. Intelligent commerce allows sales and marketing teams to act on insights in near real-time, while giving developers flexible frameworks to scale what works.
Whether you're modernizing a B2B portal, launching a D2C initiative, or building complex, omnichannel experiences — intelligent commerce provides the speed and flexibility needed to stay ahead.
Many businesses know they must modernize, yet feel trapped by legacy stacks. Replatforming can be costly, risky, and slow. But even full replatforms are easier with intelligent commerce. AI simplifies frontend builds, streamlines integrations and data migrations, and more. It also prepares businesses for a future where AI systems increasingly influence discovery and purchasing decisions. Most of all, intelligent commerce unlocks choices. Teams can either replatform all at once, or gradually add intelligence without ripping out what still works.
According to the Digital Commerce Landscape report:
AI systems also reduce organizational friction. By bridging silos across product, engineering, and marketing, intelligent commerce platforms support collaboration and experimentation. AI-assisted development and orchestration reduce dependency on scarce technical resources, allowing business teams to move forward without waiting on long development cycles. Teams can test new ideas in live environments with built-in guardrails — an impossible task in tightly coupled monoliths. Teams that start with a focused pilot often unlock cross-functional momentum, showing quick wins to finance, marketing, and IT. As AI-driven buying journeys become more common, these pilots also future-proof the business by ensuring products, pricing, and rules are ready for both human buyers and AI agents.
Ask yourself:
Are manual workflows slowing launches?
Do integrations eat most of your dev budget?
Are buyers frustrated by complex catalogs?
Is IT tied up patching brittle custom code?
If you answered yes to any, intelligent commerce can help. This is especially true for:
B2B companies with complex pricing and quoting
Merchants with limited IT headcount
Brands managing multiple channels or storefronts
You don’t need to overhaul everything. Intelligent commerce lets you start with one key capability and expand from there. Intelligent commerce is also ideal for:
Teams that want to test AI without rebuilding everything
Organizations seeking to unify data across commerce, PIM, CMS, and ERP
Leaders aiming to increase buyer satisfaction without long timelines
Quickly build and launch a distributor portal tailored to your unique business requirements, powered by AI-driven page generation, React code output from MCP, and guided semantic recommendations.
Pilot an AI shopper agent, then expand from there. Each success funds the next. Intelligent commerce is about iterative modernization, not disruption. With each modular upgrade, your business gains speed, insight, and competitive edge.
Evaluation Factor
What to Look For
Open Ecosystem
API-first, schema documentation, GraphQL/REST options. Support for publishing structured, AI-consumable product and commerce data.
AI-Ready Orchestration
Event bus or MCP layer for agent actions. Context-aware access, role-based permissions, and safe separation between shopper, account, and admin actions.
Business-User Enablement
Low-code tools, experimentation sandboxes. AI-assisted tools for content, catalog enrichment, and digital experience iteration without developer bottlenecks.
Modular Flexibility
Swap services without downtime. Extend data models, workflows, and APIs without modifying core commerce services.
Unified Support
Single point of contact across the stack. Clear ownership across storefront, catalog, orchestration, and AI-driven capabilities.
An open standards initiative that defines how AI agents securely discover, interpret, and interact with digital systems. AGNTCY establishes common protocols for identity, permissions, messaging, and action boundaries so agents can operate predictably across platforms without requiring custom integrations or compromising governance.
An autonomous assistant that navigates catalogs, compares options, and completes transactions in natural language. These agents operate within defined permissions and contexts, reducing friction for complex buying decisions.
An AI tool embedded in development or merchandising tools that helps generate, suggest, or automate workflows. Co-pilots improve developer productivity and empower non-technical users.
A protocol Elastic Path supports to provide context-aware, scoped access to commerce services for AI agents. MCP enables agents to retrieve catalog data, perform authorized actions, and interact safely with commerce systems without exposing administrative endpoints.
A layer that connects different tools and workflows together using real-time events, enabling automation across systems. Essential for adapting processes on the fly.
AI-powered search that understands user intent, context, and conversational input to deliver relevant results. Moves beyond keyword matching into true natural language processing.
Using large language models (LLMs) and AI agents to generate content, logic, or interactions based on user needs. It powers everything from dynamic FAQs to guided selling.
Modular system design that allows each function—catalog, pricing, cart—to be independently managed or swapped. Composability ensures flexibility and reduces vendor lock-in.
Architecture that triggers workflows or data updates in response to specific events. Useful for automated pricing changes, inventory updates, or order flows.
Real-time tailoring of content, pricing, and user experience based on behavior and context. Core to increasing conversions and customer satisfaction.
Intelligent commerce structures product, pricing, and availability data so AI systems can accurately discover, recommend, and initiate purchases. This ensures your products are visible and actionable in AI answer engines, not just storefronts.
Most catalogs were designed for storefronts, not AI consumption. Intelligent commerce platforms help enrich, structure, and publish catalog data so both humans and AI agents can understand relationships, rules, and context.
Intelligent commerce supports negotiated pricing, account hierarchies, and multi-step workflows through APIs and orchestration. AI accelerates these processes without bypassing business rules or governance.
Agents access commerce services through scoped, context-aware interfaces. Permissions are limited by role, and buyer actions are isolated from administrative operations.
Yes. Intelligent commerce enforces strict separation between shopper, account, and admin data. AI tools only access what they are authorized to see or act on.
Composable and intelligent architectures are designed for change. You can swap models, tools, or interfaces without rewriting your commerce core.
No. Smaller teams often see value faster because AI reduces manual work and dependency on large development teams.
Common metrics include faster time-to-launch, lower integration costs, improved conversion rates, higher repeat purchases, and reduced operational overhead.
Intelligent commerce helps businesses move faster with AI, accelerating storefront development, simplifying integrations, and preparing products for AI-driven discovery and purchasing. Whether you’re launching smarter search, automating frontend builds, or enabling AI shopping agents, Elastic Path lets you innovate without compromise.