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In the past few years, generative AI has transformed the way we live, work, and shop. Traditional browsing is giving way to conversational interactions, where consumers expect instant, personalized responses. This shift has elevated expectations across the board, yet many B2B organizations find themselves constrained by outdated platforms or risky, costly replatforming projects.
Enter intelligent commerce — a transformative approach that uses AI to create agile, personalized, and efficient commerce experiences. Unlike traditional models, intelligent commerce integrates AI across the entire commerce ecosystem, from customer interactions to backend operations.
Intelligent commerce refers to the integration of artificial intelligence into commerce platforms to enhance decision-making, personalize customer experiences, and automate operations. This approach enables businesses to:
Across the commerce landscape, companies are rapidly moving from experimentation to execution when it comes to AI. From generative assistants guiding product discovery to intelligent agents automating back-office tasks, the shift is already underway:
The momentum is clear: intelligent commerce is no longer a theoretical ideal — it’s a strategic priority with real-world results. Whether driving operational efficiency, improving time-to-value, or enhancing the buyer experience, AI is becoming foundational to how modern commerce operates.
As AI continues to evolve, intelligent commerce is poised to become the standard in B2B markets. Businesses that adopt this approach can expect to see improvements in customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and overall competitiveness.
In this eBook, we will explore the components of intelligent commerce, its benefits, and how your organization can implement this approach to stay ahead in the rapidly changing commerce landscape.
B2B has always been complex — dense product catalogs, layered pricing rules, integration-heavy workflows. That’s why so many B2Bs sat out the last wave of commerce innovation and replatforming. The risk was too high, and the reward too uncertain.
But generative AI changes the game.
With the ability to auto-generate API connectors, clean and enrich product data, and adapt workflows to contract-specific logic, AI makes what once seemed impossible feel intuitive. The result? B2Bs can leapfrog over the slow, expensive middle ground and move straight into a new, intelligent era.
And the urgency is growing. According to the 2025 Digital Commerce Landscape Report by Elastic Path:
The message is clear: intelligent commerce is no longer optional. It’s the most strategic — and realistic — move B2Bs can make right now.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transitioning from a supportive tool to a central driver of innovation. In the realm of intelligent commerce, AI doesn't just assist — it actively orchestrates, personalizes, and optimizes every facet of the customer journey and backend operations. This transformation is evident across various industries, with leading companies integrating AI to enhance user experiences and operational efficiency.
Automating Routine Tasks - AI excels at handling repetitive tasks that traditionally consumed significant human resources. For instance:
These capabilities free up human teams to focus on strategic initiatives, fostering innovation, and agility.
Enhancing Technical Workflows - AI serves as a valuable co-pilot for development and integration teams by:
By streamlining these processes, AI reduces errors, accelerates deployment, and enhances system interoperability.
Driving Merchandising Efficiency - AI revolutionizes merchandising and campaign management through:
These applications enable merchandisers to deliver targeted, timely, and effective campaigns with greater precision.
Personalizing Customer Interactions - AI significantly enhances the buyer experience by:
Such personalized experiences increase customer satisfaction and foster brand loyalty.
Informing Strategic Decisions - AI provides actionable insights that inform business strategies:
These insights empower businesses to make data-driven decisions, enhancing overall performance and competitiveness.
Leading companies are harnessing AI to redefine commerce under the intelligent commerce umbrella. Here are just a few examples from the world of payments:
These examples illustrate the practical implementation of intelligent commerce, showcasing how AI can transform traditional shopping experiences into proactive, personalized journeys.
So what does this look like in practice?
At Elastic Path, intelligent commerce isn’t a buzzword — it’s a strategic imperative. We’re injecting AI throughout our platform: enabling shopper assistants, automating catalog and pricing operations, and developing AI agents tailored to the unique roles of merchandisers, sales reps, and ecommerce managers. With rapid-cycle frontend development powered by AI coding tools, we’re helping brands launch new experiences in days, not months. Our approach empowers companies — especially in B2B — to reduce costs, increase speed, and deliver experiences that meet the rising expectations of today’s digital buyers.
In the next section, we’ll explore how businesses are translating these AI capabilities into tangible results — launching faster, spending less, and delivering the kind of experiences buyers now expect.
In traditional commerce transformations, success often meant enduring a 6–12 month replatforming project, hoping the budget stayed intact and the customer experience didn’t suffer along the way. Intelligent commerce introduces a different path—one where the timeline is compressed, and the payoff is faster and more adaptable.
AI-powered systems promise to transform how brands deliver value—not by replacing platforms, but by layering intelligence on top of them. These modular improvements allow organizations to innovate within their existing stack, using AI as a flexible activation layer that enhances workflows, personalizes experiences, and accelerates development.
As AI co-pilots evolve, teams are beginning to automate code generation, content creation, and integration workflows. The goal is to reduce bottlenecks, enable faster rollouts, and unlock experimentation at scale. In the near future, this could mean:
What was once a slow, linear process will become an agile, iterative cycle—driven by AI and aligned with business outcomes.
Though intelligent commerce is still in its early stages, the direction is clear. As brands begin to embed AI across the commerce lifecycle, we anticipate improvements in key metrics:
These aren’t promises of overnight transformation, but strategic bets based on emerging pilots, platform roadmaps, and market readiness.
Intelligent commerce isn’t about tearing everything down—it’s about moving smarter with what you already have. This approach helps reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) while unlocking faster experimentation and better alignment between tech capabilities and customer needs. Key opportunities ahead include:
This is commerce that works with your team—not against it. The outcomes are faster releases, lower costs, and more resilient systems.
The B2B commerce world is at a turning point. Intelligent commerce offers not just new tools, but a fundamentally new approach — one that replaces brittle architectures and manual workflows with systems that are adaptive, AI-assisted, and focused on time-to-value.
For organizations ready to take the leap, here’s how to start.
Forget the big-bang replatform. Modernize where it matters most — by improving how your systems talk to each other.
With Elastic Path’s Composer, integration is already being simplified by enabling modular, composable connections between essential systems like ERP, PIM, CMS, and commerce engines. Composer helps reduce complexity today — setting the stage for a more adaptive and scalable integration approach.
In the future, AI will further accelerate this process, enabling low-code and no-code integration across the ecosystem. AI will assist with real-time API mapping, data transformation, and orchestration across touchpoints — allowing teams to focus on innovation, not plumbing.
Focus your energy on:
The goal is orchestration, not perfection.
Your product catalog is the foundation of every digital experience — and too often, it’s the thing holding teams back.
Traditional commerce systems treat the catalog as a monolithic, internal-facing structure. But modern buyers expect flexibility: bundles, subscriptions, personalized pricing, gated access. To deliver that, your catalog needs to be decoupled, dynamic, and modular.
Start by:
In the future, AI will assist by auto-generating structured data, enriching descriptions, and even flagging inconsistencies across channels.
The most successful commerce teams in 2025 won’t be the ones with the most polished architectures. They’ll be the ones that learn the fastest.
Generative AI now makes it possible to test storefront content, launch campaigns, and iterate on designs faster than ever. Intelligent commerce teams are treating their entire storefront as an experiment — continuously optimizing based on buyer behavior and business outcomes.
Where to begin:
Think of your storefront not as a destination — but as a living system, always learning.
Speed isn't a nice-to-have — it's a survival strategy.
Long transformation cycles are often obsolete before they finish. Intelligent commerce is about layering intelligence over what you already have to deliver fast, measurable improvements.
Make time-to-value your KPI:
If the answer is yes, it’s worth trying.
You don’t need a blank slate. You don’t need a multimillion-dollar budget. What you need is momentum.
Intelligent commerce enables brands to activate existing systems, modernize critical workflows, and deliver standout experiences — without falling into the trap of endless digital transformation. AI isn't just about adding new tools — it's about unlocking agility, adaptability, and customer-centricity in a rapidly changing market.
For B2B brands in particular, this is a pivotal moment to lead. Intelligent commerce isn't just faster — it's smarter and finally within reach. With AI as the catalyst, companies can transcend the constraints of legacy systems without the risks traditionally associated with replatforming.
The future belongs to those who:
The winners of 2025 won’t wait until they’re “ready.” They’ll move with purpose, test with confidence, and learn faster than the competition. The path forward doesn’t require starting from scratch — just starting with purpose.
The future of commerce is intelligent. The time to act is now.