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The Intelligent Commerce Era: AI's Breakthrough Moment for B2B

Welcome to the Intelligent Commerce Era

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 This shift has elevated expectations across the board, yet many B2B organizations find themselves constrained by outdated platforms or risky, costly replatforming projects.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.

What Is Intelligent Commerce?

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:

  • Automate Repetitive Tasks: AI can handle routine processes such as inventory management, order processing, and customer inquiries, freeing up human resources for more strategic activities.
  • Personalize Customer Experiences: By analyzing customer data, AI can provide personalized product recommendations, tailored marketing messages, and customized shopping experiences.
  • Enhance Decision-Making: AI-driven analytics offer insights into customer behavior, sales trends, and operational efficiency, enabling data-driven decisions.

Real-World Momentum: Intelligent Commerce in Action

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:

  • Digital storefronts are embedding AI to support tasks like auto-reordering, personalized bundling, and conversational checkout — creating intuitive, self-service experiences that feel more like a dialogue than a transaction.
  • Complex B2B operations are exploring AI-driven support for quoting, product configuration, and catalog navigation — especially in industries with long sales cycles and detailed product specs.
  • Commerce platforms are evolving to offer intelligent tools that adapt to user behavior, enabling omnichannel engagement that’s context-aware and dynamically personalized.

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.

The Future of Commerce

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.


Why Now? The Great Leapfrog Opportunity

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:

  • 93% of organizations say their digital commerce operations are impacted by technology limitations
  • 51% cite integration as their #1 upgrade priority
  • 86% believe they’ll be left behind without AI in their storefront
  • 49% plan to improve integration of emerging technologies like AI into their commerce experience in 2025

The message is clear: intelligent commerce is no longer optional. It’s the most strategic — and realistic — move B2Bs can make right now.


How AI Powers Intelligent Commerce

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.

Replaces Repetition

Automating Routine Tasks - AI excels at handling repetitive tasks that traditionally consumed significant human resources. For instance:

  • Content Generation: AI can automatically generate product descriptions, campaign copy, and test scripts, ensuring consistency and saving time.
  • Product Bundling and Pricing: By analyzing customer behavior and sales data, AI suggests optimal product bundles, pricing models, and promotional strategies.
  • Code Development: AI assists in building and testing code snippets and integrations, accelerating development cycles.

These capabilities free up human teams to focus on strategic initiatives, fostering innovation, and agility.

Co-Pilots for Development and Integration Teams

Enhancing Technical Workflows - AI serves as a valuable co-pilot for development and integration teams by:

  • Dynamic Component Generation: AI can generate front-end components dynamically, adapting to user interactions and preferences.
  • Data Mapping and Transformation: It automates the mapping and transformation of data between disparate systems, ensuring seamless integration.
  • API Connectivity: AI automates API connectivity, facilitating real-time data exchange and reducing manual intervention.

By streamlining these processes, AI reduces errors, accelerates deployment, and enhances system interoperability.

Orchestrates Merchandising and Campaigns

Driving Merchandising Efficiency - AI revolutionizes merchandising and campaign management through:

  • Automated Experimentation: It runs A/B tests and other experiments automatically, identifying the most effective strategies.
  • Personalized Content Delivery: AI personalizes storefront content based on audience segments, increasing engagement and conversion rates.
  • Accelerated Launches: By predicting market trends and customer preferences, AI accelerates the time-to-live for new product launches.

These applications enable merchandisers to deliver targeted, timely, and effective campaigns with greater precision.

Enhances the Buyer Experience

Personalizing Customer Interactions - AI significantly enhances the buyer experience by:

  • Conversational Search: Implementing semantic, conversational search capabilities allows customers to find products more intuitively.
  • Real-Time Personalization: AI personalizes customer journeys in real-time, adapting to user behavior and preferences.
  • Behavior-Based Recommendations: It surfaces relevant product recommendations based on individual browsing and purchasing behavior.

Such personalized experiences increase customer satisfaction and foster brand loyalty.

Delivers Real-Time Business Intelligence

Informing Strategic Decisions - AI provides actionable insights that inform business strategies:

  • Performance Analysis: It identifies drop-off points and underperforming areas within the sales funnel.
  • Optimization Opportunities: AI surfaces opportunities for optimization across various business processes.
  • Actionable Recommendations: It suggests next actions for both human decision-makers and automated systems, facilitating proactive management.

These insights empower businesses to make data-driven decisions, enhancing overall performance and competitiveness.


Industry Applications of Intelligent Commerce

Leading companies are harnessing AI to redefine commerce under the intelligent commerce umbrella. Here are just a few examples from the world of payments:

  • Visa's Intelligent Commerce Platform: Visa has introduced a platform that enables AI agents to make secure purchases on behalf of users. This system allows for personalized shopping experiences, where AI agents can handle tasks like booking travel or purchasing event tickets, all within user-defined parameters.
  • Mastercard's Agent Pay: Mastercard's Agent Pay integrates AI to facilitate transactions initiated by intelligent agents. This approach allows for seamless, secure, and personalized payment experiences, with AI handling everything from product discovery to purchase completion.

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.


Real Results, Not Rhetoric: The Path to Intelligent Commerce

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.

Launching Faster, Smarter

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:

  • Rolling out new storefront features in days, not weeks
  • Testing pricing strategies or promotions dynamically with AI
  • Reducing the time-to-live for new campaigns and product launches

What was once a slow, linear process will become an agile, iterative cycle—driven by AI and aligned with business outcomes.

Measuring What Matters

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:

  • Average Order Value (AOV) through personalized, AI-driven product bundling
  • Conversion Rates from optimized discovery and contextual product recommendations
  • Customer Retention via proactive, data-informed engagement strategies

These aren’t promises of overnight transformation, but strategic bets based on emerging pilots, platform roadmaps, and market readiness.

Reducing Costs, Gaining Agility

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:

  • Automating repetitive workflows to reduce manual labor
  • Simplifying integration with AI-driven logic and no-code interfaces
  • Lowering reliance on custom development through modular innovation

This is commerce that works with your team—not against it. The outcomes are faster releases, lower costs, and more resilient systems.

The 2025 Playbook for B2B Innovators

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.

1. Start with Integration

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:

  • Creating unified data flows across commerce, operations, and marketing systems
  • Automating API creation and mapping to reduce manual work
  • Monitoring and managing integrations through a single pane of glass

The goal is orchestration, not perfection.

2. Modernize Your Catalog

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:

  • Separating products, pricing, and catalogs into manageable components
  • Allowing for personalized views of catalog content based on buyer context
  • Supporting experimentation with promotions and bundles at the edge

In the future, AI will assist by auto-generating structured data, enriching descriptions, and even flagging inconsistencies across channels.

3. Embrace Experimentation

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:

  • Use AI to generate and test promotional campaigns and storefront copy
  • Pilot AI agents to guide discovery and answer product questions
  • Measure time-to-value in weeks, not months

Think of your storefront not as a destination — but as a living system, always learning.

4. Focus on Time-to-Value

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:

  • Can this idea go live in under 60 days?
  • Does it solve a real customer or business problem today?
  • Will it scale if it works?

If the answer is yes, it’s worth trying.

The Bottom Line: What’s Next for Intelligent Commerce

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:

  • Embrace composable, flexible architectures that evolve with their business
  • Prioritize ethical, explainable AI to earn and keep customer trust
  • Unify data across systems to power real-time insights and hyper-personalized journeys

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.