Intelligent commerce is the next evolution of digital commerce. It blends modular, API-first architecture with artificial intelligence to automate complexity and deliver dynamic, hyper-personalized buying journeys. Brands no longer need to choose between rigid legacy suites and risky full replatforms. With intelligent commerce, you can modernize quickly, while keeping the parts of your 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.
Automate merchandising activities within Shopper Admin
Build storefronts, syndicate product catalog, and query documentation through MCP
Automate frontend creation using our Composable Frontend and SDK
Improve product discoverability and accelerate conversions
Connect your digital commerce application stack components quickly
Assess catalog components to improve sellability at scale
Conversational interface to prompt product documentation and enablement resources
Vectorized product search service for commerce frontends
Simplify data cleanup and preparation when migrating product, order, and customer data between systems
Generative AI has reset expectations. We no longer browse; we ask. We no longer tolerate delays; we expect instant answers. In B2B commerce, this shift is even sharper. Complex catalogs, contract pricing, and multi-step workflows once slowed innovation. Now AI unlocks high quality commerce experiences much faster than ever before.
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. With the rise of agentic models and conversational commerce, AI is becoming core to competitive digital experience.
According to the 2025 Digital Commerce Landscape Report, retailers, manufacturers, and distributors are ready for this shift.
Intelligent commerce makes it possible to leverage AI to improve the storefront experience, integration capabilities, and much more.
Here are just a few examples of intelligent commerce at work:
AI scripts and updates storefront copy on demand
Co-pilot tools connect third-party integrations without hand-coding
Buyer agents guide shoppers through complex catalogs with natural language
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.
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. Maintaining dozens of microservices with brittle connections often led to skyrocketing IT costs and burnout. 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.
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. 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. 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. Intelligent commerce’s measurable value is what earns long-term internal support.
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
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.
AI-Ready Orchestration
Event bus or MCP layer for agent actions.
Business-User Enablement
Low-code tools, experimentation sandboxes.
Modular Flexibility
Swap services without downtime.
Unified Support
Single point of contact across the stack.
An autonomous assistant that navigates catalogs, compares options, and completes transactions in natural language. These agents reduce 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.
An open standard Elastic Path supports to make catalog data readable and actionable by AI agents like ChatGPT. It’s how storefronts become searchable and shoppable through AI interfaces.
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.
Many brands launch a first AI use case in 4–6 weeks by layering on top of existing systems.
No. Intelligent commerce supports incremental change. Replace one component or workflow at a time.
It reduces cost by automating manual work and eliminating unused features. You pay for proven outcomes.
Yes. AI co-pilots and low-code tools let lean teams ship big ideas quickly.
We combine composable architecture with MCP orchestration and unified support, so you can innovate without integration headaches.
Intelligent commerce empowers businesses to build agile, AI-driven shopping experiences that learn and improve every day. Whether you need a smarter search bar or a full AI shopping agent, Elastic Path helps you move fast and innovate without compromise.