ChatGPT didn’t just change everything - it redefined what’s possible. From the moment it launched, we knew commerce would never be the same.
While many in the eCommerce industry started to obsess about the threat (and opportunities) of agentic commerce - asking existential questions about the relevance of eCommerce sites in the future, we were asking a very different question.
We weren’t focused on how AI would improve the shopping experience for consumers - we asked ourselves how Ai would change how retailers and brands operate.
Our hypothesis was simple: AI was going to create unprecedented pressure on merchandising, marketing, and eCommerce teams - forcing them to scale in ways never before contemplated or even conceivable.
In the long term, there will inevitably be a future where the majority of eCommerce operational processes are automated by agents that augment - and ultimately replace - traditional human teams. But that operational transition won’t happen overnight.
In the near term, it was already clear to us that the advent of AI was reshaping the market. Competitive pressure was rising, and teams were facing a step change in workload simply to keep up.
With AI lowering barriers for new upstarts, enabling incumbents to move faster, and making everyone smarter, the competitive landscape for brands and retailers is becoming fiercer by the day.
The unfortunate truth is that most brands and retailers don’t truly understand their market or their competitors - their strategies, their campaigns, their assortments, or their pricing.
In fact many struggle to understand their own business.Keeping tabs on competitors is extraordinarily complex. Endless channels, categories, campaigns, influencers, and segments - across stores, wholesale, marketplaces, and constantly shifting across time, seasons, and regions.
But throughout our careers, the three of us witnessed firsthand that competitive monitoring today is ad hoc at best. Across thousands of conversations and decades inside the industry, one truth kept surfacing: even the world’s best brands often operate on anecdotes, gut feel, and incomplete information.
It's no surprise. There has never been a unified tool or service capable of keeping up with the massive and constantly growing dataset of products, pricing, promotions, campaigns, content, ads, social, email, SMS, resellers, inventory, marketplaces, assortments, sourcing, and availability (the list goes on) that brands and retailers must track.
The status quo has been narrow scraped datasets - void of context, void of insight, and unable to illustrate or explain the full dynamics of the market and their competitors.
Today, market and competitive intelligence is a strategic imperative. The brands that understand their market in real time will win. Those that do not will fall behind.
We’re on a journey to make the best brands smarter, more nimble, and empowered to win in the era of AI - by infusing commerce intelligence into every decision that shapes their most critical KPIs.
