How AI and Commerce Platforms Will Converge: Building the Infrastructure for Tomorrow’s Shopping Experience
The conversation around AI and commerce has reached a fever pitch, and for good reason. With global ecommerce projected to reach $7.4 trillion by 2025 and AI adoption accelerating faster than any technology in history, we’re witnessing the early stages of a fundamental shift in how people discover and purchase products.
The question isn’t whether AI will transform commerce, but rather how the industry will evolve to make this transformation seamless and beneficial for everyone involved.
The Current State of Product Discovery
Anyone who’s tried to find a specific product online recently knows the frustration. You wade through pages of sponsored results, parse through reviews that may or may not be authentic, and jump between multiple sites comparing prices and features. Research shows that consumers now visit an average of three to five websites before making a purchase decision, and for major purchases, that journey can stretch to 79 days.
This isn’t a failure of any single platform or technology. It’s simply the natural result of how the internet evolved—millions of separate websites, each with their own catalog, their own search functionality, and their own checkout process. The emergence of AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity presents an opportunity to reimagine this fragmented experience into something more conversational and intuitive.
OpenAI and Perplexity are already moving in this direction, experimenting with commerce capabilities that could streamline the path from question to purchase. Meanwhile, Google faces the complex challenge of evolving its search experience while managing its advertising ecosystem, and newer players like Claude are taking a more cautious approach to commerce integration.
Understanding the Commerce Evolution
The shift we’re discussing isn’t about replacing existing systems—it’s about evolution and integration. Today’s commerce flow has served us well, taking us from the early days of online shopping to a multi-trillion dollar global marketplace. That flow typically looks something like this: discovery happens through search engines, comparison occurs across multiple sites and platforms, purchases flow through established ecommerce platforms or marketplaces, and fulfillment runs through sophisticated third-party logistics networks.
As AI becomes more integrated into this process, we’re likely to see these stages blend together. Imagine asking an AI assistant to find the best running shoes for your specific gait and budget, and having it not only research options but also understand your past purchases, check real-time inventory, and facilitate the purchase—all within a single conversation. This isn’t about eliminating commerce platforms; it’s about creating new pathways that complement and enhance existing infrastructure.
The Infrastructure Challenge We Need to Solve Together
For this vision to become reality, the industry needs to address several fundamental infrastructure challenges. These aren’t problems any single company can or should solve alone—they require collaboration across the entire ecosystem.
First, there’s the challenge of product information standardization. With somewhere between 12 and 24 million ecommerce sites globally, each with its own way of describing products, creating a coherent experience for AI assistants is complex. We need better ways for AI to understand and compare products across different platforms without losing the uniqueness that makes each merchant special.
Then there’s the authentication and payment challenge. Traditional payment systems were designed with human buyers in mind. When an AI assistant makes a purchase on someone’s behalf, new questions emerge about identity verification, liability, and dispute resolution. Payment providers are already working on these challenges, with companies like Stripe, PayPal, and Block developing new frameworks for AI-mediated transactions. The key is ensuring these solutions work seamlessly across all platforms and protect both consumers and merchants.
Perhaps most interesting is the fulfillment integration challenge. No matter how sophisticated AI becomes at finding and purchasing products, physical goods still need to move from warehouses to customers. The global logistics industry, worth over $10 trillion, remains fundamentally physical. This presents an enormous opportunity for logistics providers to become the stable backbone of an AI-enhanced commerce ecosystem.
Why Logistics Providers Are Perfectly Positioned
While much attention focuses on the digital transformation, logistics providers have a unique advantage in the AI commerce evolution. They’re already the universal connector—every purchase, regardless of platform or payment method, ultimately flows through fulfillment networks. This positions them as natural integration points for AI commerce.
Consider what happens when an AI assistant needs to complete a purchase. It needs to know inventory availability, calculate shipping costs, estimate delivery times, and eventually track the package. These are all capabilities that logistics providers already have; they just need to be made accessible in ways that AI can understand and utilize.
The opportunity here extends beyond simple integration. Imagine AI assistants that could automatically optimize delivery routes for sustainability, split orders intelligently across multiple fulfillment centers, or coordinate complex international shipments seamlessly. These capabilities already exist in various forms across the logistics industry. The challenge is creating standardized ways for AI to access and orchestrate them.
Building Bridges, Not Walls
The path forward requires thinking about AI and existing commerce platforms not as competitors but as complementary parts of an evolving ecosystem. Commerce platforms have spent decades building trusted relationships with consumers, creating sophisticated inventory management systems, and developing robust payment processing. These aren’t capabilities that disappear in an AI world—they become even more valuable.
Similarly, AI assistants excel at understanding natural language, maintaining context across conversations, and synthesizing information from multiple sources. When these capabilities combine with the established infrastructure of commerce platforms, the result is a shopping experience that’s both more intuitive and more powerful than either could achieve alone.
Payment providers are already showing how this collaboration can work. Rather than seeing AI as a threat to traditional payment rails, companies are developing new authentication methods, creating AI-specific fraud detection systems, and building frameworks for handling the unique challenges of AI-mediated transactions. This collaborative approach benefits everyone—consumers get better experiences, merchants reach customers in new ways, and payment providers facilitate new types of transactions.
The Technical Foundation We Need to Build
Creating this interconnected future requires establishing some common technical foundations. This isn’t about imposing rigid standards that stifle innovation, but rather about creating flexible protocols that enable seamless interaction while preserving the unique value each participant brings.
We need universal ways to describe product information that AI can understand while maintaining the rich, unique details that differentiate products. We need authentication systems that can verify AI agents while protecting consumer privacy and merchant security. And we need fulfillment protocols that allow AI to interact with logistics networks without requiring custom integrations for every combination of AI platform and logistics provider.
This is where the concept of a universal commerce operations API becomes crucial. Think of it as a common language that allows any AI assistant to communicate with any fulfillment system, query inventory across multiple warehouses, calculate optimal shipping routes, and handle returns seamlessly. This isn’t one company’s vision—it’s an industry necessity that will require collaboration across AI platforms, commerce systems, payment processors, and logistics providers.
Preparing for the Transition
For merchants, the evolution toward AI-enhanced commerce represents an opportunity to reach customers in entirely new ways. The key is ensuring your product information is structured and accessible, your systems can handle programmatic interactions, and your fulfillment processes are flexible enough to adapt to new types of orders. This doesn’t mean rebuilding everything—it means gradually enhancing existing systems to be more AI-friendly.
Payment providers have the opportunity to become the trust layer in AI commerce. By developing clear frameworks for AI authentication, liability, and dispute resolution, they can facilitate new types of transactions while maintaining the security and reliability consumers expect. The providers who move first to establish these standards will likely shape how AI commerce develops.
Logistics providers should focus on making their capabilities more accessible to AI systems. This means developing standardized APIs, providing real-time visibility into operations, and creating flexible integration options that work across different AI platforms. The logistics networks that become easiest for AI to work with will capture a disproportionate share of AI-mediated volume.
The Collaborative Path Forward
The transformation we’re discussing isn’t going to happen overnight, and it shouldn’t. The current ecommerce ecosystem took decades to build and serves billions of people daily. The integration of AI should enhance and extend these capabilities, not replace them wholesale.
What’s needed now is collaboration across the industry to establish the protocols and standards that will make AI-enhanced commerce possible. This means commerce platforms working with AI companies to ensure product information is accessible and accurate. It means payment providers developing new frameworks that protect all parties in AI-mediated transactions. And it means logistics providers opening their systems in ways that allow AI to orchestrate fulfillment seamlessly
What’s needed is a standardized ways for AI to interact with fulfillment systems. But this isn’t something any single company can or should own. The real power will come from industry-wide collaboration to build the infrastructure that makes AI-enhanced commerce beneficial for everyone—consumers, merchants, platforms, and service providers alike.
Looking Ahead
Conservative estimates suggest that 25% of ecommerce transactions could involve AI mediation by 2030. More aggressive projections put that number as high as 60%. Regardless of the exact percentage, the direction is clear: AI will play an increasingly important role in how people discover and purchase products.
This transformation presents challenges, certainly, but the opportunities far outweigh the risks. Imagine a world where finding exactly what you need is as simple as having a conversation. Where small merchants can compete on equal footing with large retailers because AI can surface their products to the right customers at the right time. Where logistics networks optimize themselves in real-time to reduce costs and environmental impact.
This future isn’t just possible—it’s inevitable. The question is how quickly and smoothly we can build the bridges between today’s commerce infrastructure and tomorrow’s AI-enhanced experience. It will take collaboration, standardization, and a willingness to see AI not as a disruptor but as an enabler of better commerce for everyone.
The companies and platforms that recognize this opportunity and work together to build the necessary infrastructure will shape the next decade of commerce. Those who view it as a zero-sum game risk being left behind as the industry evolves around them.
The conversation about AI and commerce is really a conversation about the future of how people discover and buy products. It’s about making commerce more accessible, more efficient, and more personalized. And it’s about ensuring that the benefits of this transformation are shared across the entire ecosystem—from the largest platforms to the smallest merchants, from global logistics networks to individual consumers.
This piece reflects ongoing industry discussions about the evolution of AI and commerce. If you’re interested in contributing to the development of standards and protocols for AI-enhanced commerce and logistics, we’d love to hear from you at [email protected]
About Pipe17
Pipe17 is on a mission to “unify commerce operations” by connecting sellers, marketplaces, fulfillment partners, and back-office systems through a powerful, cloud-native network. Pipe17 simplifies ecommerce order operations by providing plug-and-play integrations, robust data routing, and AI-driven transformation of workflows. At the heart of Pipe17 is a vision: to serve as the central infrastructure for the ecommerce ecosystem, enabling brands and partners to scale operations with agility and reliability.
An experienced leader, manager and technologist with a deep desire to effect change, Mo (Mohamad) Afshar has worked in development, engineering, marketing and sales for over 15 years within the technology industry. His experience managing product releases, new product introductions, acquisitions, capital budgets, IT projects, and fund raising has given him deep industry knowledge and global experience in cloud and data coupled with a detailed business understanding of middleware and hardware.
