CIs your e-commerce architecture ready for AI agents?

By Stefan de Jong, art director

Imagine this: a consumer sees an outfit in a TikTok video, asks their personal AI agent about the brand's sustainability, and pays instantly with a voice command. Without ever visiting the seller's website. This is not a vision of the future; it is already possible.

From Point of Sale to Point of Discovery

The traditional purchasing process via a webshop is losing ground. Attention, orientation, and transaction merge into a single experience, spread across various platforms. Whether it's Instagram, ChatGPT, Google Search, or AR glasses: they are all places where transactions take place.The consumer no longer obediently comes to your webshop but pays at the place where inspiration arises. In short: the Point of Sale (POS) has shifted to the Point of Discovery. This way of shopping is also called Commerce Everywhere (Gartner), E*commerce (Forrester), or Everywhere commerce.

The AI Agent as a Personal Shopper

Almost everyone is now familiar with chatbots like ChatGPT that can talk and type. The difference with an AI agent is that it actually performs tasks for you. See it as a smart assistant that not only advises but also acts.

Currently, you still select products and enter payment details yourself. In the near future, your personal AI agent will independently negotiate the purchase with the webshop's agent. We also call this Agent-to-Agent (A2A) or Agentic commerce.

Impact on Technology and Organizations

The speed at which developments are now progressing requires operational agility: the ability to quickly adapt your organization to changing market conditions.

The impact on IT systems is enormous. A stable webshop is no longer enough. Everywhere Commerce demands that data such as inventory, prices, and promotions are available in real-time in every channel. Is your data incorrect? Then the algorithms of TikTok or Google will immediately punish you with invisibility.

The information exchange between the systems within your organization and external platforms or AI agents happens entirely via APIs: standardized ways to exchange digital data. This requires a technical infrastructure that is designed for this from the ground up, a so-called API-first architecture. Without this technical foundation, your organization is virtually invisible in an ecosystem where IT systems and AI agents communicate autonomously with each other, without human intervention.

Composable Commerce: The Perfect Foundation

As described above, digital commerce in 2026 requires, among other things, an agile organization and an API-first technical architecture.

A strategy that fits this perfectly is Composable Commerce: A business-first strategy conceived by strategic advisory and research firm Gartner in 2020. If you look at the three most important pillars of Composable Commerce, you quickly see why this strategy aligns so well with Everywhere Commerce and Agentic Commerce.

Everything starts with the Customer Journey. Instead of the customer having to adapt to the structure of your webshop, your architecture adapts to the customer. Whether that customer shops via a voice command to an AI agent, a click in an Instagram video, or via a smart mirror; the customer journey is leading. You build your commerce environment not around a system, but around the moments when your customer needs you.

To facilitate this customer journey, you break up your platform into separate Capabilities. These are the specific functions needed to make a purchase, such as 'search', 'payment', 'promotions', or 'inventory check'. Instead of a bulky package where everything works 'reasonably', you choose the very best solution for each functionality. Do your customers need lightning-fast AI search or checkout via facial recognition? Then you add those specific blocks to your landscape. This way, you offer exactly the functionality your target group demands.

To make the customer journey and all those individual functions work smoothly, you need a modern technical foundation. The technology in a composable commerce strategy is based on the MACH approach: Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless. Where old systems are often cumbersome and closed, this modern setup ensures openness and speed. Thanks to the API-first approach, external AI bots and new sales channels can directly access your data, such as current inventory and prices.The headless structure ensures that you are not tied to one website, but can sell everywhere. By building with separate blocks (microservices) in the cloud, you also remain flexible: you can replace or scale up components without affecting the entire platform.

Want to know more about Composable Commerce?

Would you like to delve deeper into the possibilities of this architecture or are you curious about how other retailers have made the switch?

In our article "What is Composable Commerce?", we explain the basic principles in detail. Are you curious about the concrete business value? Then read our blog about the 4 most important benefits or discover why the transition is a smaller step than you think.

Read our cases: Discover how we built a fully scalable platform for Van der Plas and how HANOS is ready for the future with a headless approach.