We all know that AI is powering individual nodes within the customer experience. What felt materially different about this hack day was our ability to prove that commerce can shift away from a world of navigation menus, pages and sections, toward one shaped by interaction, adaptability, and behavior.
For much of the last decade, ecommerce innovation has centered on optimization. Brands and agencies refined conversion funnels, standardized UX patterns, improved merchandising logic, accelerated checkout flows, and built increasingly sophisticated systems for performance marketing and personalization. These advances created enormous operational maturity across digital commerce, but they also produced a high degree of uniformity. Many digital experiences became highly efficient while simultaneously becoming harder to distinguish from one another, and we unwittingly created a highly commoditized commerce experience.
AI introduces the possibility of brand differentiation returning to the experience layer.
Brands should invest in their personality, not a commodified online presence
One of the clearest themes that emerged from the hack day was that AI fundamentally changes how brands express themselves digitally. Historically, brands have represented themselves online through design systems: typography, layout, color, motion, photography, and copy, expressed through familiar and relatively homogenous content blocks. Agentic systems shift that dynamic considerably.
As conversational interfaces, adaptive agents, and context-aware commerce experiences become more integrated into the customer journey, brands are increasingly defined by how they behave: how they respond to ambiguity, guide a decision, build trust over the course of a single interaction, and keep the relationship going with a new customer — as much as, if not more than, by the aesthetics governed by their design systems.
In many ways, this represents a return to a much older understanding of branding, one rooted less in graphic systems and more in a strong personality, clear message, and a unique way of speaking to the customer.
In this new phase of branding, the most effective AI commerce experiences won't be the ones that feel most technologically advanced — they'll be the ones that translate brand identity into interaction patterns that feel coherent, emotionally intelligent, and invisible to the user. Tone of voice, memory, pacing, recommendation logic, curiosity, and conversational nuance all begin to function as core brand assets, expanding what we need to consider when designing interfaces.
Personalization is becoming contextual rather than only predictive
The hack day also reinforced how dramatically AI expands the possibilities around personalization.
For years, personalization within commerce has largely operated through segmentation models and predictive systems. Brands relied on behavioral targeting, recommendation engines, customer cohorts, and increasingly complex automation frameworks to tailor experiences at scale. Part of this complexity comes from the need to stitch multiple personalization vendors together into one coherent system - which honestly I haven’t seen done successfully, no matter how hard we’ve all tried. Effective at growing specific conversion KPIs, sure, but still constrained by predefined logic and historical assumptions, even as vendors sprinkle in AI. Fully agentic systems governed from a single source of truth get us closer to something else: truly adaptive experiences, bringing us closer to my career-long dream of One Site Per Customer™.
What became compelling over the course of the day was watching agents, structured knowledge, and lightweight orchestration combine into experiences that evolve fluidly around the customer’s immediate context, rather than predicting customer wants and needs based on prior behavior. The storefront stops being a static environment built around predetermined pathways and starts facilitating discovery, guidance, and decision-making in real time. The interaction becomes substantially more conversational, but also more situational, so two customers with different objectives or confidence levels can land in genuinely different experiences. That degree of adaptability is a meaningful departure from the standardized ecommerce architectures the industry (and practitioners like myself) has spent years refining. Personally, I love the disruption.
AI commerce reopens the question of experience
Perhaps the most important takeaway was the sense that AI is reopening foundational questions about the nature of digital experience itself.
Over time, the discipline of UX has matured into a highly operationalized practice governed by systems, heuristics, templates, and optimization frameworks. In many respects, that maturity benefited the industry enormously. Digital experiences became more usable, more scalable, and more commercially effective. At the same time, much of the web became structurally familiar.
I actually championed this standardization. My career started with designing very unique Flash sites for fashion houses like Versace, Bvlgari, Emillio Pucci, and landed me in a full-time role at Ralph Lauren, doing more of the same. We were designing immersive worlds that expanded on campaign photography, rich and beautiful interactive expriences, not commerce interfaces.
As “Best Practices” converged across the industry (a term I once derided as a Creative, and then embraced as a UX’er) true brand differentiation moved away from the site experience and toward brand marketing, acquisition strategy, and media spend. Interaction design became progressively more standardized.
Now, AI could reverse that trajectory.
As interfaces become more conversational and adaptive, Experience once again becomes a primary source of strategic differentiation. The brands leading this next phase of commerce will not be those implementing AI functionality onto existing systems, but those willing to rethink how the branded digital interaction itself should feel.
That requires entirely new heuristics for design and customer engagement — ones built around trust, responsiveness, and conversational coherence, alongside more traditional UX considerations. The discipline itself starts evolving away from screen optimization and toward the orchestration of intelligent interactions across multiple contexts and surfaces. In that sense, the current moment feels historically familiar: a paradigm shift back to the rich, unique, immersive branded experiences I started my career on.
Final thoughts
There is a parallel between what the industry is experiencing now and the transition period that reshaped digital commerce during the late 2000s, when smartphones, social platforms, and modern product thinking fundamentally changed how brands approached customer interaction online.
The emergence of agentic commerce carries a similar sense of foundational change. The tooling is evolving rapidly, the conventions are still unsettled, and many of the interaction models that will eventually define this category are only beginning to take shape. The best practices are still being written, and that uncertainty is precisely what makes the moment so compelling.
The architecture being explored today, across agencies, platforms, brands, and technology partners, will inform the next generation of digital commerce experiences. What feels experimental now will eventually become infrastructure.
And for the first time in quite a while, the industry feels genuinely transformative again.
