{"id":54406,"date":"2026-09-24T15:20:24","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T14:20:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/?p=54406"},"modified":"2026-09-24T15:20:25","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T14:20:25","slug":"ai-ambition-is-outpacing-the-commerce-foundations-needed-to-deliver-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/2026\/09\/24\/ai-ambition-is-outpacing-the-commerce-foundations-needed-to-deliver-it\/","title":{"rendered":"AI ambition is outpacing the commerce foundations needed to deliver It"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Akeneo, a Product Experience (PX) leader, has released its Agentic Commerce Reality Check Report, revealing that as organisations race to operationalise AI, the product data, integrations and governance underpinning commerce are becoming the real test of AI readiness.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Akeneo’s survey of 1,000 senior IT decision-makers across the US and Europe, 95% of respondents globally are confident their organisations are ready for AI-driven commerce and 87% expect AI budgets to increase over the next one to two years. The US shows even stronger levels of confidence and investment, with 62% very confident in their readiness and 92% anticipating increased AI budgets. Behind that confidence, IT teams are confronting the work required to make AI reliable across complex commerce environments, from preparing and governing product information to connecting existing systems and scaling new AI-driven experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The findings point to a new phase of AI adoption. The question is no longer whether organisations believe in AI, but whether their commerce foundations, particularly related to product information quality, technological integrations and data governance standards, can keep pace as AI becomes embedded across the business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AI is exposing the complexity beneath modern commerce<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

AI has quickly moved from isolated experimentation into a core IT responsibility. Two-thirds (66%) of US organisations say IT owns AI strategy, while 80% say IT participates in approving or governing AI initiatives. More than a third (35%) of US senior IT decision-makers say AI has fundamentally reshaped their day-to-day role, with another 41% taking on additional responsibilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For IT teams, scaling AI means making it work within the systems the business already relies on, from ERP, PIM and DAM environments to supplier feeds, commerce platforms, and downstream channels. AI did not create fragmented data, manual workflows or brittle integrations, but it is making the cost of those existing challenges harder to ignore as more systems and agents depend on the same information. And new AI-driven and agentic experiences are not replacing existing commerce environments; they are adding another layer of complexity and placing even greater demands on the product information those environments already depend on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AI readiness comes with a data tax<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nearly half (44%) of US organisations spend more than half of total AI project effort on data preparation. For commerce organisations, much of that work involves resolving missing attributes, inconsistent taxonomies, conflicting product information and regional pricing or compliance requirements before AI can reliably use the information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“US IT leaders clearly aren’t lacking confidence, ambition or investment in AI. What they’re confronting now is the work required to turn that confidence into something scalable,” said Romain Fouache, CEO of Akeneo. “Every new AI use case depends on the quality of the information beneath it. If organisations are repeatedly cleaning, reconciling and restructuring the same data for every initiative, they’re not building a scalable AI capability. They’re rebuilding the foundation every time. Product information has always been fundamental to commerce. What AI changes is the scale, speed and number of systems that depend on it, making trusted, governed product data more important than ever to compete and win.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AI is creating a new discovery layer<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That pressure is becoming particularly clear as US organisations prepare for AI-powered product discovery. Nearly half (48%) are actively investing in generative engine optimisation (GEO), the highest level among the markets surveyed, with 59% of US IT decision-makers saying they are very familiar with GEO. But GEO is only one response to a broader shift in how products are discovered and considered, as AI assistants increasingly interpret intent, compare options and influence purchase decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moving quickly does not guarantee visibility. Twenty-nine percent of US organisations cite limited skills or understanding as a barrier to scaling GEO, while 27% point to a lack of cross-functional alignment. As this new discovery layer takes shape, incomplete or inconsistent product information becomes the sole deciding factor behind whether a product enters the consideration set at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As investment in AI continues to grow, organisations that build a reusable foundation of trusted information, resilient integrations and operational governance will be better positioned to scale without recreating the same work for every new use case. The findings underscore that the next phase of AI readiness will depend less on adding more tools and more on strengthening the trusted product data, integrations and governance that commerce already depends on, so that the same foundation can reliably support people, channels and increasingly, AI agents.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Akeneo, a Product Experience (PX) leader, has released its Agentic Commerce Reality Check Report, revealing that as organisations race to operationalise AI, the product data, integrations and governance underpinning commerce are becoming the real test of AI readiness. According to Akeneo’s survey of 1,000 senior IT decision-makers across the US and Europe, 95% of respondents […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4189,"featured_media":54407,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1645,43],"tags":[11920,12986,9760,12983,6674,2747,12987,12985,12984],"class_list":["post-54406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-insights","category-top-stories","tag-agentic-commerce","tag-ai-in-commerce","tag-ai-readiness","tag-akeneo","tag-data-governance","tag-e-commerce","tag-generative-engine-optimisation","tag-product-data","tag-product-information-management"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4189"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54406"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54408,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54406\/revisions\/54408"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/north-america\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}