Elevated: Learnings from Elevate – The Global Commerce Summit™

Last week, I arrived in Miami excited and ready to kick off Elevate — The Global Commerce Summit™. This event was born out of a five-year vision, exceptionally executed after a year of strategic planning (thank you Katrina Spadaro , Mara Schüßler , Rachel S. and so many others) and the collaborative efforts of a number of teams across the business, as well as the continued commitment from our customer and partner ecosystem.  

In reflection, I'm really proud to say the inaugural event far exceeded my already high expectations. The weather was spectacular, the venue was beautiful and the content was anything but the usual fluff — Heather Hershey ’s keynote is a must-watch! Attendees from all over the world represented influential brands across various global industries, SIs, ISVs and consultancies, as well as other industry visionaries and thought leaders. The energy throughout the entire event was palpable.

Speakers were refreshingly candid, sharing tangible insights and learnings, but didn’t shy away from expanding on challenges they’ve experienced or bold predictions for the future. This year marked just the beginning of the long-term vision for Elevate, and the dedication and talent of the commercetoolers behind it were evident. My colleagues are truly some of the best and brightest in the industry, and they should be acknowledged for their contributions to making this event a success.

My Wednesday started at 8am with Dirk’s LinkedIn Live interview with Insider Intelligence’s Jeremy Goldman which previewed what was to come over the next two days (worth a watch if you missed it!). Following that, I had the pleasure of being joined on the keynote stage by executives - Greg Fancher from PetSmart, Jawed Yusufi from Ticketmaster and Jeffrey Hamm from Ulta Beauty to discuss their #DigitalCommerce journeys and how they’re leveraging composable commerce to create best-in-class experiences for their customers. I participated in a panel discussing the future of the MACH Alliance with Kelly Goetsch , Casper Aagaard Rasmussen and Jon Panella . Additionally, I moderated a breakout session with panelists Elaina Shekhter of EPAM, Sarah Hickey from Dawn Foods, and Mark A. Pickett from Black Phoenix Partners, focusing on marketing topics close to my heart. Finally, I had the opportunity to speak with SiliconANGLE & theCUBE about how our customers are leveraging #ComposableCommerce to create unique and modern customer experiences. 

Needless to say, there was no shortage of content!

One big highlight of the day was undoubtedly our special guest, Basketball Hall of Famer, retired NBA star and philanthropist, Dirk Nowitzki! It was also quite entertaining to see both Dirks shoot paper ball baskets to raise money for Nowitzki’s charity, the Dirk Nowitzki Foundation .

Elevate delivered exactly what we had hoped for, and we're excited to do it all over again next year, even bigger and better.

“This eCommerce summit truly lived up to its name, elevating my understanding of the digital and retail landscape.” — Laetitia Lamari , eCommerce Analyst, Podcast Host & Speaker, Le Café de l' E-Commerce 

Now that I’ve had time to unwind, here are a few of my top session takeaways.

1 -  Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.

Michael Sharp , Chief Product Officer at commercetools, gave a keynote address, aptly titled — Simplify, Lead, Excel, embodying the journey we are on here at commercetools.  

These are the three focus areas for product development. Mike stressed that simplifying is not about removing things or putting them into one box, but about making things easier to access and implement.

A perfect example is the launch of the new commercetools Foundry B2B Blueprint for Manufacturing, which he announced on stage. We first introduced commercetools Foundry, a pre-composed solution for B2C use cases in January. Now, it has been extended to support #B2B use cases with a specific focus on manufacturing.

“We're regularly adding capabilities, features and functionality that allow you to do more with less effort.”

— Mike Sharp, CPO, commercetools 

2 - Community is important to commerce.

This is something that’s become very apparent as consumers are turning more often to social media and influencers to help them discover products and validate their shopping decisions. During the session, Commerce Unleashed: Exploring the Future of Retail, Chris Colyer , Google Cloud ’s WW Head of Retail Partnerships, explained that this desire for a social connection is why Google has coined the term conversational commerce, launching a new AI-driven chatbot solution that can have more “helpful and nuanced conversations with shoppers”.

“The way shoppers interact today with eCommerce, it's pretty boring. You look at rows and columns. It’s going to be significantly different in the future. You're going to end up with a personal shopper. They're not only going to know what you like, they're going to know your sizing, the fit, the type of textures you like. You’re going to be able to say, 'Hey, I need to go to a wedding in Miami in August,' and it will give you all these personalized recommendations. That's why we use the words conversational commerce — it's actually going to make it pretty cool.”

— Chris Colyer, WW Head of Retail Partnerships, Google 

3 - And, community is important to the composable ecosystem.

It’s in the same spirit of opening up lines of conversation and sharing personalized advice with our customers and partners that commercetools decided to launch commercetools Community, which Michael Sharp also announced during his keynote. 

“This is a place where prospects, customers and partners can come together to share insights, ask questions, get feedback and share ideas on implementation and how to be successful inside of our ecosystem.” 

— Michael Sharp, CPO, commercetools 

4 - AI is everywhere. Embrace it and understand relevant applications.

AI wasn’t the focus of every session, but it was a major part of the conversation. Dirk kicked things off during his keynote by sharing how commercetools’ product team recreated the commerce site of one of the world’s biggest sporting goods companies — in less than six hours — using generative AI (Gen AI).

From there, we heard from multiple customers and vendors explaining how they’re using the technology, the challenges they’re having and their overall sentiments around it. In the session, Beyond Keywords: Future Trends Shaping E-Commerce Search and Discovery, Piyush Patel , Chief Strategic Business Developer Officer at #Algolia, discussed how there’s a lot of customer education that needs to be done in explaining how AI is different from Gen AI and even predictive analytics — and how to apply them to search and discovery. 

“As a search company, we don’t want Gen AI creating results for our customers — if you don’t sell that product, you don’t want it to come up as a result. But once they have the right set of results, our customers can use our Gen AI frontends to create comparison charts to help that consumer make a decision.”

— Piyush Patel, Chief Strategic Business Developer Officer, Algolia

Heather Hershey , Digital Commerce Research Director at #IDC, took the #AI conversation to a whole new level during her keynote when she introduced Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — as the direction AI is heading in. She reviewed the multiple issues with Gen AI — how it can only pull from existing data, which includes bad data, and delivers a lot of hallucinations. “It’s really important to understand that generative AI is not made to be innovative. It's a pretty cool technology, but it's to help human operators. You need a human operator to do the prompt engineering, to do the moderating.” 

Heather explained that the current AI we use is narrow AI, which means it is designed for specific tasks, while AGI can perform as well or better than humans on many “general” tasks. In this future state, which she predicts we’ll start to see in 2029, AI is the tool the algorithms of tomorrow will leverage to achieve AGI. 

“This is the kind of artificial intelligence [AGI] that wouldn't really need as many humans. The kind of AI that would make most of us in this room obsolete because it is capable of doing its own context. It is capable of reasoning. It is capable of self-moderation. It will be able to solve its own problems.”

— Heather Hershey, Research Director, IDC

5 - Composable changes everything for the better.

commercetools introduced headless commerce back in 2013. Since then, we’ve been at the forefront of the modernization of commerce tech stacks. We’ve been steadfast in the power of composable commerce. Even so, I never tire of hearing stories of how our composable commerce solutions have benefited our customers, and these were aplenty at Elevate. We heard incredible stories of successful digital transformations from leading retailers, manufacturers, telecommunications companies and more. Each story was unique, but what they all had in common was that migrating to composable commerce enabled them to constantly deliver exceptional customer experiences that were previously unachievable.

One of the most impressive statistics of the week came from John Lewis Partnership. Simon Skelton , Platform & Operations Manager (whose tandem presentation with Simon Fulford , Delivery & Operations Manager, was both compelling and entertaining) shared that during their “monolithic era,” the company was only able to achieve 10 big releases per year. In 2023, their teams did over 17,000 deployments thanks to the flexibility and scalability of composable commerce. 

“Long lead times often meant the world had moved on by the time we'd implemented it. The size and the complexity meant that sometimes they led to outages or even worse, having to roll back that release, putting us even further behind our competition. Today, with our microservices model we have over 40 agile product teams who build and run their own services. Last year, I'm pleased to say we did over 17,000 deployments,  which were small opportunities for us to test and learn and experiment. This just gives us much more  business agility so we can pivot to our business priorities as required.”

— Simon Skelton, Platform & Operations Manager, John Lewis Partnership

6 - When times are tough, the tough work harder.

What impressed me most about our Dirk’s interview with Dirk Nowitzki was his attitude, determination and perseverance. He stressed that anyone who has high goals is bound to have setbacks, challenges and losses. The key is recovering from them and moving forward.

“I’ve always found that after a few weeks, the initial disappointment goes away. Then you have to find a way to draw inspiration and motivation from those losses: 'Okay, let's put this behind us. It’s time to work,' instead of, 'What could I have done better? Look in the mirror? What can I do better?'”

— Dirk Nowitzki, Basketball Hall of Famer, Retired NBA Star and Philanthropist

With eight keynotes, 24 breakout tracks, seven innovation tracks and a 14-hour training course, there were countless opportunities for attendees to learn about the future of commerce, and get inspiration to take home and translate into greater digital success. To get more insights from our speakers, visit elevate.commercetools.com where we’ll be sharing additional content over the coming weeks and months, and stay tuned for more news on Elevate 2025!