A customer asked us a question recently that's worth unpacking: is your commerce platform AI ready?
They weren't asking out of nowhere. They'd been seeing advertisements from other large commerce providers, all touting how their product detail pages are AI ready. Embedded attributes, image data, product details in machine-readable format, prepped for AI. The pitch was that everything in the future will run on AI, so you need this now.
I don't disagree with the premise. AI is getting embedded in everything, and that's not slowing down. But when I looked at what was actually being sold as AI ready, most of it was something that's been around for a long time.
The features being touted — machine-readable attributes, structured image and product data, clean product detail pages — are things a properly built commerce site should already have. Google needed that data. Crawlers needed it to decipher a page and rank it. We've had it for years, because you couldn't run a serious commerce site without it.
AI certainly uses that structured data. But it's not a new requirement AI created. AI is adapting and doing what crawlers already did, just interpreting and sifting the information better. The data was on the site. AI is a better reader of it.
None of this means the prep is free. You do need to enrich your catalog, structure your detail pages, and keep your product data clean. That work is real and it matters. But it's the same work good commerce sites have always required.
This is the pattern that keeps showing up in technology. The tools get more capable and more accessible. The underlying principle stays the same. Structured, well-organized content produced better search results before, it produces better AI results now, and the usage patterns behind it haven't really changed.
We do build AI features, and I don't want to undersell that. We have AI search and other capabilities coming that genuinely enhance the experience. Those are real and they're worth being excited about. The point isn't that AI adds nothing. It's that not every feature wearing an AI label is new, and buyers benefit from being able to tell the difference.
So when I could confidently tell that customer their commerce site is AI ready out of the box, I wasn't reaching. Good structured content is what makes something AI compatible, and a full platform that's been refined over years already has it.
The hype around every feature being AI is an interesting marketing tactic, and it's not going away. Regardless of what we call it, everyone in commerce is working toward the same place: content and systems that are compatible with AI, or AI that becomes compatible with them. Sometimes that's already handled out of the box. Sometimes it's genuinely new development.
This is a data point many are weighing right now, and all buyers should weigh it. When you're evaluating a platform, look past the AI label. The companies that treated clean, structured content as a long-term asset instead of a last-minute AI checkbox will be the ones who were ready all along, because with a tier-one commerce offering, we've been working through these details for many years. The label is new. The work isn't.