Issue #1 – Priorities, Agents, and Growth
Welcome to AI Academy for Commerce, where cutting-edge AI meets the future of retail! Each edition is packed with opportunities to learn. Let’s explore the future of AI.
- External perspectives:
- Gartner’s perspective on what GenAI initiatives retailers should prioritize.
- DigitalCommerce360’s take on Agentic Commerce.
- Brian Walker & Bill Friend (StrategyēMs)s’ article on the rise of CommerceGPTs.
- Journalist Charles Hayes (AInvest) coverage on the venture communities focus on “Foundational AI” for enterprises.
- Cimulate’s perspectives:
- Our co-founder / CTO Vivek Farias (MIT Sloan professor)’s hot take on AEO & GEO for Retail.
- An upcoming LinkedIn live.
How do you begin prioritizing your GenAI initiatives?
Generative AI is no longer just a buzzword in retail. It’s becoming a practical driver of value across customer engagement, operations, and decision-making.
The AI industry is evolving so rapidly that it is difficult to know where to start your AI journey. Gartner’s latest research maps 20 use cases against feasibility and business value, helping retail leaders identify where to invest today.
Key takeaways:
- Fast paths to value are conversational chat for customers, enhanced search and upselling, personalization for customers, and automated text creation.
- Retail leaders should experiment with calculated risk and align investments with a strategy, not just hype.
- Winners will be those who prioritize practical value today while laying the foundation for transformation tomorrow.
Agentic commerce is the next big thing in retail AI
Digital Commerce 360 recently published a report on how agentic commerce is quickly becoming the future of retail AI.
Because AI agents understand intent, they can better provide personalized recommendations to consumers. Agents can handle the heavy lifting of shopping by doing the searching and comparing for them.
Some top insights:
- Traffic from GenAI tools to US retail sites grew 3,300% year over year.
- Longer, natural language searches are replacing keyword-based searches.
- Agentic Commerce shortens the shopper’s path from initial research to final purchase.
Future-proofing your business means optimizing both:
- The customer-facing experience.
- The backend systems to be agent-friendly.
The rise of CommerceGPTs
Brian Walker & Bill Friend from StrategyēM recently dug into how CommerceGPTs are reshaping the way businesses engage with customers and drive sales.
The way consumers engage online is undergoing a huge transformation. A rising number of shoppers are favoring AI engines for product searches over traditional search methods. AI engines allow them to share longer, intent-based prompts, instead of keywords, that often don’t give consumers what they are looking for.
CommerceGPTs are “commerce domain-specific generative AI models – trained and tailored to specific markets and individual businesses, and connected to their data-sources.”
Benefits of a CommerceGPT:
- Understand complex shopper prompts.
- Deliver rich results that replicate the most knowledgeable salespeople.
- Able to adapt to the individual consumer’s evolving needs.
Impact of CommerceGPTs:
- Agentic commerce success requires retailers to optimize for “agent experiences”.
- CommerceGPTs will be a central player in agentic systems.
Investors Are Betting Big on Foundational AI
Enterprise AI adoption is accelerating, and investors are focusing on the infrastructure that makes AI scale. Data-layer startups are emerging as the backbone of this shift, attracting major VC dollars and reshaping how enterprises deploy AI.
Growing trends in the AI market:
- The conversational AI market is expected to grow from $11.58B in 2024 to $41.39B by 2030.
- However, the AI conversational tools market is expected to grow even faster, climbing from $5.72B in 2025 to $29.8B in 2030.
- In H1 2025, 51% of VC deals targeted AI infrastructure and model-agnostic solutions.
The real AI race is happening in the foundational layers where infrastructure and training determine who scales and who stalls.
What is GEO? And why does it matter?
Retail marketers are buzzing about Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). In this new video, Cimulate’s CTO and MIT Professor, Vivek Farias, unpacks these terms and what retailers should prioritize.
- Acronyms like AEO and GEO oversimplify how AI models actually select and present content.
- Retailers need strategies grounded in credibility, structure, and context, not just keyword tweaks.
- Building AI-friendly content means aligning with how generative tools surface trusted sources—not just traditional search engines.
What’s Real vs Rhetoric: The Emerging Concepts of AEO and GEO
AEO (Agentic Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) are the latest AI trends on the scene; however, there is no clear implementation roadmap.
Everywhere you look, companies and tech providers are claiming they have the solution for AEO and GEO. But do they really know?
Vivek Farias, Cimulate CTO, John Andrews, Cimulate CEO, and Brian Walker, Co-Founder & Principal Analyst at StrategyēM and Cocktails & Commerce, will cut through the noise and explore what’s hype, what’s real, and how retailers can prepare for uncertainty.
AI Academy for Commerce
This article is part of the AI academy for commerce where we explore the future of AI and retail.