AI for E-Commerce: Why a Composable Foundation is Essential

Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing the online commerce experience. In just the last few years, generative AI tools have personalized shopping experiences, such as empowering chatbots to provide recommendations to consumer prompts. Now, agentic AI can even autonomously buy products on behalf of shoppers.

Consumers are witnessing unparalleled service online. However, for retailers to provide this convenience and to achieve sustainable AI innovation, e-commerce teams need to work from a technical infrastructure that’s designed to adapt to and handle AI.

In an era of agentic commerce and personalized e-commerce, retailers need to move away from legacy technologies and implement a composable foundation.

E-Commerce Elevates the Convenience of Commerce

From the early days of AI, there’s been a focus on how the technology can create a more personalized experience online. Even Gartner predicted early on that AI would power a 25 percent improvement in customer satisfaction for online retailers.

As AI evolves, the focus on the consumer hasn't changed. In fact, the vision’s grown. One recent report said half of online shoppers use GenAI for shopping, noting that one in four survey respondents feel ChatGPT gives better product recommendations than Google.

Agentic commerce is also altering e-commerce, as services like ChatGPT explore becoming a place to buy products. Additionally, Amazon.com uses agentic AI to enable automatic subscription purchases for consumers, and OpenAI has launched Operator, an AI agent that can autonomously browse and order products for consumers.

It's clear that AI has a say in the future of e-commerce, a channel that's already thriving. The latest from the U.S. Census Bureau shows a nearly 6 percent year-over-year jump in e-commerce sales for Q2 2025. This growth, combined with AI’s computational demands, requires infrastructure that can scale dynamically. Retailers looking to implement AI solutions on top of their e-commerce systems will need to have an architecture that moves beyond the limitations of monolithic platforms and adapts as quickly as AI evolves.

Composability Provides Solid Foundations for AI 

Studying the connection between AI and composability, the MACH Alliance learned that enterprise companies with a composable, MACH architecture are twice as likely to successfully implement and deploy AI.

The same holds true for online retailers; companies using a legacy framework are working from outdated technology. The rigid, monolithic nature of an architecture can get stretched thin and struggle to adapt to the needs of various AI solutions.

Conversely, MACH-based technology supports e-commerce by enabling modular AI services to integrate through APIs. The approach allows retailers to add new AI capabilities without rebuilding their core commerce infrastructure. A composable, MACH-based infrastructure relies on three core principles:

1. Modular design: An e-commerce operation using composable technology leverages the flexibility of multiple solutions that are interoperable, modular, and connected. For example, a retailer’s content management system would be interoperable and work with a payment platform. At the same time, AI agents would work across the components.
2. Open infrastructure: API-first connectivity within a MACH architecture enables real-time communication to happen between modular components, AI agents, and end users. In this realm, as the modular components of an e-commerce operation work together, the open infrastructure invites them to communicate, share data, and enable agentic AI to make autonomous decisions.
3. Cloud-based updates: The needs of AI solutions require a continuous flow of data. MACH architectures allow online retailers to have technology updates happen automatically in the cloud and to provide incremental updates to the AI for more accurate, timely decisions.

Retailers Prepare for Agentic, Online Commerce

Online retailers are already invested in AI and modern commerce experiences. As companies explore where AI can take them, they’ll want to ensure they implement an open, flexible and sustainable composable architecture.

Holly Hall is managing director of MACH Alliance, a not-for-profit industry body that advocates for open and best-of-breed enterprise technology ecosystems.