At our last Ecommerce Growth Pod session, led by Kingston Lee-Young, we took a deep dive into Ecommerce Ecosystem Mapping and AIs impacts on Ecommerce.
The discussion highlighted the importance of clearly mapping the ecommerce landscape and how AI is reshaping the way teams and businesses operate.
Here are the key takeaways from the session:
Ecommerce Ecosystem Mapping:
🟢Whether you are the ecommerce retailer or the supplier, it helps to map out your relevant ecommerce ecosystems so you and your business can understand the wider picture. This can be done in PowerPoint or using an online tool like Miro.
🟢Map your different channels: D2C, B2B, B2B2C, Omnichannel, Wholesale, via Food Service Apps etc.
🟢From here you can assess the opportunities, identify gaps, overlay the performance data, see where you have influence, better understand ROI, and use this to plan future investments, budget allocation and priorities.
🟢Doing the mapping can also help internal cross-functional teams and leadership better understand the overall ecommerce operating picture.
Ecommerce AI Key Takeaways:
🟡Larger corporates and multi-nationals have a more conservative, slower, cautious approach to AI usage and implementation. Will this be a disadvantage for them?
🟡Technology improvements and AI are changing the rules and commercial operating models. No longer are there requirements to grow teams along with revenue growth, in-fact the trend is moving towards implementing more tech and AI to assist existing teams to make them more productive.
hashtagAIAgents are all the rage in 2025, especially in Ecommerce. Creating your own using ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot or Anthropic’s ClaudeAI, should be on every person’s action list in 2025.
🟡The capabilities of AI Agents for Shoppers are improving. ie: being able to retrieve specific knowledge and data from different systems, being able to research on the web, being able to propose products or services, being able to fill in forms, being able to ‘speak’ to other AI Agents, being able to compare pricing, and being able to make recommendations. Eventually, it will get to a point where the UI interface for ecommerce shopping will be via AI Agents, especially when they can transact on the shopper’s behalf.
🟡Likewise on the retailer front, AI Agents can: track and monitor inventory levels, analyse sales trends, create custom reports, learn shopper behaviour and purchase patterns, help answer customer complaints and issues, help recommend and personalise products for shoppers, and begin to automatically adjust google ads and social media ad campaigns.
🟡AI solutions for ecommerce and digital marketing are improving each month, providing capability across content generation, catalogue descriptions, customer interactions, search and recommendations, analytics and ad campaign optimisation.
If you’re responsible for hashtagecommerce and would like to join our MindPick GrowthPod and network with others in the industry, please reach out.