CommerceNext Steps Part 2: Top Takeaways from the 2025 Growth Show

At the 2025 CommerceNext Growth Show, we asked our speakers to distill their advice into clear, actionable takeaways: CommerceNext Steps. In this second edition, we’re sharing even more insights from our breakout sessions that move beyond the big ideas—offering practical strategies to drive real-world impact.

Explore each day’s theme and gain strategies to help you lead through today’s most urgent retail challenges.

DAY 1:  The Future of Customer Experiences

Minimizing the Tradeoff: Balancing Retail Media ROI with a Seamless Brand Experience

• Communication is key. Your ecommerce search engine and ad tech must communicate with each other.
• Relevance drives incremental revenue. Relevance fuels both conversion and brand trust.
• Treat sponsored listings like organic results. Hold them to the same standards.
• Shift from media revenue to overall profitability. Think beyond media ROAS. What’s good for the shopper is good for the bottom line.

 

Decoding Gen Z Professionals: The Future of Retail Through Their Eyes

• Gen Z does their research. 92% will research products before they buy to validate if the product is worth the price. 
• To land with Gen Z, a brand needs to be authentic to itself, its North Star and its audience. 53% of Gen Z embrace brands that use Gen Z lingo if that aligns with its core audience and its North Star.
• Align your influencers with your brand. Brands also have an opportunity to gain more traction with smaller influencers.

 

Unlocking Growth: How Leading Brands Turn First-Party Data into Powerful Outcomes

• Progress over perfection. Don’t wait for perfect systems. Start small, move fast and iterate as you go.
• Test smarter, not bigger. Use lean testing to challenge assumptions and uncover hidden growth levers.
• Build internal advocacy. Bring finance and cross-functional teams into the process early to drive buy-in.
• Let the data surprise you. Attribution can reveal unexpected behaviors. Follow the insights, not the assumptions.

 

Smarter at Scale: How AI Decisioning Is Reshaping Customer Journeys

• Not everything needs AI. Focus on problems that truly require complex decision-making and assess if AI delivers ROI now.
• When using external partners, negotiate a pilot and an MVP. Build flexibly. Your first version won’t be perfect.
• Ensure customer data is clean, reliable and accessible. It’s essential for powering and interpreting personalization tools.

 

Being Customer Obsessed in the Age of AI

• Listen to the customers. Analyze voice, behavior and sentiment data at scale, then act with empathy and speed.
• Be in the moment. Real-time responsiveness is now imperative. Use AI to anticipate needs, trigger relevant actions and be present at critical decision points.
• Stay relevant to every customer. Context-aware, dynamic experiences help each customer feel uniquely seen and served.
• Agentic AI allows you to deliver on your customer promise. Empower AI to act on behalf of your brand, but only after aligning it with your core values and customer intent.

 

From B2C to A2A: How Agentic Shopping Makes Catalog Quality More Important Than Ever

• Build for what’s next. Agentic AI tools rely on structured, high-quality product data. Prioritize investments that future-proof your catalog for machine interpretation.
• Get your data right. A unified, enriched and continuously maintained catalog is now a competitive advantage. 
• Drive the change. Don’t wait for industry standards to catch up. Lead internal alignment across tech, content and merchandising teams to operationalize AI-readiness now.

 

Beyond Borders: Navigating Omnichannel Growth in a Tariff-Driven Economy

• Get the right product data. Invest in good operational product data and ensure it is accurate (i.e. Country of Origin (COO)).
• Ensure a smarter fulfillment strategy: Explore in-region options to reduce tariff exposure and improve delivery speed.
• Stay informed and adaptive. Consult with experts in your own business or partners to remain up to date on constantly changing regulations, reduce risk and improve cash flow.

 

The Loyalty Shift: Transforming Transactions into Lasting Relationships

• Your brand has only one chance to create a memorable introduction. Make a strong first impression and drive emotional connection.
• Design loyalty programs around moments, not just transactions. Focus on building emotional loyalty by celebrating meaningful experiences.
• Gifting is a strategic growth lever. Use thoughtful gifting as a tool to deepen relationships and open doors.

 

Incrementality is the New Performance Marketing Benchmark: How COS Approaches Acquisition 

• Culture > Tools. Incrementality is now table stakes, but being effective starts with a high-trust culture and the right partners.
• Focus on impact, not channel. To maximize acquisition, diversify your channel mix and learn how channels can drive each other’s growth. 
• Never stop learning. Prioritize nimble, iterative test-and-learn approaches; even if you don’t have your ideal measurement capabilities, smaller insights can still spark unlocks and innovation.

 

Beyond the AI Hype: Turning the AI Buzzword into Real Growth

• Balance brand and performance. In luxury, growth requires trade-offs. Use data to defend tactics that may feel commercial but drive critical results.
• Blend art and algorithm. Pair curated experiences with AI-powered recommendations to serve both brand storytelling and shopper behavior.
• Test your way in. Use low-risk, high-impact entry points like on-site search and triggered messages to prove AI’s value and translate outcomes into brand-aligned impact.

 

How Minted Drives Conversions Profitably with Behavioral AI

• Streamline operations to focus your team’s energy on strategy, not execution. Manual deployment of promotions is not effective. 
• Be intentional with incentives. Excessive discounts can dilute brand value. We are giving away too much in promotions.
• Adopt AI-driven tools to achieve smarter, more profitable customer engagement. AI Agents will finally deliver the kind of targeting we’ve always envisioned, optimizing for both revenue and margin.

 

Customer Acquisition: Adopting the Metallica ‘Nothing Else Matters’ Mindset

• Know that eventually you will lose EVERY customer. Identify your best customers. Adjust acquisition strategies to get more of them. 
• Proactively identify hidden risks that drain resources and erode performance. Avoid sinkholes that can really hurt your business.
• Unify your data and marketing channels to improve the customer experience. Break down silos to create a seamless journey that keeps customers coming back.

 

Leveraging Trust to Drive Conversions

• Educate your customer, and go direct. In today’s polarized media landscape, identify the most effective platforms and tools to combat misinformation and directly inform your audience.
• Balance authentic storytelling and robust product verification. An effective purpose-driven merchandising strategy must balance authentic storytelling with robust product verification and consistent claims across all platforms to maintain trust and ensure conversion.
• Lead with values. Leading with values through purpose-driven merchandising and marketing strategies directly drives meaningful revenue growth and positive bottom-line results.

 

Paid, Organic, Local, Gen AI: Why the Best Acquisition Strategy Is All of the Above

• Maximize your discoverability by aligning all search efforts under one cohesive plan. Dominating search results requires total SERP visibility, driving a unified paid + organic + local strategy.
• You can leverage computing and analysis capabilities of AI models to perform cross-channel SERP performance analysis at scale. Taking this approach with a fully integrated search marketing program can drive measurable growth.
• Embrace Gen AI to accelerate creative and content velocity. Use AI to generate, adapt and optimize—enabling faster testing and better alignment with evolving search intent.

 

From Experimentation to Full Vibes at Rue Gilt Groupe: How AI is Accelerating Productivity and Performance

• Add Product Content Optimization to your tech stack. This will help bridge the gap between consumers, merchants, marketers and machines.
• Strengthen your product detail pages to amplify visibility and performance across every channel. Prioritize optimizing PDP content to impact search everywhere (SEM, SEO, GEO). 
• Start with Google, but don’t stop there. Capture intent where it starts, but expand reach to where your customers actually are.

 

What’s Next Is Now: LLMs for Precision Targeting and Measurable Marketing Impact

• Say yes to testing! (If it’s easy). Start small and fast. LLM tools that plug into existing workflows can unlock quick wins without major lift or risk. Let ease of integration guide your experimentation roadmap.
• Choose your domain wisely. Focus LLM efforts where your teams have strong data, clear objectives and an appetite for change.
• Focus on broad AI applications. Transform the areas where you allocate big portions of your budget.

 

From Viral to Viable: How Fulfillment Powers Bask & Lather’s Omnichannel Breakout

• Stress test your ops. Viral growth is only as successful as the foundation you’ve built. Run simulations or secret shops to see how things are performing.
• Stop guessing, start forecasting. Use tools or partners that match sales spikes to specific activities for better planning.
• Fulfillment is a product. Your unboxing experience, shipping speed and order accuracy are just as critical as product quality and marketing.

 

From Storefront to Inbox: Maximizing Retention with Connected Experiences

• Know your real audience. Use data to uncover unexpected high-value segments. Don’t rely on assumptions.
• Activate your frontline. Store teams are untapped marketing assets. Empower them to deepen connections with top-tier customers.
• Serve value, not just discounts. High-value shoppers seek utility and relevance, not just low prices.

 

Hook, Convert, Repeat: Tactical Talks on Winning Customers

• Shift spend with attention. Consumers are spending more time on the open web. Rebalance media mix to match behavior and unlock untapped conversion potential.
• Retarget the invisible. Most site visitors are anonymous. Use identity tech to recover lost revenue by reactivating abandoned flows beyond cookie windows.
• Rethink top-of-funnel. Lean into overlooked channels like podcast ads, package inserts and publisher emails for efficient reach and high-intent traffic.

 

GenAI as a Growth Lever: How Billion-Dollar Brands are Re-Imagining Growth & GTM Strategies

• Start with outcomes. Anchor GenAI initiatives in specific business goals, whether that’s conversion lift, speed to market or market expansion, to ensure tech drives tangible growth.
• Think time to value vs ROI. Prioritize fast, visible impact over long-term theoretical returns.
• Look for flexibility. Choose GenAI tools and partners that adapt to your workflows, not the other way around.

 

Ops Stack Unlocked: Tools that Make Ecommerce Tick

• Think beyond UX—compliance is conversion. A seamless checkout must be accurate. 
• Invest in real-time orchestration. Move beyond OMS. Bridge inventory, promise dates and fulfillment into a single nervous system.
• Audit your fragmentation. Where is demand happening vs. where are you investing?
• Treat order management like marketing. Orchestration is your new acquisition and retention engine.

 

Omnichannel Gets Smarter: What AI Agents Mean for Retail’s Future

• Meet customers where they’re discovering and deciding by showing up in emerging AI ecosystems. Participate in third-party agentic channels like ChatGPT.
• Experiment with first-party agentic experiences like branded shopping assistants. Create branded, intelligent assistants that guide and convert high-intent users.
• Enable autonomous agents to transact by making checkout flows agent-friendly. Prepare for a future where agents—not just humans—complete purchases.

 

The New LTV Playbook: AI, Services & the Path to Profit

• Invest in differentiated experiences that reward loyalty and build emotional connection. Give your best customers the best experiences.
• Use smart automation to scale personalization while protecting your bottom line. Reduce costs and drive profits with personalized, automated experiences that protect against fraud.
• Weed out bad actors and cultivate your most valuable customers with AI-optimized post-purchase experiences. Let AI work behind the scenes to safeguard growth and strengthen customer retention.

 

DAY 2: Balancing Automation and Human Touch

How to Connect with Consumers 365 Days a Year

• Nurture the in-between moments. Engage customers even when you’re not launching products; deliver timely, relevant content that reflects their journey.
• Turn customer support into content. Use service inquiries and social listening to fuel helpful how-tos, building trust and long-term loyalty.
• Create “anthem moments” across channels. Orchestrate unified, personalized experiences across all touchpoints to reinforce your brand as a trusted partner, not just a seller.

 

Leading in the Age of AI: Human-Centric Strategies for Retail Excellence

• AI transformation requires human-centered leadership. AI success isn’t just technical—it demands leaders who can connect innovation to human needs, communicate clearly and build trust across the organization.
• Upskilling and mindset shifts are critical. Equip teams with AI fluency while fostering a culture open to experimentation, failure and iteration.
• Successful AI integration starts with purposeful, empathetic leadership. Leaders must set a clear vision for how AI will enhance, not replace, human work, guiding adoption with transparency, context and care.

 

Rearchitecting Retail: Preparing for the Age of Agentic AI and A2C Commerce

• Get your product data ready with AI-optimized feeds. Create semantic product data and images to support machine-readability. Implement schema.org markup across all PDPs and category pages for discoverability.
• Prepare supply chain data for agents: price, inventory, EDD, returns & warranty. Study emerging MCP standards and build APIs to be fast and easily accessible.
• Ready backend systems to orchestrate fulfillment and deliver on promise. Define critical scenarios for orchestrating fulfillment and evaluate capabilities.

 

The AI Glow-Up: Pattern Beauty’s Secret To Personalized, Scalable Engagement

• Start with data. Build rich profiles using first- and zero-party data like quizzes, behavior and feedback to drive personalized engagement.
• Scale with intent. AI enables dynamic, moment-based merchandising—tailored by channel, season and user type—without sacrificing brand voice.
• Drive action. Tools like exit-intent popups, smart recommendations and social-style PDPs boost conversions by anticipating user needs in real time.

 

How Digital-First Brands Win With Linear and Streaming TV

• Never rely on a single measurement model. Linear and CTV are notoriously hard to measure—using only one model gives a skewed view. 
• Say goodbye to traditional creative formulas. Today’s viewers multitask and tune out. Creative must evoke emotion, tell human stories and stand out with strong audio and distinctive brand assets.
• Combine linear and CTV for better results. Unifying linear and CTV ensures consistent storytelling, increases recognition and improves performance across the funnel.

 

Building a Winning Creator Strategy

• Nothing compares to knowing your customers inside and out. Consistently evaluate consumer data to create experiences that truly resonate.
• Break out of the singular focus. Build a diverse and authentic community beyond creators from your niche. Find creator cohorts that match the values of your brand.
• Be strategic. Innovate, experiment and test different ideas with your audience. 

 

Identifying New Marketplace Growth Opportunities

• Data. Data. Data. Use data to understand keyword positioning, pricing elasticity, competitor movement and performance by channel.
• Focus on pulling levers of the ecommerce equation. Optimize traffic with smart keyword targeting (not just high-volume terms) and branded search strategies. Improve conversion with content that clearly communicates value.
• Revenue = traffic x conversion x price x available (repeat for customer lifetime value). This equation should drive your playbook. Invest where your products can win organically, ensure your PDPs do the heavy lifting to convert and avoid missed sales due to poor availability.

 

Winning Fast: How BWS & Torani Transformed Their Brands With AI Personalization

• AI personalization enables you to meet customers where they are by quickly deploying tailored product recommendations. Even with a lean team, this helps accelerate time to market and discovery.
• Instead of building and managing a complex internal tech stack, brands should use AI-powered solutions that deliver fast, scalable results right out of the box. With the right partner, teams can launch effective personalization in weeks, without draining internal resources.
• The future of AI-powered personalization isn’t siloed—it’s strategic. Brands need to unify data and decisions across every channel—web, email, app and SMS—to truly deliver personalized experiences at scale.

 

Harvesting Growth: Turning Scrolls Into Sales

• Combine platforms to maximize sales impact. Social and search are intertwined in the user journey.
• Look outside walled gardens for measurement tools. This will hold you accountable to your KPIs.
• Take the actionable insights and run with them. Where you can’t measure, apply similar learnings.

 

Redefining Reach: Scaling Growth with a Leading Marketplace

• Go where growth is shifting. Reach today’s omnichannel shopper by targeting younger, higher-income and urban segments across diverse platforms.
• Bridge online and offline. Use hybrid retail strategies to connect digital discovery with real-world convenience and fulfillment.
• Support sellers like strategic partners. Pair self-service tools with account-level insights to help partners continuously optimize and scale.

 

Optimizing Search, Discovery & Personalization with AI

• PDP is the new homepage. Shoppers often land directly on product pages—optimize them with social proof, urgency and smart content to drive action fast.
• Rethink the path to purchase. Abandon rigid funnels in favor of intelligent, adaptive flows that respond to real-time behavior and intent.
• Make search intent-driven. Evolve the search box into an “intent box” using semantic and personalized results. Don’t force chat; focus on clarity and conversion.
• Personalize by emotion. AI can identify emotional mindsets like safety or urgency and tailor UX accordingly to unlock deeper 1:1 engagement.

 

Connected TV, Connected Commerce: Winning in the Digital Living Room

• Treat CTV as a full-funnel channel. When paired with smart targeting and retargeting, CTV can drive measurable performance across the entire customer journey.
• Activate your CRM. Leverage first-party data to build high-performing lookalike audiences, suppress current customers and retarget high-intent segments directly on streaming platforms.
• Track beyond impressions. Insist on log-level transparency to measure true outcomes—tying ad exposure to site visits, conversions and offline sales with precision.

 

Beyond the Briefs: How Mack Weldon Built a Performance-First UGC Strategy

• To consistently find top performers, produce 50–100 content variations per month. Only 2% of ads become winners.
• Leverage teams, agencies, influencers, customers and creators to test across formats, styles and messages. High-performing content comes from multiple sources.
• Utilize UGC’s authenticity to connect with audiences traditional ads can’t reach. UGC delivers 27% more incremental reach than branded content.

 

The Bigger RMN Opportunity: Commerce Media is the Future of Media

• Define your data advantage. Analyze and organize your data to make it clear why it matters to advertisers.
• Unlock creative partnerships. Build an ecosystem that will bring new value & insight to your brand partners.
• Leverage aggregatable providers. Enable endemic & non-endemic brands to measure the impact of their messages.

 

Behind the Seams: Stitching AI and Analytics Into CX 

• Adopt AI to stay relevant. Embracing AI isn’t optional. It’s essential to remain competitive and future-ready.
• Start small. Think big. You don’t need a fully trained AI agent to see results. Begin with one focused initiative where AI can make an immediate impact.
• Lean on your tech stack. Partner with vendors who have established AI capability to unlock value without starting from scratch.

 

DAY 3: Future-Fused Commerce: Blending Innovation, Community and Human Connection

Unlocking Customer Loyalty Through Seamless and Secure Digital Experiences

• Make onboarding effortless to reduce drop-off at the moment of intent. Lower barriers to entry for account creation with methods like Google One Tap.
• Offer passwordless authentication options like social login and passkeys. Remove friction from login experiences to keep users engaged.
• Implement adaptive / risk-based MFA to avoid adding friction for repeat users. Balance security and convenience to protect trust without sacrificing usability.

 

How Data-Driven Insights and Integrated Marketing Power Growth 

• Retargeting ≠ remarketing. Effective strategies require distinct approaches for known vs. unknown shoppers.
• Intelligent targeting can bridge the gap. Leveraging behavioral data and shopper identity networks can drive smarter outreach.
• Align the organization on a common goal. Measure for enterprise-level, incremental return across profitable revenue, customer and brand.

 

AI-Powered Personalized Digital Journeys: Beyond the Linear Funnel

• Shift your team’s mindset from building perfect campaigns. Instead, test fast and iterate based on results.
• Rapid iteration reduces risk and increases learning velocity. Companies win by launching many small experiments and doubling down on what works. 
• Create a testing culture where every team member is responsible for running experiments. Equip your team with AI tools that can spin up campaigns and creative variations quickly.

 

How Top Brands Are Winning Customers With AI, Attribution and First-Party Data

• Treat data trust as a core marketing capability. Ensure your marketing data is accurate, consistent and reliable.
• Build a deep understanding of your acquisition drivers. Go beyond surface-level metrics to uncover exactly how and why new customers are finding and choosing you.
• Prioritize profitability in every campaign decision. Track true campaign ROI. Focus on lifetime value and margin contribution to guide smarter growth.

 

These CommerceNext Steps outline the path forward for retail—where innovation and relevance are the keys to staying ahead of today’s dynamic consumer. Want more insights like these? Join us at CommerceNext’s Post-Purchase Forum, happening October 15 in NYC. Apply now to take these strategies to the next level.