Elevate — The Global Commerce Summit 2025 | Alistair Groves & Julia Rabkin, commercetools

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Julia Rabkin

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Alistair Groves & Julia Rabkin, commercetools

Alistair Groves

Head of Product commercetools

Julia Rabkin

B2B Product Expert commercetools

Julia Rabkin, B2B product expert at commercetools GmbH, and Alistair Groves, head of product at commercetools, join theCUBE’s Scott Hebner and Jennifer Wu at Elevate — The Global Commerce Summit, for a deep dive into the evolving world of B2B commerce. The conversation unpacks what it takes to stay competitive in a landscape defined by speed, complexity and customer expectations.

Rabkin and Groves discuss the growing importance of unified commerce, composable architecture and data interoperability. Their insights spotlight how commercetools is helpin... Read more

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What are the major differences between B2B and B2C in terms of complexity and impact? add

What are some benefits of bringing together unified commerce into one system? add

What elements do B2B organizations need to work on in order to be ready for AI implementation? add

What are some ways in which commercetools can benefit businesses, particularly in terms of agility, flexibility, handling complexity, and composable technology? add

What are the key factors in achieving successful collaboration and scalability in B2B relationships? add

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Alistair Groves & Julia Rabkin, commercetools

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Patricia Wu

>> Hello and welcome to Elevate - The Global Commerce Summit. We're here at the Miami Beach Convention Center. I'm Patricia Wu, your host, along with Scott Hebner, my co-host and analyst, and saw you sipping your eighth cup of coffee there.

Scott Hebner

>> I'm fired up. I had some sugar, some chocolate.

Patricia Wu

>> All right. Well, I can tell you my afternoon slump not happening today because fired up about this next interview because we've been talking B2C all day. Now we're getting into B2B.

Scott Hebner

>> And from the preamble, I can tell you this is going to be a fun interview.

Patricia Wu

>> Yes. We got the B2B experts right here. Julia Rabkin, the B2B expert, commercetools, and Alistair Groves, head of product commercetools. So let's start with you, Julia. What is different in the B2B landscape? Opportunities, challenges, and maybe three trends that you're seeing.

Julia Rabkin

>> In the B2B landscape, I think what is the most marked difference from B2C is just the complexity and the impact, right? So everything in B2B is much more complex. The buying processes, the ordering flows, everything around purchasing and approvals. There's a lot of compliance, regulation, legal, all of that stuff is factored into the buying process. When you layer in on top of that, that B2B buying usually happens across multiple stakeholders, the complexity grows almost exponentially. So I think complexity is kind of the biggest difference we see in B2B. Another big difference, and obviously depending a lot on industry, is also the impact. So in B2C, let's say you're ordering a pair of leggings or a sport jacket online. If you get the size or the color wrong, no one dies. It's not a big deal. You exchange it, you return it. There are different options. Might not be the best experience, but it's not fatal. In some B2B scenarios, if you configure a product the wrong way, a medical device, or you get the quantity of a chemical wrong or some other kind of configuration, this can have a lot of impact and consequences over time for your customers. People can die, people can get hurt. And so I think in B2B, we have to think a lot more about that complexity. Now, in terms of the trends that we're seeing, I would say it's similar trends to B2C, but with B2B, there's always a different angle or a different flavor. So I would say trend number one is probably unified commerce. I'm sure you've heard that throughout the day today in the B2C context. In the B2C context, unified means whatever the touch point, right? Whether it's online or in store, you have a complete view of that data. Now, when we think about B2B, there are many manufacturers that do not have a physical store. You don't need a physical store to sell vats of chemicals sometimes. And so it's either offline for them or online. And offline for them means through a seller. So I think when we think about what unified commerce actually means for B2B, it's really around this data interoperability flow. So it's about having all of those disparate systems talking to each other, having the data flow seamlessly through API-based integrations, to the point where you get a complete view of all of your customers, all of your products, all of your channels, all of your orders. And then with that complete picture of data, you can actually make better business decisions. So I think that's unified commerce for B2B. The second trend I think that we see is really around going beyond the B2B buyer. Let's take a step back and think about customer centricity. Every business wants to be customer-centric. You want to be where your customers are, you want to deliver what they need, you want to meet their expectations, doesn't matter what you're selling or to whom. But in B2B, because we know that buying is a lot more complex. There are a lot more people involved. The B2B buyer is obviously at the center here, but there are a lot of different people and teams that serve that B2B buyer across their entire journey. From marketing to technology, operations, sales, service support, and also the seller that's actually interacting with the B2B buyer or the digital interface. And so our goal at commercetools and what we envision as the future for B2B commerce, and this is what we're really building our product strategy around, is about empowering that full digital experience for all the teams to be able to deliver that customer centricity, to meet those needs of that B2B buyer across the board and seamlessly. So I think that's the second big thing we're seeing. And the third one I think is largely time to market, time to value. I mean, in a uncertain economic climate, this is obviously paramount for any business. I think B2Bs especially being a lot more risk averse, a lot less digitally mature. Of course they want to go to market faster, but they also want to see the ROI faster. So it's a bigger investment. And I think that this is also what we really try to infuse within our product strategy is this element of speed. So we want to make sure that onboarding is better and faster, implementation is onboarding and faster. And then of course, the day-to-day commerce operation. So anything you need to do, whether it's moving one customer from one business unit to another, we want to make sure that that's as frictionless as possible for every team involved in the process. So that can go to market a lot faster. You can deliver to your customers a lot faster. And I think speed is really the key element to staying successful for B2Bs kind of in this current volatile climate.

Scott Hebner

>> So complexity clearly is much different. And the other thing that's true about B2Bs, it's always changing, right? Nothing's static, very dynamic environment, a lot of moving parts. And that kind of brings me to the composable commerce, which seems even more important in the B2B space than it would be in the B2C. Is that a proper observation?

Alistair Groves

>> I think that's a very fair comment. I mean we have, as Julia gave examples, a very rich kind of broad range of stories that are often happening in the B2B world. It's really about their relationships with the companies that they're selling to, and because of the complexity of what they're selling, but also the nature of those ongoing relationships. They do need to be able to adapt to the needs of their customers. We have other customers of ours that are handling huge ranges of, say for example, chemicals for productions. Depending on the sort of industry they're selling to, the entire range of products might change, but also the process of how you purchase those maybe changes. Because if you're selling to aerospace and defense, it's going to have a very different process of selling to someone who's using those chemicals to make sticky notes or something like that. And we talk a lot in the B2C world about maintaining that connection with the consumer and the brand awareness, but you're doing it on a very broad scale with broad brushstrokes. Whereas in the B2B world, you're often dealing with a smaller subset of customers, and really the cost of losing those in their lifetime has a far greater impact on the business. So you are under far more pressure to adapt to meet the needs of your customers because there are other B2B businesses that are trying to also get to know those customers and get in there. So it's really one of relentless change and something that some parts of the B2B industry have been somewhat slow on. They've been handling via the purely human aspect via calls and so on. But as their buyers are changing, their buyers are actually sometimes feeling less connected to a person on the phone. They feel like that intrudes, they want to do things via other channels, but they still want to maintain that trust. But you have to have those channels in a way that you can still change to meet their needs.

Scott Hebner

>> So Julia, you mentioned the data interoperability as being really key, the composability and the whole architecture, the MAC stuff that's under the covers, the microservices, the API, cloud native, and the headless that facilitates the data interoperability, right?

Alistair Groves

>> Definitely. I mean, as we talk about unified commerce, whether that be across multiple different systems and channels, what we're really seeing is that people that can really take the most advantage of it is bringing it all into one system because then you've got a much clearer view of that data. You've got a much clearer view of what the customer's doing through their lifetime. Another example of this from talking to some of our customers is they previously may have been producing stuff that was all then sold via a distributor. Now the problem for that is they didn't have their connection to the consumers. So it is very hard for them to understand how they're going through the decision-making process about the purchasing. So one of the first parts actually was thinking about, "Well, how can we shift a bit more of the relationship to be directly involved with the manager, sorry, with the manufacturer." Which then means, "We may even do some non-transactional elements." Such as service guides, documentation and so on, and build up a picture with how the end consumer's working with it, and then that can help enrich the buying process and better meet their needs. And that's really, really hard to do across lots of disparate systems. You bring that data together, you homogenize it, and then you can pump that into all sorts of analysis or you can pump it into an AI agent and analyze it. That capability, you need it all in one place to do that.

Scott Hebner

>> With the AI agents, I imagine, especially when you get to agentic level where there's workflows and everything, and I think it's a big part of the MCP announcement. It takes the data and operability to another level.

Alistair Groves

>> We're in a fantastic position that we have well-documented, well-defined APIs that make it very, very fast and easy to expand and to connect into our different systems. And with MCP, it's basically just the next logical step. We're providing a set of tools that allows you to describe how those APIs work, that allows you to announce that to other agents. And then you can define what you want to expose, how it works, and it really makes it very fast and easy to plug in other capabilities. We started off looking at A2A commerce, how we can enable the purchase via other agents, but actually we found those building blocks are actually very useful for our own internal tools. You got a well-set, defined set of interfaces that AIs can use. So for your internal tools, AIs can also interact via that. You don't have to build another integration point.

Patricia Wu

>> So thinking about the announcement and innovation, what would you say is the most exciting product innovation on the horizon that you think can fundamentally change?

Alistair Groves

>> I think there's a lot that is being unlocked through A2A commerce, I mean you also have a very different opinion on this one.

Julia Rabkin

>> Well, I think that most B2B organizations are not really ready yet for AI. They don't have a lot of that foundational work done both on their products, their data, their systems, their technology, their infrastructure, their architecture. I mean, 30% of the B2B market is completely new to digital. They don't have any e-commerce at all at this stage. So there's a huge opportunity there. And my personal hope is that with all the AI hype in the B2C world, obviously B2C is a lot more advanced than B2B has been traditionally. I'm hoping that this acts as a catalyst for many B2B organizations to kind of wake up and realize, "Hey, we need to shore up all of our foundational elements so that we're ready for this next wave, this next evolution." I mean, I would love to have B2B, agent to agent commerce, right? Because that is how it's going to be manifested within the B2B world, but I'm not sure they're ready for that today. So my hope is that the hype serves as a catalyst, but maybe you have a different perspective.

Alistair Groves

>> I think Julia is right in terms of where people are on the adoption cycle. I think it's very right that this is pushing a lot of people to think about where is the future, how are they going to have to evolve? Those logical steps are needed, and it's great that we're seeing those things happen. I guess we'll have to find out how far along the journey we go, but I think it's very interesting. A lot of these relationships, companies will negotiate the initial stages of relationship. They'll go through this process, they'll agree prices, they'll agree who needs to prove that they do that. And then after that, there's a lot of us continual going round the loop, going through the same steps for those recurring orders. Now, we also implemented functionality to make the recurring orders process better, but I can also see the potential where they may well go, "We've done that and after a certain number of cycles, we're happy to just go hands back and let's actually take out these extra steps. We've agreed between the two companies, we're happy to run on these set of rules. Let's let the agents do the work and focus on something else." It won't be for all our customers, but I'd love to see how that kind of expands and grows.

Scott Hebner

>> Well, the one thing that really jumped out at me, it's almost a takeaway that I know it's going to stick with me when I leave, is the way you have architected the whole platform going back years and years and years and years was built for agentic AI. Even though back then you may not have been thinking about agentic AI because you have to have a microservices' architecture. You got to be able to call out APIs. It's got to be cloud native, frankly, not every part of it, but the guts and the heart and soul that needs to be. And then of course, you have to be able to connect all this stuff together and separate it from the user interface so it gets to the composability and then you add MCP to it. So I think you're going to be making it much easier for B2B customers to move to this new infrastructure that you're probably right is a big inhibitor because a lot of that stuff is ancient.

Julia Rabkin

>> Or non-existent.

Scott Hebner

>> Or non-existent. It'd be better off if it's non-existent, then-

Julia Rabkin

>> It can build from scratch.

Scott Hebner

>> Build from scratch.

Julia Rabkin

>> And it's actually sometimes a lot easier. We see sometimes that the completely new to digital folks are the ones that do go live a lot faster because they don't have all of that previous baggage. And so I think it's time for B2Bs to almost reevaluate how they do business completely end to end, and whether they're really prepared for this new world of agents and AI and all of this other innovation that's going to come out over the next few years. Right? Changes happening very quickly.

Patricia Wu

>> Well, that was my question. Things are happening so quickly. How much time do they have to make this decision to change?

Alistair Groves

>> I mean to steal the tree analogy, the best time to plant a was 20 years ago. That's gone today. It is moving fast. No one can argue that the pace is quick. And I'm pretty sure no one can argue that it's going to get quicker and those that don't innovate will be forced to innovate or die. And I think there's definitely a generational change in terms of how the buying, the selling process, and they're waking up to that. And I think we just need to know that, "We can get this right for now, but then the next cycle will happen. Are we in the right position for that?" So we really need to focus on being ready for change rather than just changing now to meet the current needs.

Scott Hebner

>> The difference today is that these innovation cycles are moving at warp speed. You can fall behind really quickly and never catch up. It goes at old adage that the game's played on the field not in the dugout. And the worst thing you can be doing now is sitting back and watching and seeing what happens but you got to get involved. At least start experimenting, do POCs. And I think that's the big message here is in the context here of B2B is don't sit back and just wait.

Julia Rabkin

>> You want to be agile as a business. And I think many B2Bs recognize this in the pandemic. This was the first big catalyst that I think is the wave that we're now seeing of B2Bs wanting to go digital. I think AI is going to accelerate that. I mean we don't know what the next thing will be, but there will of course be something, whether it's another pandemic, another war, anything can disrupt your business operations. So how is your business set up in order to function well and succeed in times of change that you can't predict? So I think that agility, that flexibility, and also with an eye towards B2B, the ability to handle anything complex, this is where I think commercetools can really help and shine, and especially composable technology. That architecture, our infrastructure. This is really what makes the difference.

Patricia Wu

>> You're nodding. I didn't know if you had another gem of wisdom. I felt it coming.

Alistair Groves

>> There's something there that kicked off. I mean, so we were talking about the pandemics, right? I mean, a lot of people realized, "We need to go online." Now some of them went, "What's the most trivial way of getting online? Let's move our process from an in-person thing to a way of them just emailing in a form." That got them over that hurdle, but is that really helping them now? Others took the opportunity to go, "Our business model is changing. How should we best do it?" And then thought about, to use another customer as an example. They were selling machines and they needed something to sell parts. Great. They actually realized the business they were in for their customers was enabling their customers to dig tunnels. So they actually rethought the overall process. Yes, they will build an online way of doing spares, but they also brought this in. How do we better predict when they'll need spares? How do we make that process as frictionless as possible so that their machines are going down less, tunnels get built quicker with them, and therefore it actually became a much better opportunity to expand. They didn't just replace their ordering, but actually build confidence with their customers. And at the end of the day, we're in another cycle now. Yes, it's not an epidemic, but do you just make the smaller, little adaption now to fit to that or do you set yourself up for the future and more success?

Scott Hebner

>> The future-proof message is another thing that came out real clear today from almost everyone we talked about, which links you all the way back to the composability being really the secret sauce here. Now you're going to be able to help your customers move to the agentic world much quicker because a lot of that infrastructure's there. It's a big deal because that is the big inhibitor is your existing infrastructure. That and culture. But the infrastructure can be a real problem for people.

Julia Rabkin

>> And I think it's about that customer-centricity, right? So jumping on your example of the underground mining and tunneling customer, they really thought about how are our buyers buying? They're buyers, the people that can actually see the machines that are digging underground. They are engineers maybe 500 feet meters, miles underground in a mine. They're not on a desktop computer. They're probably on a phone or an iPad or something like that. And of course there's a centralized procurement office somewhere where there's a manager that maybe needs to approve that. So I think this customer really thought about how do we make this all a frictionless, end-to-end experience that makes life easier for everyone involved? And I think if B2Bs start thinking about their businesses in this way, this is where the real value and the real future proofing and the real agility will be unlocked. I was going to say, it sounds like it starts with a mindset shift.

Alistair Groves

>> I mean, at the end of the day, we are part of the story. You can have the best ideas about technology, the best design. If you don't bring the business with you, it's not going to succeed. Likewise, the other side, if the business has the best ideas but doesn't have the right parts, it really needs both sides of the equation. And you need to bring those in hand-to-hand if you want to get the most benefit out of it.

Julia Rabkin

>> You need both the commercetools and the commerce people, technology, strategy, process to kind of make it all work seamlessly well together.

Patricia Wu

>> Like Andrew Burton, the CEO said the constellation of commerce.

Julia Rabkin

>> Yes. Exactly.

Scott Hebner

>> So who wants a really hard question?

Alistair Groves

>> Well, it depends on what it is.

Scott Hebner

>> No, it's not that hard. No, I mean, I think over the years, this is going to be a question about, we're talking three years from now. What are we going to be talking about? And I think this agentic space is going to evolve into the notion of digital labor, right? Digital workers, and you mentioned you got different people, the people that are approving things aren't necessarily down in the mine and the tunnel, and you start creating these digital workers that are agents that are giving people new superpowers, their companions. I think as Andrew said too, how does that change things? And if you're looking out in the B2B space three years from now.

Alistair Groves

>> I mean I think it goes down to again, the sort of saying there are these relationships negotiated between different companies, and it may... Well, at the moment, all of these steps are human, right? The initial contact, the initial negotiations, and then on a recurring basis. And I think it will vary massively depending on the industry and the business model. But I'd say the first things to see is, after the relationship is established, then the recurring part, they may well go, "We're happy, we've defined the rules." And start handing that stuff off. The day-to-day tedium, the stuff that makes you feel like a robot. Well, a robot can do it anyway, right? You can take that out the equation. Whereas over time, I think we may well see more of the heading towards the initial discussions and the initial contracts. You may well go, "I'm just going to say these are my needs, these are my requirements. You go out there to an agent of some sort and go find me the best option, negotiate those things, bring me back the best deals, and then I'll decide." Over time, you may even take the decision out and just go, "I trust you to do that." But I think it's very much, it's going to be a sliding scale depending on the industry and so how quickly that happens. Regardless, even if you just go the first steps, those repetitive things, that makes everyone's life so much easier because it's tedious work. It takes time, it costs money, it slows down you getting your order and what you want. It slows down the revenue coming into the company. So everyone is aligned with at least taking that part out the equation.

Patricia Wu

>> And if you even want to get to the future, you'd best get composable now.

Scott Hebner

>> Yes.

Julia Rabkin

>> I would also add that it's about collaboration and scalability, right? It's the collaboration between the humans, the agents, the customers, the buyers, the data. I think in B2B, the advantage that companies have is that their sales teams know the customers the best. And so you can actually define and deliver, create a digital experience that actually maps into a very detailed and nuanced way of knowing your customer. So I think this is one huge advantage that B2B has, but I think as we see AI and agents start participating more, it's really going to be around this constellation, this interaction, but also how do you do it at scale and how do you do it at scale well? As Alistair said, right? Maybe you'll start by asking this agent some information, but maybe over time you're like, "You know what? I can just automate this. I can let this do its own thing." And this, I think is where we're going to see a lot of scalability across the board. And I think this automation will also free up B2B's time to actually innovate.

Patricia Wu

>> All right. Well, we're going to have to leave it there, although we could probably go all afternoon. A lot of innovation coming our way. So adapt or become a dinosaur. Thank you so much, Alistair and Julia.

Julia Rabkin

>> Thank you.

Alistair Groves

>> Thank you very much.

Patricia Wu

>> And thank you so much for watching. We're here at Elevate: The Global Commerce Summit. We'll have a lot more coming your way. I'm Patricia Wu for Scott Hebner, and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise, tech news, and analysis.