Elevate — The Global Commerce Summit 2025 | Andrew Burton, commercetools

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Andrew Burton

CEO

commercetools

play_circle_outline Re-imagination in commerce with AI technology

play_circle_outline Empowering Commerce with AI Agents, Emotional Loyalty, and Human-Centric AI-Native Technology in MACH Ecosystem

play_circle_outline AI as intelligence as a service for enhancing commerce experiences

play_circle_outline Focus on outcomes, consumer engagement driving AI adoption in business

play_circle_outline MACH as future-proof technology foundation enabling brand affiliation and connection

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Andrew Burton, commercetools

Andrew Burton

CEO commercetools

Andrew Burton, chief executive officer of commercetools GmbH, joins theCUBE’s Scott Hebner and Patricia Wu at Elevate — The Global Commerce Summit, to explore how AI is reshaping commerce from the ground up. The conversation highlights the shift from transactional exchanges to emotionally intelligent brand experiences.

Burton shares insight into the rise of agentic commerce, where AI evolves from assisting tasks to fulfilling end-to-end jobs and user needs. Hebner and Wu discuss how Commercetools' MACH-based approach supports extensibility and real-t... Read more

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What are some potential impacts of AI on commerce experiences and engagement in the future? add

What are some of the key points made in the discussion about the importance of emotional loyalty in commerce and the role of agentic AI in revolutionizing customer experiences? add

What potential opportunities does intelligence as a service offer in the industry? add

What is the importance of focusing on outcomes and business value, and how are consumer expectations driving the blending of consumer and business experiences in regards to technology and AI? add

What is the significance of emotional connection and brand identity in navigating the transition from digital to in-person experiences in enterprise commerce? add

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Andrew Burton, 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 my co-host and analyst, Scott Hebner. Well, we're pretty lucky because this conference is all about the future of commerce, and we've got the guy who's shaping the future with us right here.

Andrew Burton

>> I don't know about that, but, okay.

Patricia Wu

>> Andrew Burton, the CEO of commercetools. Thank you so much for joining us.

Andrew Burton

>> Thank you for having me.

Patricia Wu

>> So you had a really bold challenge for the audience this morning in your keynote, it's, "Be disrupted or lead the re-imagination."

Andrew Burton

>> Yes.

Patricia Wu

>> What does that re-imagination look like and why now?

Andrew Burton

>> Well, I think if you look at the history of technology in the last 15 or 20 years, it's really been a story of re-imagination where new technology enters into the equation and you get two options. One, you try to think about it as an afterthought or you really try to think about how it can change the way that you work. And so we saw that with, as I mentioned earlier, mobile devices. We've seen that with obviously the way people think about using cloud and modern technologies. But with AI, I think it's even more exciting because the rate of which this technology will be accessible and used is just unmatched in anything I think we've seen. And so when we think about commerce experiences, what AI will do is it's, many people think of it as a search dynamic. And I think that is just the first use case, and it's a very simple one. But when we really think about bringing intelligence as a service into commerce experiences and creating hyper-personalized engagement and really an extension off of brands and what people really affiliate and identify with, I think it's going to be super exciting. And I think the AI or intelligence revolution is what I was referencing, is really just going to change, not just the way we engage and conduct commerce, but the way we even think about just going about our daily lives.

Scott Hebner

>> Well, congratulations on your keynote. I thought it was really good.

Andrew Burton

>> Thank you, appreciate that.

Scott Hebner

>> It was clear, it was concise, and I thought very meaningful.

Andrew Burton

>> Thank you.

Scott Hebner

>> And I love the way you brought everyone through sort of a tour of the journey.

Andrew Burton

>> Yeah.

Scott Hebner

>> So nice job on that. But the one thing that really struck me was your contrast that you drew between a transactional experience and an emotional experience and the importance of emotional loyalty as a differentiator for commerce. Could you just explain that in a little bit more detail?

Andrew Burton

>> Yeah. I mean, one thing I did not talk about earlier, but I think it's become well-known is they call it the IKEA effect. When you put a little bit of effort into something and when you craft something, or even when you think about whether it's commerce or any type of engagement, you become inherently more vested. And people inherently are emotional. I'm a big behavioral economics person, and we like to think we're rational. But I think we find affiliation, we find identity, and we'd like to work with and have experiences with organizations are companies that we trust. And so I think the experience is really first brand and experience leads, in my opinion, this natural journey of how people engage in commerce. And most customers I talk with, nobody wants to be a price or a SKU because when you're a price or SKU, it is transactional. And that's not generally where people want to provide value. And so when we think about loyalty, you think about trust, you think about affiliation, it's really driven off this idea of creating connection and creating an affiliation. And that's where I think multi-channel unified commerce is headed, where people can move across any touch point and get that consistent experience.

Scott Hebner

>> And the technology that you were talking about that's going to revolutionize all this is the agents, agentic AI, because their ability to help you achieve a goal, help you make decisions, automate timelessly some of the things you would otherwise have to do. And I think what you were saying up there is it's not just about the productivity of it, it's about making that emotional connection. And I thought that was a very intriguing point you made.

Andrew Burton

>> Yeah. I think we'll see this change where I think today people use some of these chat-bots and they see it as, I'm effectively in a transaction or I have a request, they're chatting. I think we'll see that shift to tasks, where you'll have a task that needs to be done. Where the true agentic era, which we are, in many instances, not even scratching the surface, is in the jobs. Which is, when you have an agent doing a job and that job then can be done and then that agent can then interact with you. So I think in agentic commerce, it's not just the simple interaction or a task to be done, it's when you have a job or a need for something to be completed, as you said, in the end, and help you. And we'll see that in B2C, we'll see it in B2B, we'll see in all these different type of business models. The thing that I'm excited about is we're agnostic. We're agnostic to industry, we're agnostic to business model, we're agnostic to how people think about what we really are enabling is empowering this future of an agentic commerce era and unifying those channels across any touch point.

Patricia Wu

>> Well, you mentioned search, you mentioned agentic. So talk to me about this evolution from the basic filters to the agentic AI recommendations. What does this all reflect about the broader shifts in customer expectations?

Andrew Burton

>> Yeah, it's probably, I'd simplify it by what I hear from my customers, which is, in this digital-first or digital-led experience, which is where many of us start. What happened five years ago as people went from offline to really a digital transformation or digital investment. And now what we've seen is some of these more progressive brands or even consumer preferences showing they're going to start digital and then they're going to move cross channels. And so I mentioned grocery earlier. I think we're seeing that now with people starting online and then going into the store into an experience to get grocery, food rather, whatever the case may be. And think about those experiences when you go into a physical environment, the smells, the sounds, the colors, everything is just super high-texture. So this digital experience, and I reference this idea of a cheese board, when you go into a grocery store and you see this idea of an in-person cheese board, how do you represent that in a virtual world and how do you create that tailored? And I think that is incredibly exciting, but that's a challenge. And I think that challenge is really thinking about from a customer standpoint. And again, it could be B2B, could be B2C, whatever your business model is, it's how do you actually create a connection with that person that having loyalty, trust and engagement is critical to your business? And that is not a transaction, that is a relationship.

Scott Hebner

>> You made the point too in the keynote about people. It's not going to replace people, it's going to empower them. It's going to help them not just respond, but anticipate. And I'm assuming when you say people, you're meaning both a consumer as well as the workers at your company, right?

Andrew Burton

>> Yeah.

Scott Hebner

>> And this idea of what's really happening here over time is you get these digital workers that are there to give human workers superpowers and it becomes like a little HR, a digital employee HR department. And you guys have built an open foundation from the get-go being MACH, that allows your microservices base, it's cloud-native, it's API based, it's headless. So that's perfect what you need, is plug-and-play agents, right?

Andrew Burton

>> Yeah. There is, I think a big challenge in our industry where there are folks that are trying to bolt on AI. They built largely a software, they took a closed approach, they built a software stack, they put everything inside of it, and now they're trying to figure out how do I take AI and have it work with this, largely, this monolithic or very rigid structure? And that's just, frankly, that's what a lot of software is, the majority of software companies built, is a product. And that product is effectively defined largely by the UI and in that box. We took a totally different approach. We created an open approach, the microservices, the native architecture. And so that is AI-native. That is AI-enabled. It is ideal for an AI world. Now, what we've done is we've been building value up. So we started with the foundational layer of extensibility, flexibility and choice. And now we've been putting pre-composed solutions because we recognize different companies and different organizations want to start their journey in different places. But in the AI-agentic era, you really have to start with this core composable imperative. And with that, then the AI extensions, because it's not just an AI-agent-led world. And there are some examples where we're seeing agent-led commerce, but that's just one more channel, that's one more point of contact. And we think about when you need to future-proof a commerce experience and a commerce platform, you really need to start with the foundation. I think we're really the only ones that have done that successfully.

Scott Hebner

>> We as an organization have been doing a lot of work with startups and we've come to this view that there's no better time to actually be a startup these days.

Andrew Burton

>> Oh my gosh, yeah.

Scott Hebner

>> And what I've learned, at least from talking to a lot of the successful ones, there's a bunch of principles that are different, but two of them is target labor spend, not IT spend. And the second one is, rethink software from the bottoms up. It's not like a SaaS app, which is I think the point you just made, right?

Andrew Burton

>> Exactly.

Scott Hebner

>> And so in the context of your platform that's based on MACH, I'm assuming that people that want to start up new businesses and build AI agents are going to be able to be a part of this ecosystem.

Andrew Burton

>> Oh, absolutely. And I think we talked about it today. So think about it, if you're somebody that is trying to... Let's say you've got a job to be done. Because we talked about jobs earlier. An agent is, you think about it as almost a companion. And there is this discussion out, I think in the community, about an agent feels impersonal, an agent could have intelligence, could know what to do. But now if I tell you you're going to have a companion... A companion versus an agent conveys certain things. And an emotional context, a companion is someone you trust. A companion is someone you look to for guidance and advice. So if you're looking for a commerce companion and you want that companion to help out, and maybe that's someone that's going to, you're a B2B company and you've got a really complex catalog and you have an ongoing business relationship, that companion could help you make sure that you're constantly staying up to date. Could it make sure that the latest products or services are presented to you in the right way in context? And so if you're building a companion or agent for this type of engagement, where would you naturally want to build it? I think a composable platform that allows for you to be future-proofed is the default. It isn't optional. I think it just becomes the default, which is a microservices MACH-based architecture. That's a lot of great technology. What I hear from customers is, "Hey, we need to be empowered to drive revenue, save costs, and reduce our risk." And in that environment, we're translating that back to we have a technology advantage, but this agentic world is going to be super exciting and I think it's going to allow for people to do new things, have new jobs done that people can go in and think about some of these product catalogs, thousands and thousands and thousands of SKUs, thousands and thousands of different attributes. Navigating that is very challenging. And so an agent or a companion that can help you do that and make sure you're up-to-date, that takes a lot of the pain and hassle out of a lot of people's lives.

Patricia Wu

>> It reminds me of that old African proverb, "If you want to go fast, you go alone. If you want to go far, you go together."

Andrew Burton

>> Oh, I like that.

Patricia Wu

>> So you want the right companion.

Andrew Burton

>> Exactly, exactly. And you'll have a mix, right? You'll have your colleagues, you'll have companion agents, but it'll be this intersection. And the other thing that I think is really exciting, think about intelligence as a service. So you think about AI, it's just this level... I talk about the PhD proof that was done that the first time in the last 90 days that the agents outscored the PhDs. The first time.

Patricia Wu

>> That's something else.

Andrew Burton

>> And if you think about, again, my analogy of the mobile or the web, when they first emerged, they were really simple use cases, but what they created was a whole new era of opportunity. That's what we're talking about. And that opportunity is what I think we have, and it's not just commercetools, but I think as an industry we've got to seize that opportunity. And I think we're looking at a new era or a new dawn of intelligence as a service that is available to anyone. And when you do that now in an agent model and creating great commerce experiences, it really is an exciting time.

Patricia Wu

>> When you mentioned the web and mobile, that adoption cycle just got shorter and shorter.

Andrew Burton

>> Oh my gosh, shorter and shorter.

Patricia Wu

>> So what's your one piece of advice for businesses out there who are just starting to embrace this new re-imagination mindset?

Andrew Burton

>> Ultimately it's about the people. You look at any type of technology innovation that occurs, and we could list the companies, some of them thrived and some of them didn't. Some teams take advantage of that. And it's ultimately about people. It's about how to help people embrace and learn and look at change and opportunities. So for example, one of the best pieces of advice I would give any leader or any person is, put the tools in the hands of everybody. Don't gate that, as we said, when mobile, everyone had to go get the mobile phone, and the lab you had to go get... With AI, I would say make those tools, make those resources available as widely and easily as possible and give that opportunity for people to experiment, learn, and try things out. And so, don't gate it by access. The second is, then create an environment where people can take some risk with this new technology because anybody who tells you they have figured it out, they're probably being a little overly confident, shall we say. But if you say our mission is to figure it out together, that is inherently a human experience. And so that's my number one piece of advice.

Scott Hebner

>> One of the things that jumped out at me as I was listening to you talk this morning was, I'm going to lead to a question about we're here two years from now, what are we going to be talking about? But it was sort of like what you're actually trying to create here is a HR department for digital workers where people can have different jobs that you can plug into your commerce experience. MCP, multi-contact pro-

Andrew Burton

>> Protocol....

Scott Hebner

>> which you're building into your platform is going to allow those digital workers to talk to each other.

Andrew Burton

>> To communicate, right.

Scott Hebner

>> And it almost becomes, like you said, it's about a companion. It's about people that are going to help people. It's not just a tool anymore.

Andrew Burton

>> No, exactly.

Scott Hebner

>> It's about superpowers for people. And so having that connection in my mind from when you were talking, let's go out a couple years, what do you think we're going to be talking about?

Andrew Burton

>> Yeah. I think in a couple years, I think it's just going to be assumed. Right now, think about the changes that have occurred with even in our lives. And you look back, you're like, "Well, of course we had those things." People have a hard time imagining life without the mobile, without... They have a hard time imagining not having connectivity anywhere. But it wasn't that long ago. And so I think in a years it's just going to be inherently... It feels foreign today, I think it'll be inherently natural, and you're going to see the next generation of the re-imagination will have occurred. I don't think that's in doubt. The question is, who are the people and who are the firms and the organizations that embrace it and use this as that next? And you'll see an incredible amount of disruption, but you'll also see, I think some people seize the opportunity and really be able to thrive. And I think we're in a position to thrive. But I think today it was all about opening up those doors of awareness.

Scott Hebner

>> And I think your MACH foundation sets you up to lead in this world. Because you're right, if you go back through the whole transformations over the last 30 years, the innovation cycles today are moving at warp speed.

Andrew Burton

>> Super fast.

Scott Hebner

>> I mean, it was just what, two and a half years ago, we were talking about generative AI, now we're onto agents. And then we're going to be onto decision-intelligence soon.

Andrew Burton

>> This rate of dispersion is a key. If you look at major technology disruptions and innovations, it's how quickly it can be dispersed into a community or in a population. What do we all have? We all have the internet connectivity. We have the devices that are enabled. So the rate of dispersion, to your point, is going to be super short compared to previous. And that dispersion by the rate of AI getting penetrated or available in our environment is going to help accelerate that usage.

Scott Hebner

>> And how do you do that without a MACH, a VOK?

Andrew Burton

>> Totally. I was on the West Coast last week, and a lot of the established tech companies, it's pretty ironic because in the previous models, you would start with a UI, a user experience. You mock it up and then you build against it. And in our model, you start with data and APIs and then you figure out what you want to put on top of it. And so there's a lot of companies out there trying to figure out effectively how to rip off their UIs and rip off the heads and then figure out, well, now how do we put AI back in? And our model, we're a native, already designed, architected and built for security, transparency and trust, all the things you need. And AI MCP fits really nicely just right inside. And then you look out, composable is great, but if you really... Who is truly composable? And what I've tried to convey is, it's not just technology, it's choice, it's freedom, it's opportunity to experiment so you're not locked in.

Scott Hebner

>> It's future-proof, is what it is.

Andrew Burton

>> It's future-proof.

Scott Hebner

>> Absolutely.

Andrew Burton

>> Absolutely.

Patricia Wu

>> Yeah. You talk about these people who are trying to just bolt on these AI systems. Anything else that, if you had a magic wand, that you could change one thing about how people are approaching this, what would it be?

Andrew Burton

>> I think the trepidation that it's inherently natural, the unknown, the new.

Patricia Wu

>> Anything new.

Andrew Burton

>> Yeah, anything new and unknown, it's inherently a thing. It's a human condition. If you inherently don't know something that trepidation that people have, and I can understand AI can be scary, change can be scary. And I think that I would just encourage, if I could wave a magic wand, is if you look at it through a positive lens and look at what it can do. Now, obviously there's risks in any innovation and disruption, but I think that trepidation is always something that needs to be worked through. But I think that the ability for us to look at the opportunity and be able to embrace this innovation, because you look at even the last couple hundred years, you look at all the major innovations have led to elevated standards of living, elevated levels of just business that have occurred. And I think it's amazing. I think we're on the precipice of that next one.

Patricia Wu

>> And I'm wondering, whenever you have new technology like this, there's always a lot of noise.

Andrew Burton

>> Yes.

Patricia Wu

>> How do you separate the noise from the true business value? Where do you see it delivering the biggest impact?

Andrew Burton

>> Yeah, this is great. I mean, it's ultimately measured in outcomes. I could sit here and talk tech all day long. I could talk AI, but we've got to look at the outcomes, the business value, and are people fundamentally able to impact that business outcome? And in many cases, the consumer, we heard earlier, the consumers are driving this because they're engaging in consumer brands and consumer experiences. And we've seen the blur between consumer experiences and business experiences. People now just have an expectation that the tools and the services are going to work the way they need it to. And so I think we're going to see that really continue to occur. And I think that's again, an exciting time for us.

Scott Hebner

>> That brings me full circle to the beginning of this conversation about the emotional connection because driving this notion, which I think is right on, which it's not just about productivity and efficiencies, it's about making that emotional connection, because people are people and they're going to respond to things that make them feel good, that are really helpful, recommend, help you make decisions. The companion part. And I think that's what's really different now.

Andrew Burton

>> And think about it, some of the iconic brands, they create this sense of affiliation and identity and trust, and how do those brands show up in a unified digital world? That is, we still got the in-person physical. That's the thing I'm excited about, going from digital to in-person and everything in between. And the iconic brands are navigating that and we're focused on enterprise commerce because that is a complex proposition across any customer touchpoint, being able to convey that brand identity in those experiences and then be able to have that commerce interaction just be a natural interaction.

Patricia Wu

>> And I know you talked a lot about platform-led versus brand-led, and I'm wondering where does a consumer fit into that and when you're making that choice, what's at stake?

Andrew Burton

>> Yeah, I mean, I'm a big fan of brand-led. I think the examples that we're seeing of some of the AI agents or companions and how do they represent a brand, and I think goes back to you're going to have, probably have, your own personal agentic tools that you use or companions that you use. But I think the brand is one that shows up and continues to be at any touchpoint. And so my personal opinion is, I think the brand-led experiences are really about creating identity, affiliation and connection. And that is going to... And that's not about technology. I think the technology is going to be more in the background. And great technologies is, I think, is when you don't really know or have to worry about what the tech is doing. And some of our customers, I think what they tell me and they love about commercetools is they don't have to worry about the technology in the back end. It's future-proofed. And they're like, "Hey, I have a new initiative. I got to figure out how to do this or that." They love that freedom because they want to be focused on where the business value, back to the early question, measuring it in business value is where ultimately I think this goes to. So technology and platform-led is all about enabling that brand and that affiliation and that connection across channel.

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah, you got a great sandwich here. You have all the meat in the middle. You have MACH as the future-proof technology foundation. Then you got your ecosystem as the top piece of bread.

Andrew Burton

>> And I think, by the way, the MACH, a few years ago I would say that was new and people were trying to... "What is it?" I think largely, let's look, now it's just, in my opinion, it's presumed. It's okay, this is just a foundational principle. And so what today we've announced is that next step where you put MCP, as you said, where you can have agents and you can have interconnection, and it doesn't require someone to have to replace their technology platform or to do a re-platforming.

Patricia Wu

>> You don't have to build from scratch.

Andrew Burton

>> You don't have to build from scratch. And so that's probably the most underappreciated aspect of what we're doing is, oh, I can now serve a different channel. I can connect through a different way, and now I still have that same core, I don't have to move that. That's the power of what we're talking about.

Scott Hebner

>> And that's what you've enabled. And going back years after years, after years before the notion of agents was even real.

Andrew Burton

>> Yeah, exactly.

Scott Hebner

>> And that's why I like about... Not to beat a dead horse here, but this notion of future-proof in the platform, you've got a great ecosystem and it's just going to get stronger as you go through time here.

Andrew Burton

>> Absolutely. And it is a core philosophical. A lot of people talk about the technology, how it shows up, but when you think about your philosophy, I think major changes are often led by when someone has a core philosophy that's different. And our philosophy was about creating an open model, one that enabled choice. And so in an open model, you create a service-based model. In an open model, you give people choice of what they want to use. And you frankly, by being transparent, you are also being highly accountable that what you do works really, really well. The closed models, you don't really know what's going on inside that box, and you assume what's occurring is what you want. In our model, it's an open, transparent trust model, and what that enables, to your point, is a future-proof model because then you can say, oh, I want to do agentic commerce. Great, you can use that service. You can extend it. I want to tailor my unified commerce experience to these things. Great, you can do that as well. You don't have to revisit the core foundational premise you took.

Scott Hebner

>> It's like you said, a constellation of commerce.

Andrew Burton

>> Yes. I like that.

Patricia Wu

>> Commercetools at the center.

Andrew Burton

>> Yeah. Constellation of commerce. It started here, right?

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah, absolutely.

Patricia Wu

>> That's right.

Andrew Burton

>> Exactly.

Patricia Wu

>> Well, thank you so much. That was insightful. We had the sandwich, the cheese board, and-

Andrew Burton

>> And now a constellation.

Patricia Wu

>> Exactly. Exactly. A lot of food for thought. Thank you so much.

Andrew Burton

>> Thank you so much for-

Patricia Wu

>> I can't wait for next year's summit.

Andrew Burton

>> Yes, it'll be very exciting.

Patricia Wu

>> Thank you, Andrew.

Andrew Burton

>> All right, thank you.

Patricia Wu

>> Thank you so much for watching. We'll have a lot more of Elevate, the Global Commerce Summit. I'm Patricia Wu for Scott Hebner, and we'll be right back. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.