Elevate — The Global Commerce Summit 2025 | Jason Cottrell, Orium

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Jason Cottrell

CEO & Founder

Orium

The future of agentic AI in commerce: 8 standout takeaways from Elevate 2025

Artificial intelligence is redefining how commerce happens, pushing it beyond transactions into experiences that feel intuitive, personal and emotionally aware. From dynamic agents to hyper-tailored journeys, agentic AI is turning what once felt futuristic into the new baseline.Commercetools, a longtime force in digital commerce strategy, is driving much of this shift. Known for its MACH-based approach — microservices, application programming interface-first, cloud-native and headless — commercetools gives companies the agility to adapt and build fast, according to Scott Hebner, principal analyst at theCUBE Research

play_circle_outline Exploring MACH Architecture's Influence on Agent-Driven Interactions and Navigating Technological Advancements in Future Commerce

play_circle_outline Innovative Strategies for Adapting to Evolving Customer Behavior and Channels to Drive Profitable Growth

play_circle_outline Industry solutions in healthcare and pharma disruption

play_circle_outline Importance of flexibility and composable architecture

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Jason Cottrell, Orium

Jason Cottrell

CEO & Founder Orium

Jason Cottrell, founder and chief executive officer of Orium, joins theCUBE’s Scott Hebner and Jennifer Wu at Elevate — The Global Commerce Summit, for a forward-focused conversation on composable systems, AI and data-driven strategy. The discussion explores how Orium is helping clients reimagine commerce through flexible, modern architectures.

Cottrell shares insights on leveraging AI and composable data to enhance customer experiences and operational efficiency. With a focus on adaptability, the session underscores how organizations can stay compet... Read more

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What are some success stories or use cases of how technology solutions are impacting clients in terms of efficiency and customer interaction? add

What are some key considerations for businesses looking to adapt to the changing landscape with the infusion of AI into customer interactions and the shift in where customers make their purchases? add

What industry solution are you announcing in healthcare and how does it relate to your partnership with Commercetools and other partners? add

What approach did Harry Rosen transition to in 2020, allowing for quicker and more cost-effective changes to their architecture? add

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Jason Cottrell, Orium

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Patricia Wu

>> Good morning and welcome to Elevate - The Global Commerce Summit. I'm Patricia Wu, your host, along with my co-host and analyst, Scott Hebner. And we're here at the Miami Beach Convention Center. Not bad for a gig, right?

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah. It's hot down here, let me tell you.

Patricia Wu

>> It is. Only thing hotter is the future of commerce.

Scott Hebner

>> There you go.

Patricia Wu

>> And we have got just the guy to take us into that future. Thank you so much for joining us. We've got Jason Cottrell, the CEO and founder of Orium.

Jason Cottrell

>> Great to be here.

Patricia Wu

>> So you are all about the future and helping people get ready for it. Tell us what you do at Orium.

Jason Cottrell

>> Absolutely. We see this future coming and it's composable, it's intelligent, it's increasingly agentic. What we try to do at Orium, we're the largest consultancy and system integrator focused at the intersection of composable data, AI, and systems. So companies like Commercetools, hosting this wonderful event here, great partners of ours.

Patricia Wu

>> Let's just bring it to life for our audience. Give us a success story or a use case of how these solutions really impact your clients.

Jason Cottrell

>> Sure. We see customers really starting to approach this from two angles. Obviously some of this technology now is really changing the way customers run their business. They're able to bring in specialty systems that really are able to take specific roles tailor-made for their business. They don't have to write custom software anymore. They can choose from many vendors in terms of where do they want to drive competitive advantage, get more efficient. And those play really well now to this emerging world of AI and agents. Most of these vendors are putting very aggressive investment into turning on automation in changing how staff can interact with this and changing how customers will interact with this. If I think of really great examples though, I think the companies that are really pushing boundaries, they're looking for incremental efficiencies, but then they're rethinking how they're going to relate to customers, how they're going to relate to and gain market share in this new world. There's a great quote from Ethan Malik that I really love. There's one advantage that has been so core to your business that's held true for the last few decades, and it's now gone with the recent advancements. And then there's another thing that your customers want, but that was never possible and that's possible now. And so your job is to figure that out before anyone else does. And so I think our customers that are pushing boundaries, customers that have been coming to us like New Balance or Steelcase or Google, they're pushing boundaries and trying to say, "How are we reimagining how we relate to customers using what agents, using what some of this AI capability can now do."

Scott Hebner

>> If you looked at a couple years ago, you look at today and then perhaps a couple years out, how's this all changing, particularly with the infusion of AI into these experiences?

Jason Cottrell

>> We start to look at ... less from a systems perspective and thinking more, what are the jobs to be done, what are the interactions? And a lot of what we do today's very much humans using a technology, and we're starting to think more and more how do these technologies create more self-learning, self self-adapting, always-on interactions that are getting smarter and smarter with every use. I think the companies that are doing really well are starting to rethink, "What are those key interactions? Where are the costs in our business? Where are we on during business hours but not 24/7? What are the things that we can start to disrupt, recreate, using these new advancements? I think what is changing in a big way is where customers buy. So we're already seeing a number of our customers where they're not coming ... Consumers are stopping coming to their own channels or we're seeing declines in traffic. They're starting their research elsewhere and then maybe then coming to their own channels or into their store. They're maybe starting the research on the property, but then buying increased. Now they've got options to buy through an agent. And so think we're going to see this added channel or this collection of added channels. It's going to fragment what are already often fragmented consumer flows to begin with. And so I think I look at it as it's a bit of a Game of Thrones. You can't place one bet. This provider's going to win, and then if I just support them, I'm good to go. I think to survive and thrive in the next few years, what a lot of brands are going to have to do is think about, "Look, let's assume there's lots of change and variability. Let's assume all the tech majors, all the AI labs are going to have extensive new announcements every few weeks. And so what are the foundations we need to put in place to ... What's going to stay true no matter?" How they're organizing some of their proprietary data? How are they able to actually surface the information in the APIs to collect and accept orders in these channels? Those bets probably stay true no matter what, and then allow them to move very quickly as things change rapidly over the next few years.

Scott Hebner

>> I think most people are familiar with using the chatbot out there. Over the last couple years we've had the infusion of these AI assistants that are using generative AI, and I think a lot of people are familiar with that. Large cross-section, at least. Agents are a whole new game, right?

Jason Cottrell

>> Yes.

Scott Hebner

>> And I think those are starting to become real today. I know you guys have a bunch of AI agents, which we'll get into in a couple of minutes here, but how do you see the agents being different than the AI assistants?

Jason Cottrell

>> Sure. When we're working with customers, how we try to get them thinking about agents versus assistants, I think it is the degree of autonomy that they're given, and the tools that are at their disposal, and their ability to make sense of what they need to use in order to solve a problem. There's a customer service startup, Minimal, which has built on the agent framework, LangChain, and I really love, for example, their ability to look at incoming customer interactions, make sense of information that's sent by text, make sense of photos or video that customers might be sending in. outlook, is there one problem in this customer's concern? Are there four? And then what do I need to do to solve that? Do I need to go to our warehouse system or a fulfillment system? Do I need to actually go look at the product data? What do I need to do to solve this? What are the policies that apply? So these agents start to get into much more complex use cases, more towards what human operators might do, and even to understand what can I do on my own versus what do I need to run by a person. And so their ability to structure those types of much more complex interactions and do it over a period of time, maybe over multiple customer service interactions, that starts to get more and more on that continuum of agentic.

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah. So it's trying to help solve a goal that a buyer might have, help you make decisions, automate a lot of what's going behind the scenes, where the the assistants were more of just a conversational information source, right?

Jason Cottrell

>> That's correct. And with maybe fewer tools available and less autonomy on how they complete their task, or are trusted with things like financial decisions or key brand and customer interactions. And I think it's very timely being here at Elevate, part of that notion of more agents versus assistants is that access to external tools. So external data, external systems, other agents. And so when we talk about, say, some of the background and strength with Commercetools in composability, a challenge of composability. I think it does relate as well, as you're thinking through transformation strategy over the next few years, there isn't one AI bet that we ... "We take this, I'll buy this one thing and then I'm good to go." Things are evolving so quickly. So if we think through how you might be building agents, how you might be buying agents, making sure there's that composability. The ability to rapidly add tools, swap out tools, add other agents they can interact with, swap them out. Thinking through composability, just at the core of how you put them together, is what'll make sure that what you spend six, nine months working on isn't immediately antiquated, but that you can evolve the parts as things move very quickly over the next few years.

Scott Hebner

>> Right.

Patricia Wu

>> Yeah. So we've been talking all about the future, all about getting to that solution the fastest, talking about agents. How does it all play in with your announcement of this new industry solution in healthcare?

Jason Cottrell

>> Absolutely. I think it's a really great example. We are very proud to announce alongside Commercetools and some of our other partners, our health industry solutions, so for health and pharma. And what we've seen historically ... Obviously this is an incredibly important space, incredibly impactful to the lives of so many individuals in the US and around the world. But in the past, some of the compliance and specific requirements in this domain meant that companies had very few options to buy, and often they were antiquated and not meeting the expectation that buyers would have in the rest of their daily interactions. Or they had to build an extensive, long-running, multi-year projects to try to build. And then the time, cost, energy effort to maintain that. And it's tough to be innovative when you're essentially spending millions of dollars to do what was 10 years ago viewed to be tables takes. And so a lot of what we're trying to do is say, look, you've got options now to buy and build. There's a number of options on the market which are HIPAA-compliant, meet key regulatory and domain-specific requirements. So you can take off-the-shelf products like e-commerce tools and do things like cart, checkout, catalog. Some of the things that you don't have to go recreate those, but then we can bring in either health-specific or pharma-specific vendors. We can build custom modules just for the things that you need them for. We call it buy-and-build, and it's trying to strike the right balance there. Where I think this is really important going forward, there isn't a space now to spend millions of dollars building table stakes capabilities. Companies need to be freeing up those resources and putting them very aggressively into rethinking their data, their AI, their agent strategy. And so it's freeing the resources up for that so that it can be invested in new capabilities that are going to grow market share, that are going to make things more efficient. You've got to be investing there.

Patricia Wu

>> Yeah, this health and pharma space seems so ripe for disruption.

Jason Cottrell

>> It is. I mean, if you look at demographic trends, if you look at changes in consumer expectation, this is a space where there's so much potential for innovation over the coming decade.

Scott Hebner

>> On the subject of accelerating innovation, let's talk a little bit about the composability part. And I know you were a founding member of the MACH, right?

Jason Cottrell

>> Not founding, but very, very early. Yes.

Scott Hebner

>> Very early.

Jason Cottrell

>> Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Scott Hebner

>> So you were one of the originals, right?

Jason Cottrell

>> Yes. And now I'm on the executive board of the MAC Alliance. That's correct, yes.

Scott Hebner

>> Right. So you've been involved with that from the very beginning. I think you've built your architecture around it. For the people in the audience, MACH is ... What does it stand for again?

Jason Cottrell

>> Microservice, API-first-

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah. Cloud-native....

Jason Cottrell

>> cloud native, and headless.

Scott Hebner

>> And headless. So it's a microservices architecture, and you think about agents and you get into MCP. You start getting into that notion of they're really microservices, but they're agents representing people.

Jason Cottrell

>> I think that's correct. I like to say if we look at a customer ... Even if I look at our own business, we've got 60 different pieces of software that run our business. We're just a few hundred people, let alone our customers running tens of thousands, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of employees globally. And you don't have one piece of software that runs your whole business. And for every piece of software that you have, many that remain just even five years from now are going to have AI or agentic capability added on. I think that becomes a standard for companies that will thrive, ISVs, software companies that will survive in the next few years. And you're going to have new AI-native or agent-native startups that come in this space. But all of these, they're not going to exist in a vacuum. And so I think that the principles of MACH really hold true very, very well. To meet the performance requirements that these types of agents and interactions are going to require, that MACH foundation is more important than ever. If we look at customers who still don't have workload in the cloud, who are still on systems that are maybe 15 years dated, hosted in a colo at their headquarters, that's going to be very difficult now to meet the pace of change that this next generation of software is going to require.

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah. My take on it is it sets you up very well for the world of agents, right? I mean, the fact that you've been on that foundation with the Alliance for so long.

Jason Cottrell

>> Yep. Our customers who refer this , I think of Harry Rosen, they transformed to Commercetools back in 2020 and really went with a more MACH-oriented, a true composable approach to their architecture. For them now, change isn't scary. If they're trying to make changes to individual elements of what they're doing, if they want to add in, say ... We're seeing, for example, big changes in what's expected now for customer service automation and support. We're saying, "Hey, I've got ChatGPT or Gemini over here. I expect the same in any of my interactions with you." So if they want to swap something like that out or for search and discovery, as there's new advancements there, they're able to do so now in weeks or sometimes even days, and it's not months with hundreds of thousands of dollars invested. And so I think that type of flexibility, the ability to curate, comes with that composable approach in that MACH architecture. And the pace of change is only picking up, it's not slowing down. Yeah.

Patricia Wu

>> So true. So what's next for you guys?

Jason Cottrell

>> I think a lot of our focus continues to push into helping our customers first. I think that the expectation of vendors right now should be that ... The vendors in your position are turning on these capabilities and doing that for you. For most companies, they shouldn't be going and spending tens of millions of dollars investing in bespoke AI. There's literally thousands of startups coming on the market, each approaching parts of this problem. So a lot of the way we look at it is, let's go look at the vendors you have in place that are ... Let's look at your order management, for example. Is your order management provider, for example, actually putting real investment into unlocking and turning on new capability here for you? Are they doing that by leveraging some of what's coming on the market with AI, with agents, and bringing that as a packaged option for you? And if you have providers in your ecosystem that aren't investing there over the next 12 months, maybe we should look at moving them out. If customers right now aren't yet on a composable architecture, or it's just they're not able to do that kind of curation fast enough, well, let's put some time, energy, effort into the systems and data foundation there so that we ... Let's spend the next six to 12 months, let's fix that, because things are only going to start to move faster. And then I think then it comes back to then let's take that critical view of if there are one or two more proprietary bets, what should those be? So I think that goes back to one of the earlier points I made, what's going away in your competitive advantage? What's something new that you can do, and how do we explore that adjacency? So we have workshops that will run specifically to ... There's common shifts that companies can take based on what's eroding. Here's adjacencies that might hold potential. So then how do we look at proprietary bets specifically there? Let's let everybody else try to handle the table stakes and just wringing more efficiency out or getting us into the channels that are expected. And then if we're going to place a strategic bet, it should be in one of those domains that's a large adjacent market that you can go after.

Patricia Wu

>> Thank you so much, Jason. You gave us a lot to think about.

Scott Hebner

>> Absolutely.

Patricia Wu

>> I love the roadmap with the practical things to think about.

Jason Cottrell

>> Hopefully that was helpful. This was great. Thank you.

Scott Hebner

>> Thank you.

Patricia Wu

>> Thank you so much.

Jason Cottrell

>> Absolutely. Thanks.

Patricia Wu

>> And thank you so much for watching. We're here at 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.