theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI & Retail Trailblazers | Dirk Hoering, Commercetools

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Dirk Hoerig

Founder

commercetools

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Dirk Hoering, Commercetools

Dirk Hoerig

Founder commercetools

What does “autonomous retail” really look like when AI agents start shaping discovery, pricing and purchasing decisions? In this AI & Retail Trailblazers interview, Commercetools founder and CIO Dirk Hoerig joins theCUBE’s John Furrier to explore how artificial intelligence is redefining the future of commerce. Drawing on insights from NRF and decades of industry experience, Hoerig explains why agentic commerce marks more than an incremental upgrade. Instead, it represents a structural shift in how brands connect data, channels and customers. He outlines how ... Read more

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How do siloed data and disconnected systems hinder brands' and retailers' ability to support AI-driven (agentic) shopping, and what infrastructure changes are needed to enable real-time access to inventory, customer data, cart creation, and order placement? add

How will autonomous AI agents be used to automate and optimize commerce operations (pricing, promotions, inventory, product data, personalization, front-end generation), and how will humans and those agents work together? add

What does "headless" mean in the context of agentic (agent-driven) shopping, and is it essentially the same concept as traditional headless commerce—just a different execution? add

How have AI and agents changed the role and implementation of integrations for enterprise brands and retailers, and how are customers evaluating and preparing their data estates (data readiness, data gravity, and context) to adopt AI/agent technologies? add

What steps should companies take to manage execution risk as they move from AI experimentation to AI execution (the "agent era") in retail? add

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Dirk Hoering, Commercetools

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John Furrier

>> Welcome back. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here at theCUBE NYSE studio, our brand new studio here in Wall Street. Of course, we have our Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street. We'd love the tech market. Technology is the market. This is our special NRF series where we're looking at the future of retail and the innovation that's coming out of where AI is infusing in. It's impacting all aspects of the physical and digital real world aspects of retail office operations, staffing, user experience, shopping experience, discovery, personalization, all those things are coming together. They have the data. Now AI is coming. It's the perfect storm of innovation. Dirk is here. Dirk Hoerig is the founder and chief innovation officer at Commercetools. Dirk, great to have you on. Good to see you again.

Dirk Hoerig

>> Good to see you too. Thanks for having me.

John Furrier

>> The NRF. I know you've been to how many? 15, 20 of them.

Dirk Hoerig

>> I stopped counting, but it's somewhere within that range, yes.

John Furrier

>> What was it like this year because you and I were talking before we came on camera about how we're excited on theCUBE because it's got AI everywhere, which we love. There's a little AI factory kind of future in there, just it's transformative in its experiences as well. What was your takeaway this year compared to the patterns? Like, oh yeah. Innovation's happening inch by inch, moving along. Sometimes it moves a little bit farther. It seems to be a big step, function, mindset and sentiment this year.

Dirk Hoerig

>> I think we see a whole change going through our industry and it's much more than just a pivoting moment. The NRF this year had been probably the busiest that I have ever seen in my life. Also, probably the most exciting one. Literally everybody came to figure out what does this Agentic Commerce mean for me and my business? What do I have to do? Where's the commerce market overall going? And they had been seeking for answers for exchange, for technologies and solutions. Definitely an amazing event.

John Furrier

>> I want to ask you a question. Given your history and expert in retail from a tech perspective, it seems that in retail there's always been these hard problems everyone's been trying to solve, retention, shopping experience, more throughput. Clearly they've been great at data. I mean, they measure everything, so they give them a good A+ on getting data, having analytics. They got the data. But what had been the hardest problems that you see breaking through with AI, the idea of agents? Physical AI applies to retail, their physical outlets, and they seem to be doing well too as digital and physical merge together. What are some of those hard problems that are now being cracked with the supercomputing capability and some of the AI coming on?

Dirk Hoerig

>> Many of the challenges that brands and retailers today are still having is that a lot of the data that you're talking about is captured in silos. There had been a system for each different kind of channel. Often these systems are not connected directly in real time and when you translate that to the agentic era now is making it much harder for AI to actually transact and operate with that data on top of it. So what became more important for companies is to make their infrastructure future-proof on how can we actually make that accessible both for the humans, there we talked about unified commerce in the past couple of years, a lot at Commercetools. So how can we enable any touch point for online shopping, but with having one underlying platform that empowers all of these instead of working from silo to silo. Now this is even more important when we're entering the age of AI shopping because they need to be able to access product inventory in real-time, customer information, being able to place cards, create orders, and that only works if you're able to provide this unified kind of layer.

John Furrier

>> We had great coverage from your Commercetools event in Miami last year. Even since then, the value and the velocity are changing, more velocity, the value properties are emerging. What's the current update on Commercetools? How are you guys evolving? What's the current state of Commercetools?

Dirk Hoerig

>> 2025 had been a crazy run for us, a little bit with the backwind of Agentic Commerce that made brands and retailers to move faster actually than they had been before. We achieved some incredible milestones. On the business side the company crossed over 200 million on ARR and operationally we started to process over 80 billion of GMV. So we became one of the largest commerce infrastructure players globally out there processing over 500 million orders and helping our customers actually to get discoverability and transaction within the AI channels. That was when we spoke last time in May in Miami on our Elevate event, all of the AI chat channels, so ChatGPT, Gemini, and CO had not yet fully opened up to agentic shopping. That had been the topic now beginning of this year at NRS, that with Google's agentic shopping solution, ChatGPT launched end of last year, our customers asked us, "Hey, how can you help us on ensuring that we are discoverable in there when our customers are searching for products that we are offering and how can we also enable transactions?"

John Furrier

>> You mentioned Google and Google Cloud, what we're seeing, Google obviously has a e-commerce with all their advertising data analytics. As cloud comes in, you starting to see a lot more horsepower coming in with supercomputing. You and I were riffing about the hyperconverged edge and what that's going to do when AI factories come there. How do you see some of the new things coming? What do you see as the current conversations that are super important? Agents, shopping experience is obviously key. What's coming? What's the next big area of commerce AI intersection? Because that's everything. It's the money and the capital coming together with the tech. So you got business results with productivity, but what else is out there? What's the big thing coming next from your vision?

Dirk Hoerig

>> I see two big trends. I think they're not even trends, they're changing the complete market literally like the internet has changed the game of retail. Then later on we saw the rise of smartphones completely changing the customer journey. Now in the age of AI, this might even be bigger. On the first end, what we already covered slightly is the overall shopping journey. So how we as consumers or as business buyers now starting to discover products, where do we find them? Who's making the recommendation and where do we transact? This is amazing for us as a buyer because it provides much more convenience. It lets us transact much faster. We can skip the whole process of information gathering and much more, but it puts the businesses towards huge challenges. First, how do I technically enable these? But even more important, and this is the boardroom conversation that we are having literally with all of our large customers, is how do we stay relevant in a world where it's not only the human anymore as the only buyer, but also AI agents are operating on the other side too? So how do we stay relevant in there? Who's owning the customer journey? Who owns the customer records? How do we process these orders? All these kinds of things. This is going to evolve and I think this will dictate the pace, especially in the B2C world over the next two years dramatically. The other part, and this is where it gets interesting, is I think the even bigger shift is on how do we operate our businesses? Because the last 25 years, software companies now software service companies had been great at providing tools that allows us to manually manage our business. We are used to work in spreadsheets, consume a lot of information. The UIs have been designed all for us humans to fulfill simple business tasks. Now we are seeing a change here where we can put businesses into a kind of an autopilot. My example here, John, is that if you would think about a traditional car out there, you could either now add a smart assistant to that and say that, I don't know, like a lane assist. That definitely gives you some great capabilities on it, but it's still the same car just it's a little bit smarter. Or you think about a completely autonomous car, you think about the Waymo. We believe that this Waymo kind of thing, that's what we are working on at Commercetools, is completely changing how enterprises operate. Instead of working on the task, the platform automatically suggests what should be done and can also execute on behalf of all of us.

John Furrier

>> Can you give an example of an autonomous retail operation?

Dirk Hoerig

>> Super simple. Imagine Black Friday, it's mid of the day, business is going great. You're already transacted about 10 million orders. Your campaigns are working, you're checking in with your agent and automatically comes to you and says, "Okay, I analyzed our ongoing promotions and based on the purchasing behavior of our customers in the last three hours, these are the adjustments that I suggest. These are the improvements that we're going to get. Do you want me to execute it?" So we, human stay still in control, we are still supervising all of these, but all of the data analysis, all of the decision preparation has already been done.

John Furrier

>> So you have a pricing analyst on call basically, hey, we might want to take that promotion from 10% to five or maybe get rid of it. They're going to buy anyway. Demand is there. That's an example.

Dirk Hoerig

>> It's one example. But now we just talk about one use case and that is one agent in there. Now think about army of super smart minions where each of them has a specific task. So it can be promotion optimization, it can be pricing optimization, it can be inventory analysis, it can be product data translation, it can be product data optimization, it can be personalization, it can be front end generation and so on. These are getting all automatically orchestrated and then help us humans to interact with that. The big questions that companies need to ask themselves in the next couple of years, and that's not limited to the commerce basis, how do agents and humans in the future are going to work together? That goes beyond just the next generation of Clippy on the right bottom corner. That's a little bit of a chat that looks much different as I just tried opening.

John Furrier

>> Chatbots are chatbots, but when you get into reasoning and inference, I mean Google, Gemini, we were talking yesterday with some of the folks from Google around how that's changed just the application of some of these basic services. That has nothing to do with, I'm walking in and autonomous realizes, oh, John's buying skis. John, you might not want to get those on mountains. You're not as good as you used to be. Which is what I learned when I interact with the AI because it's like, okay, I can still ski expert trails but I don't have the staying powers. So maybe I don't get the fatter ski. Maybe I go with a little bit easier turns. And you know what? I gave the prompts. Okay, yeah, thank you. That is good interface, but I'm still typing. It could be voice.

Dirk Hoerig

>> It could be voice.

John Furrier

>> It could be an agent finding the best skis, best price.

Dirk Hoerig

>> What is important, and that's what we are working on, we are creating a new workbench where agents and humans work together. Where it's going beyond just the typical kind of chat, where it's going beyond the typical kind of voice, where it's a true platform where agents can collaborate and where humans can collaborate in a very efficient way.

John Furrier

>> Well, you guys have a great business, you always had a great solution. You're always platform specific. How do you view the platform strategy now when you have actually more platform capabilities, you have more aperture for coding because now low-code, no-code let's a business user essentially code up an agent by just saying the function, writes a PRD, does the coding, gets the app. So how do you view the platform from an enablement standpoint? Where's the handoff between platform foundational services to true agility with guardrails so someone doesn't screw up the pricing decision? Oops, I forgot to add in compliance. Take me through your thoughts on the platform of Commercetools and just platforms in general because AI native needs a new layer.

Dirk Hoerig

>> Absolutely. Therefore we are lucky that we have probably the most scalable and largest commercial infrastructure layer in the whole e-commerce space out there. As I already mentioned, we are serving over 1 billion consumers. We're managing over 150 million products on behalf of our customers in there. That all in a fully scalable infrastructure layer that's available globally within milliseconds and it's available for the human channels. So a web shop can directly run on that. Your car can be directly connected with that. Your store is directly connected with that. Now the AI agents in different kind of ways, either through for example, ChatGPT or Gemini or your own agent that you're having in your pocket can be directly connected with that system as well. What is truly important, if you want to provide full autonomous layers for AIs, you need to have that infrastructure and the data layer right. Without that you're just having an AI chat agent that's not able to do anything. Therefore, what we have built over the last 15 years is now providing or helping us to help change that whole category that we are in, again. You might remember what we initially called Headless Commerce with the idea to provide all channels for shopping, then we pioneered and had been driving that space. It evolved to a composable giving brands and manufacturers more flexibility, now becomes the economic infrastructure for agentic shopping.

John Furrier

>> So Headless implies e-commerce. Hey, you can put the UI on. I'm oversimplifying, but what does Headless mean now when you translate that to agentic where you have a lot more horizontal things going on data? Is it the same game, just different execution? How do you view that piece of it?

Dirk Hoerig

>> I see us as a commerce operating system that actually has all of the data, all of the customer information, all of the knowledge around what is being available for sale and what can be purchased, customer records, customer histories, and being able to provide that, giving secure access to the agents to be able to transact on top of that.

John Furrier

>> Awesome. You guys are going to have your event this year a little bit different? Probably U.S. and Europe?

Dirk Hoerig

>> We are making it easier for our customers so that they don't need to take the long travel anymore so we are splitting it. We will have an event in the U.S. and we are going to have an event in Europe.

John Furrier

>> I've always loved platforms. I think platforms are always fun because it's a system and I love the operating system angle. I use that all the time. But we're living in a world where Commercetools was, you could say SaaS platform with an app and the headless system enablement. Now you're looking like you're AWS or Google Cloud because now you have this scale. Talk about how you see the infrastructure piece of your business. Are you partnering? You're becoming your own retail hyperscaler basically. And that's the way. That's my word. Maybe it's not the right, accurate word, but you're at scale.

Dirk Hoerig

>> Luckily we partnered from the beginning on with the hyperscalers. So we are closely working with GCP and also with AWS to provide our customers unpaired scalability and flexibility globally. That is actually now also the underlying infrastructure for all of these shopping channels. It's true that we are a commerce hyperscaler on our own, but luckily we don't have to build all of these data centers. We can rely on strong partnerships.

John Furrier

>> It's funny, a SaaS company like a Snowflake becomes a data platform, Commercetools, a retail app system becomes its own platform. That's the beauty of SaaS. Now with AI, we just see that going completely even higher in capabilities. How do you view as a partner? I won't say ecosystem because it's a one big ecosystem. You're with the hyperscalers, you also have customers, you've got two sides of that partnerships. You got hooks into the security of the clouds, you got the compliance, you have customers who want to integrate in. What's the role of integrations and how has it changed?

Dirk Hoerig

>> First of all, integrations is key and you need to make them as seamless and easy as possible for our customers to benefit from them. Because enterprise brands and retailers, they're connected to so many different kind of systems that you need to provide that out of the box. What has changed is that back 10 years ago, customers had to pay a lot of money to get these integrations done and AI is skipping here, the game. It's making many of these integrations either becoming obsolete, companies can easily prompt their kind of integrations. We provided our AI hub already last year to help them deploying integrations very fast using AI, tooling around it. They can use their AI code generator in combination, but integrations is a key piece of success.

John Furrier

>> I think that's been one of the great sign of first wave of the agents or the first value coming out besides unique workflows has been the grinding out the integrations. Talk about the data side. I've always been fascinated by these verticals like retail, like healthcare, they've been data hoarders. They love data. In retail, they have dashboards for everything. In healthcare, it's a little bit more structured data for the compliance side of it, but they still tagged everything. So they still got great data. They're in good positions to really blow up their retail operations in a good way. How do you see the customer's behavior around their data, their data estates, their data gravity? They're already working with dashboards, so they're not new to analytics. So they must be really taken to the AI and agentic like a fish to water.

Dirk Hoerig

>> Absolutely. Though everybody is now reviewing, do we have the right set of data? Because now data is becoming much more than storage. It becomes a kind of knowledge layer. When you look on the change the sites for the agents, then also they become a kind of a memory. Therefore, it's very important to-

John Furrier

>> So the context is critical?

Dirk Hoerig

>> The context is critical. Therefore, brands, retailers across all different kinds of industries... You mentioned the medical space as well. They're very carefully reviewing, do we have the right sets of data? Where do we need to adopt changes? Because that's more critical than ever.

John Furrier

>> Dirk, final question. What are you optimizing for now? What's your focus? What are some of your goals?

Dirk Hoerig

>> We optimize for our customers being able to capture AI chat from wherever they are in the world. We actually opened even up that if you are not Commercetools' customer, you're running on a legacy system that maybe does not give you the capabilities to capture all of these opportunities, we launched a product recently called AgenticLift that gives you a fast track access also to the agentic shopping channels. Then in parallel really driving the shift from, I would say AI experimentation that we have seen many companies doing in the year 2025 to AI execution. So how can it bring real value to our system and help drive better outcomes?

John Furrier

>> Follow up to that, I'd ask, it's not so much a strategy risk as it is execution risk. Would you agree?

Dirk Hoerig

>> Yes, absolutely.

John Furrier

>> What are some of the key things people should do to make sure they're honing in on managing that execution risk as they bring in their agent era of retail?

Dirk Hoerig

>> Smaller teams, that's one thing. Companies all over the world shifted towards larger teams and that had been slowing down. So go for smaller teams, adapt quicker, take decisions faster. I think what we are all seeing is that the pace of change just keeps accelerating. We keep saying this for a couple of years, but when we look what is just happening in the world, I think it's more true than ever. And you need to figure out how as a company can you adapt. The only way that you can do that is have small teams, give them autonomy and then define clear goals. What is it actually that the business wants to do?

John Furrier

>> Do you think the retail executives, people who are the owners and shareholders understand that it's AI, adapt or die?

Dirk Hoerig

>> I think they understand and that's what we have seen at NRF, why so many had been coming. The big question is, are they able to execute? Because as you said, execution is not what matters and time, so sense of urgency is speeding everything.

John Furrier

>> I have to ask you as a founder, sometimes when the founders stay around, they shepherd the ship. They always kind of, when they have these key founder moments, founder modes, some people call it, what's been the big difference in your mind as a founder seeing the success of Commercetools? Now you're on an exciting market where all theaters of innovation are popping. Business side, technical side, people side, everything's happening. It's like everything's going off at once. Do you see the AI native side different than cloud native? How do you see the world an opportunity because you got a whole another level.

Dirk Hoerig

>> I believe that when the world is changing quickly and when there are so monumental shifts that there's always huge opportunity. Yes, there's risk involved everywhere when there's huge opportunities around it, but the market is changing like it has never changed before. That always means it's opening up opportunities for everybody and especially in commerce. So for all brands, retailers, manufacturers, but also for the vendors in there that are operating in that space, this is all going to change. Now the cards are being mixed again, and that's an opportunity for everybody to build outstanding companies on whatever site they are.

John Furrier

>> So your now new North Star as a founder is autonomous retail, is that right?

Dirk Hoerig

>> Autonomous retail is the North Star, yes.

John Furrier

>> All right. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate it so much coming on, love talking retail with the founder who's built a successful company as a platform. But as the platforms change, you're starting to see new huge opportunities with AI. It is an AI native world that is going to be a step function, change of value creation, value extraction, user experience, and it's going to change how we interact. The real world and digital are coming together at first party. That is what's happening in all the sectors with AI. We're doing our part to keep it coming to you with theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.