There’s this moment a lot of ecommerce brands hit where the tech stack stops feeling like a growth engine and starts feeling like… a job. Like you are basically running a small software company on the side, except the software is your storefront, and the reward is you get to keep it from breaking.
Shopify has always had this interesting thing going on in Canada. It is a homegrown tech success story, the Ottawa company people like to point at and say, see, we can build big things here.
If you run a Shopify store long enough, you eventually hit the “search problem.”
A year ago, if you told most merchants that a real customer would discover a product inside a chat, compare options inside that same chat, and then buy without ever visiting the brand’s homepage, it would’ve sounded like a weird demo.
A WMS over here. A 3PL portal over there. POS inventory in one system. Ecommerce inventory in another. Someone’s got a spreadsheet open with “the real numbers” because nobody trusts what the dashboard says.
They launched Agentic Storefront, a tool that lets people buy products directly inside ChatGPT and other big AI surfaces like Microsoft Copilot and Google Search AI mode. Not “click a link and go to a store” either. The idea is. You’re already talking to an AI.
Distributed order management sounds like one of those “enterprise” phrases that only matters once you’re doing eight figures. But DOM shows up way earlier than that. Basically the moment you have more than one place inventory can ship from. A second warehouse.
In 2026, the weirdest thing about buying stuff online isn’t that you can “shop with AI”. It’s that the purchase can finish without what we used to call a checkout page.
Every January-ish, Anna Tims’ consumer champion column (“Your Problems” in The Observer / The Guardian) does something weirdly comforting: it rounds up a “dishonours list” of companies and public bodies that have delivered truly grim customer service.
B2B Customer Experience (CX) has evolved from a nice-to-have differentiator into a critical competitive advantage. You're no longer competing solely on product features or pricing—your customers expect seamless, personalized interactions at every touchpoint.
Hyderabad police arrested an ex-Coinbase customer service agent in late December 2024, marking a significant development in the ongoing investigation into a massive Coinbase data leak that exposed nearly 70,000 customer records.
Toku Enters Middle East Market with its First Regional Deployments, marking a significant expansion for Asia Pacific's leading AI-powered 360° customer experience. The company has launched operations in Bahrain and Qatar, powering contact centre operations for a major on-demand services enterprise.
