Voices from Commerce: Al Williams on why product data is the new crown jewel and trust is the moat

Meet Voices from Commerce, our monthly blog series spotlighting the people shaping what's next in digital commerce. Each installment features a Q&A with a leader at Commerce, offering fresh perspectives and practical insights to help you keep pace with this fast-moving industry. We kicked off the series with Michaela Weber, then sat down with Doug Hollinger, and Ali Afzalirad. This month, we're talking with Al Williams, VP of Market Strategy, about what happens when shoppers start their searches inside AI assistants, how to separate real signal from AI hype, and why the future of ecommerce belongs to brands a machine can trust.

Q: Before we dig into strategy, tell us about your path to becoming VP of Market Strategy at Commerce. What experiences along the way most shaped how you think about where markets are heading?

A: It was a circular path, and looking back, that turned out to be the point. I started as a retailer at Urban Outfitters, where I was responsible for everything from creating the product all the way up to Add to Cart. That gave me a real feel for the core problems our customers have, because I was a customer myself. Then I widened my aperture and moved to a platform, working as a solutions architect at Salesforce Commerce Cloud, doing deep implementations with a select set of customers. Most recently, before this role, I worked on the ISV and technology partner side.

So I've been lucky enough to sit in quite literally every seat at the table. Normally there's a whole decision-making committee that decides whether a company is going to buy or evaluate an ecommerce platform, and I've held nearly every one of those positions at some point. I never really planned a strategy career. I just kept sitting at that table until I'd seen the whole thing and realized, “Oh, this is how all of these pieces connect together.” That vantage point is what lets me act on behalf of the end consumer and the customer, because I've actually been in those seats.

Q: Market strategy means different things at different companies. How do you define the role at Commerce, and what does a typical week look like when the market seems to change monthly?

A: In this company, the role is relatively new, and at its core it's about speaking for our customers: representing who they are, what they actually need, and what's shifting in tech and commerce that could affect their business. The ground is genuinely moving beneath our feet with agentic commerce right now, so week to week I’m not just keeping up with the latest trends but tracking the latest technology partners and protocols.

I think of myself as a sieve. I listen out into the market, filter all of it, and distill it down into something specific: this is exactly how we need to think about this feature, or this integration, or this new technology for our particular set of customers. Then I point the product team, the business team, and the messaging team in the right direction. A new agentic protocol drops, or we hear about an acquisition, and the question becomes, “What does this mean for us and how do we position around it?”

Q: Shoppers are increasingly starting their product searches in AI assistants and answer engines instead of traditional search. How does that change the way you build market strategy, and what assumptions from two years ago no longer hold?

A: This is the one I keep coming back to, and my honest answer is that it doesn't change the strategy. It sharpens it. I did some research recently on the history of commerce and the friction customers have faced across different eras, and the same loop shows up every time. Regardless of the channel or the technology, customers want the same three things: to find what they want easily, to check out without friction, and to know when they're going to get what they ordered.

What's shifted is where the value sits. Even two years ago, with social and TikTok Shop, the web storefront was still king. Now the product is the crown jewel. We used to optimize for people scrolling; now we're optimizing for machines summarizing. That flips the script in two ways. First, the product itself becomes the center of gravity. Second, everything around it has to be consistent. No matter where a shopper finds your product, the information is the same, and no matter how they check out, the experience is equally frictionless. If we try to chase every fragment of that landscape, we'll spin out. So the job is to crystallize the few core needs and make sure the technology genuinely supports them.

Q: There's a lot of noise in AI right now. What's your framework for deciding which trends deserve investment and which can wait?

A: I ask our merchants and myself the same question, “Does this change buyer behavior or business behavior today, or is it just a demo? Is it actually showing up in real purchase paths and solving real problems?” If not, it can wait.

It also depends on the market. In North America, the focus is on optimizing conversion and checkout: brand agents, customer service agents, anything that makes the experience more dynamic and lifts conversion. In Europe, the focus is more on optimization and process management: how do I run my business more efficiently and get more throughput at lower cost? 

Instant agentic checkout is a good example of something that's emerging. We absolutely want to be on the forefront of it and have the integrations in place, but it's not the first thing I'd tell most merchants to invest in, it’s for the cutting-edge ones. Data enrichment, on the other hand, solves both the internal operational problem and the front-end visibility problem at the same time, so it bridges the two.

“Real signal has data behind it. If there's an actual problem and you can back it up with real conversion or efficiency metrics, invest in it. Hype usually just has a keynote and a flashy demo behind it.”

— Al Williams, VP of Market Strategy, Commerce

Q: In agentic commerce, an AI agent (not a human) may be the one evaluating and buying products for shoppers. How should brands think about marketing to a machine, and does brand even matter in that world?

A: I think of AI agents as personal shoppers. Years ago I worked at the Container Store, and a few times a week someone would walk in and just ask for “a box.” My job was to ask enough questions to figure out what they actually needed. Are you shipping something, what's going inside, how big is it? Some people wanted a corrugated shipping box; some people wanted a one-by-one-inch pink acrylic box. You had no idea until you asked.

That's exactly where agentic commerce is today. Shoppers walk in asking for a box, because most of us don't yet know how to use these tools precisely. An agent can't read the room or size someone up the way I could on that sales floor. So the responsibility shifts to the brand: your product data has to answer all of those questions before the agent even walks into the room or the customer even starts typing. If your data doesn't capture both what the shopper is looking for and the unique value that makes your brand better, you're doing yourself no favors.

So brand absolutely still matters, arguably more. Product information is what makes you discoverable and answerable, and brand differentiation is what builds trust on top of that information. We say we want choice, but really we want to be told what's best for us and to trust that it's the right call. The two are tightly coupled.

Q: The rebrand from BigCommerce to Commerce brought BigCommerce, Feedonomics, and Makeswift under one umbrella. How does that combined story change the segments and buyers you can go after?

A: We didn't rebrand to sound bigger. We rebranded because the problem stopped being three separate problems and became one. There used to be a data problem, a storefront problem, and a transaction problem, and those have collapsed into a single, connected challenge. The channel is now the main entity. A flexible storefront needs to live wherever the customer is: a portal, the web, maybe a snippet inside an agent someday. And a robust transaction engine has always been non-negotiable.

Bringing Feedonomics, BigCommerce, and Makeswift together gives a retailer one interconnected family to solve all of that. But one of our core foundations is openness, so we don't lock anyone in. You don't have to run BigCommerce as your engine to use Feedonomics, or use it as the backend for Makeswift. It's well integrated if you want that, but you can choose the setup that fits your business — headless, templated, or best-in-class components. The flexibility is the point.

“We give you the choice of how to show up. We don't give you a choice on whether your data is right when you get there.”

— Al Williams, VP of Market Strategy, Commerce

Q: The line between B2B and B2C buying behavior keeps blurring, with business buyers expecting consumer-grade experiences. How is that showing up in your strategy, and where is Commerce placing its bets?

A: Business buyers now expect the same speed and simplicity they get shopping for themselves at home. Whether it's a wholesale buyer reordering quickly or a consumer telling an agent, "If there's a flight under $250 in this date range, book it," it's the same underlying technology showing up in different contexts. A wholesaler might set up a rule that triggers a reorder when margin drops below 30%. Same pattern, different seat.

So we're betting on flexible, composable infrastructure that supports a wholesale buyer or a retail shopper without forcing a choice, and we're staying sharpened on the same core areas: product information and data, price and product management at scale, customer relationship management on the B2B side, and frictionless transaction. From BigCommerce Payments for lower-maturity buyers to agentic checkout for large enterprises, with ERP integrations in between. B2B buyers aren't getting more patient; they're comparing their work experiences to Amazon and to LLMs, and it's our job to have the infrastructure ready when that leap comes,  because it's coming soon.

Q: Final question. What's one widely held belief about the future of ecommerce that you think is wrong, and what do you believe instead?

A: The widely held belief is that AI will send you more traffic. I don't think traffic is going to be the prize anymore. Right now we still have choice, we can compare five sites, five agents, five answers. Over time those choices are going to collapse, and the winners won't be the ones who show up the most. They'll be the ones who've proven they can be trusted on delivery, consistency, and visibility every single time.

Trust becomes the moat. Once an agent or a shopper learns you're reliable, they stop shopping around and just default to you, because agents,and honestly people, are lazy. They pattern-match to the most reliable, most valuable option and stop looking. I think we'll start to see trust emerge as one of the number one signals in commerce, similar to how payment providers built fingerprinting and fraud management, but for brands and accounts that want to transact on agentic surfaces. And the best thing you can have underneath all of it is a single source of record, including transactions, product information, reviews that are supported by infrastructure that's flexible but simple. 

“The future isn't more traffic. It's earning the trust that means nobody has to look past you.”

— Al Williams, VP of Market Strategy, Commerce

To learn more about showing up well across every channel and surface where your customers shop, explore our resources on agentic commerce and connected commerce strategy.

Al Williams is VP of Market Strategy at Commerce, where he represents the voice of the customer and translates fast-moving shifts in commerce technology into direction for the product, business, and messaging teams. His career spans retail at Urban Outfitters, platform work as a solutions architect at Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and the ISV and technology partner side — giving them a rare vantage point across nearly every seat at the ecommerce decision-making table.