EXCLUSIVE Q&A: EY Americas looks at how — and why — to unify commerce
Effective unified commerce relies on a strong technology foundation.
Chain Store Age recently spoke with Steven Bailey, EY Americas commercial excellence leader, about the numerous benefits a unified commerce model offers both retailers and consumers and how retailers can align their enterprise with unified commerce operations.
How would you define unified commerce?
Unified commerce is associated to consumers and their journey instead of platforms and channels. Instead of having organizations and data and technology that are optimized for a brick-and-mortar store or online, retailers create a ‘single source of truth’ for inventory, product, reporting in progress and for customers across the board, so that they truly unify the capabilities that they have.
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Most retailers still organize their marketing, commerce or merchandising functions around a channel, and until they switch to organize around the consumer journey itself, they're not performing unified commerce; they're trying to stitch together the channels.
Omnichannel is just serving customers in any channel. Unified commerce is being unified in the capability to meet the consumer where they are and give them what they need regardless of channel.
What technologies can retailers use to unify commerce?
Your product life cycle management (PLM) solution has got to be solid. If you're not able to reliably have the right price, the right product information, and the right promotion information in any channel at any moment, that system has got to be in place.
Second, inventory needs to be unified so there is a single source of truth. When an associate is looking for product or availability in a POS system in the store, they should be getting the exact same information as somebody who is about to purchase on your e-commerce site. They should know whether that product is available to ship, regardless of where it's coming from.
This is all required before moving into anything AI-related, because AI is going to require all that data to be reliable, instantaneously available and as real-time as possible.
Retailers need to move away from a system of where they’re focused constantly on weekly or seasonal promotions. Those things will still play a part, but retailers need to have an ‘always on’ more instantaneous, intelligent decision.
In the past before large language models, using AI was about getting the insights to make decisions when you’re planning. But with AI today, in terms of LLMs and agents, you need to create a capability that is driving constant intelligence so that you’re enabling humans to do what they need to do, or eventually agents to do what they need to do.
So today, I can provide the next best action, the right information, the right insight about a category, product or customer to an associate in the store; and I can provide the same appropriate information in the way that it needs to be digested for a consumer on a digital platform. The combination of that data layer intelligence layer will enable unification.
What emerging innovation models will help retailers transform their consumer-facing operations
Some consumers are just now dipping their toe into using a chatbot to search for a product. Other consumers are looking for products based on need and use cases, instead of traditional keyword search. Retailers have to meet and serve need states and have that capability be part of their systems so that the technology is able to say, ‘These are the occasions and needs that you are looking for. I have what you need.’
Also, retailers should use the next generation of recommendation engines to say to a customer you told me you’re going hiking and looking for shoes, you have these types of needs. Here's what we would offer as a complete package. Being able to truly expand the cart and the sale by providing more personalization that isn't just a ‘you might also like,’ but is a ‘we’re solving a need,’ is going to be different and require different data than just serving that content up would require.
Retailers that start to move into that model are going to out-compete the others that don't. It's not going to be optional the way that it is to a degree today. It's just going to be table stakes, because consumers will expect it.
Where do humans fit into this AI-based unified commerce model?
Everybody has heard some variation of ‘AI still needs a human in the loop.’ Where AI is truly allowing the human in the loop is by enabling them to do their job faster, more intelligently, at the at the scale that you need.
[READ MORE: Shoptalk 2026: Keeping humans in the AI loop]
This means retailers have to identify the actual agents and capabilities in-house, most of which I will probably build, because the cost to build these versus buying them is going to be lower. The cost is going to be in data integration as it always is, but you can start to build agents that cut out parts of processes that are very cumbersome today to free up capacity and enable humans to perform the higher value work at scale.
Retailers also need to look at how they are evolving the work itself. Just like it's always been bad to place old processes into new technology and hope that it's better, the same will be true as retailers start to automate and add agents. Retailers will have to take a wholesale look at their operating models and the processes underneath to determine where their actual benefit is then and focus there first.
