Artificial intelligence is changing ecommerce so quickly that keeping up is daunting.
Consider the prominent payment processors, platforms, and marketplaces that collaborated with OpenAI and Perplexity in the past year.
- Perplexity and Shopify in November 2024.
- OpenAI with Shopify in April 2025.
- Perplexity and PayPal in May 2025.
- OpenAI and Shopify again in September 2025.
- Perplexity and Stripe in September 2025.
- OpenAI and Walmart in October 2025.
- Perplexity and PayPal again in November 2025.
- OpenAI and Target in November 2025.
Each of these partnerships and integrations pushes the industry toward various forms of AI search, AI-assisted shopping, and agentic commerce. Consumers will shop differently very soon.
How consumers shop online is quickly changing.
Marketplaces
Many mid-market businesses will benefit.
Mark Simon, vice president of strategy at Celigo, an automation platform, told me recently that direct-to-consumer brands are now selling on the Walmart Marketplace and could greatly benefit if it pushes their products into the emerging AI shopping ecosystem.
Yet the product data feeds to those marketplaces, for even a moderate number of SKUs, work only when automated. And not all data-feed integrations are the same.
“There is definitely a way to obtain a competitive advantage,” said Simon. “If you choose a modern technique…a modern method [of integration], you can move quickly. You can shift to an automation-first approach.”
Simon’s perspective is notable given that Celigo is an infrastructure-as-a-service company that connects and automates business systems, including Walmart Marketplace integrations.
An automation-first mindset could help ecommerce businesses more broadly as the race to keep up with AI shopping intensifies.
Automation First
Imagine a repetitive but essential task, such as a workflow for creating AI-generated product descriptions. The workflow can start manually. A marketing specialist develops a prompt, pastes it into an AI, provides feedback on the output, re-generates it, and so on.
An automation-first mindset prioritizes how the workflow functions at scale. It seeks to make automation the default process for most operational, marketing, and business tasks.
For product descriptions, an automation would integrate the catalog, AI, and ecommerce platform. Once connected, it could run a series of tests to improve the output. When launched, the automation works at scale.
Getting Started
To implement an automation-first mindset:
- Become proactive. Simon said it like this, “Instead of being reactive around everything that’s changing, think differently and become proactive.” Automate repetitive, time-sensitive, and error-prone operations from the start.
- Invest the time. Building an automated process or workflow can take more up-front work and collaboration. Invest the time.
- Build for multiple applications. Modern integrations and automations should be mostly agnostic toward companies and software tools. The integration that feeds data to the Walmart Marketplace should easily adapt to Amazon, eBay, and even Mercado Libre.
- Find repeatable and scalable tasks. Automation, after all, is the idea of doing something over and over again. So design processes and workflows flexible enough to grow with the business.
- Monitor outcomes consistently. Good automations should include feedback loops and regular reports, not a “set and forget” approach.
- Adopt strategic alignment and common sense. Finally, automation first does not mean automation always. Ensure it makes sense for the business and passes a common-sense test.
Keeping Up
Given these characteristics, an automation-first mindset could help merchants:
- Absorb rapid change.
- Add operational margin and flexibility.
Absorbing change
If Walmart or any other marketplace alters how it ingests product data or modifies its discovery algorithm, a good integration takes those changes in stride.
Certainly change is inevitable, but automation makes adoption relatively easier.
Operational margin
The automation-first mindset can create something akin to operational margin — the space and time needed to respond thoughtfully rather than reactively.
When the integrations, workflows, and connections run automatically and reliably, managers reclaim hours each week for revenue-generating projects, avoiding manual updates, error chasing, or feed maintenance.