agentic commerce<\/a>, a term dominating recent industry conferences, like the National Retail Federation show in New York. This new channel involves personal AI assistants, such as advanced versions of Gemini or ChatGPT, doing the shopping for consumers autonomously or just in \u2018one click\u2019. For retailers, the shift changes the nature of competition.<\/p>\nMr Jackson said that in this new environment, the traditional power of marketing and brand awareness becomes \u201cway less relevant\u201d. Instead, two factors become paramount: \u201caccurate, real time, inventory availability\u201d and ensuring \u201cproduct information needs to be bang on\u201d.<\/p>\n
The stakes for getting these technical details wrong are now dramatically higher. An error made on a brand\u2019s website might result in one disappointed customer, creating a small \u201cblast radius\u201d.<\/p>\n
But Mr Jackson said an error communicated to an AI shopping agent \u2014 inaccurate stock, an optimistic delivery time, or a false product description \u2014 can have a \u201cmassive blast radius\u201d. That agent \u201cnow knows that you\u2019re not trustworthy \u2026 it stops putting you in its list of recommended places to go shopping\u201d.<\/p>\n
Fluent Commerce is channelling the Bain capital toward solutions for this new reality. A core area of expansion is its new AI-powered platform, \u2018Fluent Connect\u2019, which uses proprietary tools to write and maintain integration code between the OMS and critical third-party systems, cutting the time to deploy connections with payment gateways and carriers from weeks to a matter of hours.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, the company is injecting predictive AI into its core fulfilment optimisation, or \u201csourcing logic.\u201d This AI monitors existing rules, finds ways to improve order fulfilment \u2014 for instance, by suggesting a more profitable shipping location \u2014 and offers these suggestions to a business user as an A\/B test opportunity. This allows brands to safely test AI-driven hypotheses on a small percentage of orders before rolling out the change company-wide.<\/p>\n
Fluent Commerce is one of only three companies that major analyst firms consider leaders in order management and inventory availability, going \u201ctoe to toe\u201d with much larger, established monoliths like Manhattan Associates.<\/p>\n
With more than 80 per cent of its revenue already coming from outside Australia, the capital will specifically fuel an aggressive expansion in North America, a key market where Mr Jackson said the company is not yet ranked number one but has \u201cno reason why (it) shouldn\u2019t be\u201d.<\/p>\n
For Bain Capital, a global private capital firm with more than $US215bn in assets under management, the transaction aligns with its strategy of supporting high-growth technology companies.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are excited to partner with Fluent Commerce as it accelerates its global expansion,\u201d said Paul Kennedy, partner at Bain Capital.<\/p>\n
\u201cFluent has built a best-in-class commerce platform guided by a proven management team, a focused customer-first strategy, and technology leadership that has earned the trust of leading global brands. Bain Capital\u2019s conviction in Fluent is grounded in our global technology investing experience, which we will continue to apply as we support the company\u2019s ongoing growth.\u201d<\/p>\n
The deal was advised by Neu Capital. \u201cFluent Commerce is a fantastic Australian success story. It\u2019s been a pleasure arranging this capital as they continue to expand worldwide,\u201d said Neu Capital managing director Cyrus Church.<\/p>\n
This article first appeared in The Australian as Prada and LVMH\u2019s tech partner Fluent Commerce lands $46m for global AI push<\/a><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Infuriatingly, the new StockBot-3000 kept buying oil at the top. Pic: Getty Images If the devil wears Prada,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":492759,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-492758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=492758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492758\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/492759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=492758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=492758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=492758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}