 Hello everyone, we are back with the cubes coverage of Commerce Tools Elevate here in Miami Beach, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host and analyst, Shelly Kramer. Shelly, composable commerce is the buzzword of the day. You know, it's all about innovation and modernization of e-commerce processes and things that are important to all of us. Things that are important to consumers, things that are important to brands. Excellent, excellent. No better segue to introduce our next guest. He is Kelly Gage, Chief Strategy Officer at Commerce Tools. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. So as I introed, composable commerce is what we are talking about here today. Why don't you explain to our viewers what is meant by composable commerce? So composable commerce is the ability to incrementally add features. Some of those are features that you build in-house. Some of those are features you buy from third parties. But it's that ability to mix and match to compose the best business experience rather than going to a vendor who has an all-in-one offering and you kind of have to take the whole thing. It's that mix and match and best of need. And why is it so critical for customers to be able to do this mix and match and this incremental innovation? I think historically, if you look back to the 90s and early 2000s, a lot of brands were just getting online for the first time. So they went to a mega vendor and said, hey, we need to get online, please help us. And the vendor said, okay, well, we've got this giant stack, it's not composable. It's an all-in-one monolithic solution. And when you're first getting online, I think that made perfect sense. Nobody really knew how to implement this stuff, integrate, this is all very new. And to the point where when I was just getting started as a consultant, my customers were having e-commerce as being another physical store. So it would be store number 312 in the system, right? That was e-commerce. And then the next store, they would open up as a physical traditional store. And that's how it was for years. And now organizations, they have to and they have really matured organizationally. And as a result, they've gotten much better at reaching their customers, identifying what's a base foundational need versus what's a differentiator. And I think a lot of organizations have very different needs, whether it's somebody selling biotech or somebody selling shoes. They all have different type of content management solutions, search solutions, promotional strengths, digital experiences. Some are sold through TikTok shops. That's very popular. And an all-in-one solution just doesn't work anymore. It's very much a best of need solution at this point. Personalization. Personalization is important. There are a thousand vendors out there. And thankfully we're leading in the enterprise commerce space. But if you look at this expo floor here, they're great, great vendors, but it's not necessarily that there's one great content management system. It's a great CMS for a direct-to-consumer brand who's midsize, who's US-based, right? And you work your way across our ecosystem. There are best partners for specific use cases. So there's a nuance there that we're now capturing. Well, and I think that it's attractive to be able to pull those pieces that apply exactly to the solutions I need to be able to deliver, as opposed to having a whole bunch of stuff that I don't care about, things I never use, things I pay for. So I think that this composable commerce is incredibly attractive, both financially and functionally. Absolutely, and it allows organizations to demonstrate incremental value. So a project, we're going to replace this API, this feature, and then all of a sudden now you have this incremental business impact, and then they keep going. So we're kind of past the era now of a re-platform that used to be a thing where you'd work for six months or a year or two years, and you'd flip lights which one night everybody would celebrate. It doesn't really happen. Instead, it's a six-month project, and it's this API now, and then next month we're going to do this functionality, and it's a chipping away at that. And over time, it's an ecosystem that evolves as opposed to here's a platform that is implemented. And I think the really, as it relates to any kind of digital transformation, that process of continual evolution, that's our reality. You know what I'm saying? This isn't just in the e-commerce world, it's a matter of, you know, you used to, for instance, build a website, and you didn't really do anything with that website for a decade or whatever, and now your website is in continuous update mode. Continuous evolution, and I think that's really true on the commerce front as well, and so being able to use tools in a tech stack that speaks to that, that's where we are, and that's not going to change. Correct, correct. In January, commerce tools introduced Foundry. Can you tell our viewers a little bit more about this and how it will impact customers? Historically, when we just started out at commerce tools, we were selling commerce tools. And, you know, if you think about this, the equivalent here is selling Lego bricks, right? And it's great, you can build anything you want, and our very early customers out there really wanted the ability to pick up pieces and truly build anything they wanted to. And I'm going to over generalize, but their initial engagement with us was we know what your product does, it's great, we love it, now go away. We're going to do this ourselves. Which was a great problem to have, but now we're selling to much more pragmatic business focused buyers who say, you know what, this composable thing is great, we love the concept, but we're not quite sure that we're mature enough, or we're not sure we have the organizational capabilities. This is a little bit different for us. And what Foundry is, is taking all of our unopinionated commerce tools, and making an opinionated version of that for this specific offering. It's to say, this is how we as commerce tools think that you should adopt our product. So it's our company and our product being much more opinionated. Okay, all right, I like that. I like being so outward about and direct. We're being opinionated here, because I mean so much the, often as the buzzword is curated, or something like that, but it's really, this is the direction we see your company benefiting from most. Correct, correct. And it's making it much more repeatable, more streamlined. It's selling pre-built toys, as opposed to selling Lego bricks. That's what it is. Well, the reality of it is, if this doesn't deliver, you know, I mean, the way that I have always framed this when I'm talking to customers is that I'm in the business of winning, right? And so when my customers win, I win. And so when you're offering these solutions, and if it doesn't do what you say it's going to do, in a relatively short period of time, because we all know that we have a finite amount of patience in terms of finding ROI in value of our tech investments, that's problematic. So I think that that speaks to your capabilities here, that you know you can deliver it, you know you can deliver it quickly, and you know your customers will be realizing value in a relatively short period of time, at least based on some of the information we heard in the keynote. 100%. So I was also interested in how you described the buyers as pragmatic. Can you describe a little bit more about what the specific challenges Foundry addresses for companies that are looking to scale? A lot of our earlier customers were buying us explicitly because we were cool, new tech. And we are, and that's great. But they bought us not out of pragmatism, they bought us because we were cool and early and shiny. And that's again, great problem to have, but now we're selling to CFOs of the world who have to demonstrate positive top line and bottom line impact, they have to. So as we make that shift as a company and are selling to a more mainstream buyer, more pragmatic buyer, they have to see business value and they have to see business value more quickly. No pressure. No pressure. No pressure. So you used to be the Chief Product Officer at Commerce Tools, can you describe how your career has evolved in terms of how you think about the business and in terms of your involvement and as this company progresses? Well I originally started out as a developer a long, long time ago at the beginning of my career and that was great. And then Architect and then Product Manager and then I was our first Chief Product Officer did that for six years. And now I'm actually much more externally facing. So a lot of corporate development type of work, looking at where the market's going, looking at who out here in our partner ecosystem is really innovating, managing some of our strategic partnerships, looking at things like foundry, business cases of whether we should make investments in different businesses or lines of product. So my focus has gone from very much a here's some code and now works, right? I'm going to close my computer and go home for the day versus a much longer term horizon. So it's my role at Commerce Tools to think five years ahead, 10 years ahead. What's the market going to look like? You know, are we seeing a lot more social selling? Is that an area we should have made an investment in? Or is that an area that we should partner with somebody in? So it's a very, it's a different role and I just keep going further and further out. Exceedingly complex too. So as you started as a developer and we know now that the pace of change and innovation is dizzying, so many new technologies that we are attracted to and that it's driving so much change from your perspectives of someone who really gets the tech and also gets, is thinking about the strategy of the business, how do you think about AI and ML and these are not necessarily new technologies but so many companies are being driven by those things today. How do you feel about it? I mean, what's your perspective on it? It's complicated, it's very, it's complicated. So historically I put AI on par with the internet, with cloud, it's a big deal. And I've let a lot of trends go, blockchain, web, all that, I never really saw the utility of it. But AI is real, that is a very real and that's going to reshape a lot of industries. And already we've seen a pretty dramatic reduction in the time that companies spend on the S&P 500. And it was 58, I think it was 58 years back in the 60s and now it's dropped down to something like 18 years. It's significant. It's significant and AI and all of these new trends put a lot of incumbents out of business very quickly. Any new disruptive technology does that. And a lot of its innovators dilemma, they're just unable to completely pivot their business. So I think a lot of the incumbent businesses out there are just going to get steamrolled by this. They're not able to adapt. And I think that's generally healthy for society, that renewal, that regrowth, the regeneration. I think there are going to be some workers hurt in the short term. But historically, any new technology, whether it's cars gave rise to mechanics, for example, we're going to have better jobs, more efficiency, wider availability of services. A lot of those types of things that we are now scarce resources are now not. And on the e-commerce side, we're going to see a lot of that as well. It used to require a human to sit and write a very detailed product description. We don't have that anymore. That concept doesn't exist. And now we have fantastic product descriptions. So we're going to see our lives incrementally getting better unless you happen to be somebody who's put out of work. But I think, but you made a great point. Yes, there'll be some job dislocation, but there's many more opportunities too to have a different kind of job. A, it might take your job, but it will definitely change your job. It will, and it's making us all more productive. I mean, sometimes dramatically more productive, and it's going to further, it's going to give rise to people who are even five, 10 times more productive than they are today. So we talk on the dev side about the 100x developer or the 10x developer, you could imagine a 1000x developer, somebody who's able to use AI in such a powerful way that they could replace 100 developers with one person. I'm thinking about one of the examples from the keynote where you were showing on the screen that the AI powered development, and I don't really, I can't even go into it any more than that, but it was just mind blowing. And that's here today. No, I know, but it was just absolutely mind blowing. And so I think that you're right. It's a time to really, it's a time to be thinking about how can we integrate technology into what it is we're doing to deliver more effectively. And I think that where people get hung up sometimes when we talk about AI is that the technology alone is not the solution, it's never the solution. It's the magic combination of people, processes and technology. It's AI working alongside humans. So AI might take your job, but your job might change so that you're working alongside that AI in doing something that you much more enjoy. And you're able to think and contribute at a much higher level because AI is handling the grunt work. The day to day, I don't like doing my expenses. It'd be great if somebody could just do that for me. Well AI will enable us all to have careers like yours in the sense of you started out as a developer and now as you said, you think about big exceedingly complex strategy problems and you're much more external. I just hope too many people don't want to do that. Way to bring it all home, Rebecca. Way to threaten this job. So finally, you announced B2B specific blueprints for Commerce Two's Foundry. Can you talk a little bit about the impact that the solution will have? Well B2B is relatively less sophisticated than B2C. They're manufacturers. It's so interesting, but it makes so much sense. They know manufacturing and the executives in charge of those companies have come up through the sourcing and manufacturing side of those organizations. They're not tech people. And in retail, we have seen repeatedly that folks on the tech side are now getting promoted up to management. And there's a problem just generally in governance where somebody needs to fully understand the job that they're hiring for. Like if you asked me personally to go hire a doctor's office full of pediatricians, I have no idea what makes for a good pediatrician. I have no idea. And if you ask somebody on the B2B side, somebody who's led a factory floor to go hire a chief digital officer, they don't know how to do that. And some of that's generational, but they're being forced to modernize very quickly and they're being forced to open direct to consumer distribution channels which are much higher, higher profit, higher brand affinity, they need to do that. So I'm seeing that change happen and that's great and B2B Foundry is able to support that change. Excellent, excellent. Kelly, a great and very fun conversation. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Shelly Kramer. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's coverage of Commerce Tools Elevate. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech coverage.