Voices from Commerce: Ali Afzalirad on selling smarter in a world of answer engines and agentic buyers

Meet Voices from Commerce, our monthly blog series spotlighting the people shaping what's next in digital commerce. Each instalment 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, and last month we sat down with Doug Hollinger, who shared his thoughts on building durable strategy in an unsettled market. This month, we're talking with Ali Afzalirad, Chief Sales Officer, to get his perspective on how the art of selling has transformed over two decades, what the rebrand to Commerce really means in the field, and how merchants should be thinking about the rise of agentic commerce.

Q: Your career spans the full arc of modern commerce technology, from selling protocol stacks for early devices like Palm Pilots, through Oracle, ATG, and Adobe, to now leading sales at Commerce. When you look back, what's the single biggest shift in how commerce gets sold that people underestimate?

A: The way I see it, if you go back 20 years, “if you build it, they will come” was essentially true. Just having a digital presence  was largely enough. You didn't need to advertise as much because there were less options online, and the desktop was the surface you had to worry about. 

Over time more and more companies digitised their businesses and entered the space. The world changed 15 years ago and you had to optimise for mobile. Five years later, you needed to ensure your brand and products were discoverable and shoppable on social channels and marketplaces.

Now with the introduction of generative and agentic AI, access to AI assistants, and answer engines, the world has changed again. 

But the through-line — the thing I still find to be true across the board — is that if you're not delighting your buyers and customers by providing the best experience possible across every touch point and surface where they interact with you, learn about your products and services, and purchase —  you risk losing them. 

Q: The “platform wars” narrative, including Shopify vs. BigCommerce vs. Adobe Commerce vs. Salesforce Commerce Cloud, gets a lot of press. From where you sit, what is the conversation actually about when an enterprise business is choosing a platform today?

A: It’s the same as it’s always been. It’s about making the best decision possible and understanding what it takes to actualise results. 

Customers have always endeavoured to make well informed decisions. However, today they are much better informed than they used to be, and that's only accelerated as the tools for self-discovery have multiplied. 

By the time someone engages with you they largely know what they want, have a much stronger opinion of your brand, product and services, and they tend to be further along in their evaluation. That changes what good selling looks like.

That said, prospective customers need our help to get a deeper understanding of what can be achieved, what it takes to do it, and the tradeoffs between different approaches. There's an axiom I like: selling is not telling. Our job isn’t to persuade people that we have the best platform. They’ve already done their research and formulated an opinion. It's to understand what the customer wants to accomplish and the outcomes they want to drive, then show them how our solution fits into that equation.

Q: Commerce recently rebranded from BigCommerce to reflect a broader ecosystem, including Feedonomics and Makeswift. What problem does that consolidation actually solve that the old structure couldn't?

A: We had a great story to tell, but we didn't have a great way to tell it. When you're trying to speak to customers about the combined value of BigCommerce, Feedonomics, and Makeswift — three distinct solutions, without one entity — it gets complicated fast. Without a higher-level brand, it's really difficult to articulate what we can do across all three.

The rebrand under Commerce does a few things. First, it lets us tell a bigger story. Feedonomics has been part of BigCommerce for years. We’ve had the ability to solve problems beyond the platform and transaction. However, many of our platform customers didn’t know we could optimise, enrich, and syndicate product data with Feedonomics. Similarly, many BigCommerce and Feedonomics customers may not have understood the power of Makeswift to help create experiences. Now we can speak to this clearly, offering a broader solution while sharing our vision for how we're bringing these products together.

Second, it still allows us to sell each solution standalone. Many Feedonomics customers operate on other commerce platforms and we don't want to lose them. If someone only wants Feedonomics or only the BigCommerce platform, that's fine. They're not required to adopt the full package. The rebrand preserves that flexibility.

Third, it sets us up for the long term. We're no longer solely dependant on replatforming cycles, and we can bring new solutions to market that can integrate with or stand independent of the core commerce platform.

“We had a bigger story to tell. The rebrand lets us tell it. With BigCommerce, we solve from the transaction up. With Feedonomics, from the data out. With Makeswift, from the experience in. Together, that's the story.”

— Ali Afzalirad, Chief Sales Officer, Commerce

Q: Agentic commerce, which includes AI agents transacting on behalf of consumers and B2B buyers, is being talked about as something that could disrupt the frontend of every storefront. How are you advising merchants to prepare without over-committing to a future that's still forming?

A: Agentic commerce is part of the future, and in many ways, already part of the present. Consider how people discover products today: rather than using a traditional Google search, more and more often they’re asking ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. I'd place that within this broader AI-driven shift. Some consumers are already taking it a step further and purchasing directly through answer engines. Both behaviours are happening today, which makes being well-represented and discoverable in these channels essential.

When I think about agents procuring on behalf of buyers by interacting with your site or with other agents, today I see this as an emerging trend that will eventually represent a meaningful portion of both B2C and B2B commerce.

“The bottom line is that agentic commerce adds another mode of engagement that companies have to account for. It makes the job of selling online more complex. But the underlying imperative hasn't changed: show up well wherever your customers are.”

— Ali Afzalirad, Chief Sales Officer, Commerce

Q: For a founder or commerce leader making a platform or strategy decision in the next 90 days, what's the one question they probably aren't asking that they should be?

A: Here's what I keep coming back to: in a moment defined by AI hype, noise, and vendors claiming to solve everything, you need a partner, not a pitch.

The difference matters. A partner isn't trying to convince you of anything. They're giving you clear, accurate information so you can make a well-informed decision and help guide you through it. That's what you actually want when navigating a consequential platform or strategy choice.

The question merchants should be asking is: “Is this person actually helping me decide well, or are they just trying to close me?” It sounds simple, but it's harder to evaluate in the moment, especially when there's real urgency and the landscape is shifting fast.

That consultative approach, genuinely understanding what a customer is trying to accomplish and fitting yourself into that picture honestly, is more important than ever. 

To learn more about what it takes to succeed across today's top sales and ad channels, download our guide Connected Commerce: How to Win Customers Across Every Channel.

Ali Afzalirad is Chief Sales Officer at Commerce, where he leads the company's global sales organisation. With a career spanning early mobile device technology, enterprise software at Oracle and ATG, and digital commerce at Adobe, Ali brings deep experience selling across every stage of commerce's evolution, from the earliest days of digital retail to today's AI-driven landscape. He is based on the Gulf Coast of Alabama.