After many of our predictions for ecommerce trends in 2018 came true, we wanted to give our customers an outlook for current trends in ecommerce technology.

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Trend 1: Agentic Commerce

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AI is no longer just about finding and informing about products. Instead, AI buyer agents performing self-service buying, automated reorders and approvals is all the hype this year.

Agents can only perform within systems they are integrated with. Unless you’ve architected your APIs correctly and in a way that makes them accessible for the first time – regardless of intelligence of an agent – the slick demos you saw may be just demos. Make sure your systems are exposed in clean, documented APIs, that are the real things that any agent will be working with. We focus on what will really work.

Sly’s approach to Agentic Commerce: We get clients’ architecture ready to be agentic by building robust clean APIs. Because well-structured data matters more than flashy demos.

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Trend 2: AI-Driven Discovery: Buyers are asking AI

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Increasingly, shoppers start their research in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews, long before they ever click through to a supplier site. "Answer Engine Optimization," AEO, is rapidly emerging as a distinct practice, parallel to traditional SEO.

AEO focuses on you being "the answer", that is, having your information present in featured snippets, voice searches, and AI Overview boxes by leveraging structured data and answering questions clearly. You may also encounter the term "GEO," or Generative Engine Optimization. GEO is the practice of becoming "the source" a search engine cites when constructing a response, through authoritative content and brand references. In reality, AEO and GEO overlap sufficiently to often be considered one practice.

Research has shown that AI tools do not execute Javascript and rarely access PDFs. This means your data has to be ready on the client-side as HTML. Machine-readability is key. Structured data is an additional plus.

Our approach to Ecommerce GEO/AEO: We ensure your product and content data is structured in a way that AI-driven search engines can easily process and reference your content.

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Trend 3: Composable Commerce Is still the Right Foundation

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Composable, headless, MACH, whatever you call it, composable has become the dominant standard for building today’s technology stacks. Where the industry is divided now is on the next thing’ Some vendors refer to composable as "the new legacy," while others believe it to be the ideal base on which to construct future AI-powered solutions.

We believe composable remains the right base. The true value or the real risk, lies in how you integrate and orchestrate all the pieces that surround the architecture.

Beware of simply replacing one form of lock-in with another, just with better branding. Use open standards and be wary of vendors who, after selling you on the benefits of composable, may start introducing their version of lock-ins behind the scenes, once they control pieces of your stack. Only in this way can composable bring lasting value.

VELOX’s core philosophy goes against this trend: no vendor lock-in, use open standards and integrate with the solutions clients are already using.  We make our clients’ composable architectures last long into the future – so that the "composable" value is not diminished by a new dependency on a vendor.

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Trend 4: The End of "Default US Cloud" — and why Switzerland Matters

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Possibly the largest structural change for European and Swiss businesses is the US CLOUD Act. The CLOUD Act enables US government access to any data handled by US companies, regardless of where it's located physically. And that puts it right at odds with GDPR.

In 2026, the EU is striking back with a tech-sovereignty package, steps to move critical workloads away from US hyperscalers and increasing investment in sovereign cloud infrastructure. Switzerland has a distinct advantage in this regard, residing as it does outside both the CLOUD Act and the EU framework. This makes Swiss hosting more legally independent than even a "sovereign" EU hyperscaler zone.

In the rush towards agentic AI, companies risk passing their customer and order data through US-based LLMs. This is not an immediate flight from US hyperscalers. It's a slow and considered shift: specific sensitive workloads moving to sovereign alternatives over several years, not months.

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Sly AG advises clients on identifying which workloads truly need sovereign hosting and support your transition to Swiss infrastructure, offering a level of legal independence that even a "sovereign" EU hyperscaler zone can't quite replicate.