Issue #41 - Acceleration beyond anything we have seen

In This Issue: Vile Rumour & Gossip | Salesforce - Playing the long game | We never liked eCommerce anyway | Black Box writes Black Box - Shock horror Vibe coding

Aug 22, 2025

The ecosystem is in a super-accelerated state. AI Mode is live globally now, the stealth AI startups are emerging from their chrysalis’s. But the story is all about the big tech guns for now. Will the LLM’s rapid evolution mean the end of brand websites? Does OpenAI’s connection with Shopify give them the unbeatable mother of all product feeds (and wipe out the opportunity for the rest)? Why have Amazon halted their google shopping ad spend?

The game is 100% all about the product feed for the next few weeks & months - and then we’ll all see the scrap to be in the Answer engines start in earnest.

Vile Rumour & Gossip

SI’s still getting away with shoddy behaviour - Rumours abound about a Shopify SI that has really let down a client. Apparently the customer pre-paid, the agency has failed to deliver a functioning site... nobody wins here. We hear this relates to Eastside, but cannot quite confirm at this point.
Musical chairs are starting Brand-side - CTO’s and eCom leaders are starting to see new roles open up, and those who took time out for an AI Masters are getting new roles too… nice!
Botify are mis-selling their tool as an SEO agency replacement, definitely getting rumbled in our little group. Oh, and sad times for Yotpo, but reviews & loyalty are what they are good at in reality.
AI mode was live late (how we laughed) - did someone press the “send” button too early? Google was about 3 days out with their blog announcement in Europe, and even then the launch delivered some biggish errors. Nice to see the tech bros fail sometimes

Salesforce - Playing the long game

Everyone’s whipping boy might be about to re-emerge. I’m seeing those on SFCC very reluctant to leave, unmoved by the Shopify bandwagon so far AND being wooed by the parent SF machine too. Moreover, as some Commerce players leave the field (or at least the field gets smaller) - Salesforce’s offerings become more in tune with the needs of more mid-market brands.

Grown-up Integration? ✓

Agents? ✓

Half-decent Martech? ✓

Commerce ✓

For anyone wanting to hide their tech stack in plain sight - even within their walled garden, Salesforce has a comfortable (and increasingly affordable) home. Let’s assume for a moment that they do a deal to feed one of the LLM’s with their clients’ product data (which they will), then they are right back in the game.

Very like when Aston Villa undeservedly retained their Premiership status in 2020, they’ll have succeeded by the goalposts being moved right in front of them… and been given a top class striker ⚽

We never liked eCommerce anyway

9 months ago we were all waiting for Shopify to mount a full invasion, leaving many with few options but to move. We do still see real momentum in that direction, but a growing number of customers are delaying the Commerce platform choice while the relative importance of that particular D2C channel comes into the front of mind.

The existential “Will we need a website?” question is really being discussed. Even without LLM’s replacing the site (which of course for some utilities they perhaps will), there is a slow deconstruction occurring. Marketplace transactions are being fed directly into the WMS and by-passing the Commerce platform, whilst dropship sales are starting to bypass eCommerce if they affect the GMV billing too much.

For now, brands are spending time and money on their customer data synchronisation and enrichment, perhaps a CDP and 100% a decent product feed solution. More on this in September.

The situation is going to flex a great deal over the coming months and years, but suffice to say that this is a moment in time where (once again) only a few people in silicon valley truly know how this is going to play out, and like the early days of the web there will be some very big winners and some huge losers.

#norocketships has a partner - Patchworks

We all like a true challenger, and Patchworks is just that. Creating a new category of software, gently disrupting the old “black box integration” model that agencies were accustomed to - and helping brands in one of the trickiest of areas, connecting systems to one another without a massive fuss. Oh - and inventing a category - who knows what an IPaaS is really?

Black Box writes Black Box - Shock horror Vibe coding

Perhaps this writer is too close to the code nowadays, but we’re seeing some very odd (perhaps immature is the word?) behaviour from some who should know better. Vibe coding within the Enterprise - really?

Brand-side decision makers sometimes buy a Black Box (BB) by mistake, think about what Google has been doing for 26 years with their algorithm… would any of us choose to buy something like that given how little we know about it?

A little less rare is a brand swapping a BB for another BB - unwittingly, but it happens. This plays havoc with code quality, business logic, testing and updates, as well as integration strategy and reliability/performance.

Vibe Coding then. I chat to ex devs who are using LLM’s to write small pieces of code, they love it. Claude wins over Gemini apparently. But - ask the LLM to fix a bug in an ERP it wrote itself? It just rewrites the code. It does not fix the bug…

LLM’s are another Black Box - the kind we’ve been trying to shed for decades.

This is Jamie btw - feel free to disagree with anything in the last item - it just felt obvious to me.