A few days to think, and now a reflection on MACH in Amsterdam for those who are interested.
I’ve said this before, but the MACH Alliance has nicely pulled off a pivot towards the following - “You will have a better AI outcome if you use a composable stack”. I suspect the VTEX team are a little irked, but they should definitely not have stormed off IMHO.
Anyway, those days of didactic stack religion are over, and there is now a different atmosphere at these events, bullets to follow:
A little more humility from members/vendors. Less charging aroud the venue looking for people to sell to who match their ICP.
More convivial conversations across roundtables and such.
A smaller role for the original MACH overlords, and much more from the Ambassadors and customer speakers
At least one award winner was a Shopify user - given an award for the way they were using Patchworks through Claude to integrate and operate 12 solutions through a single interface… a new world indeed.
We’re in this together
There is, without doubt, the sense of a shared challenge. AI is (slowly) offering a different view of the future to everyone.
Where anyone can build a SaaS solution, the roles of vendors and customers really changing.
A “heard” version of “new” seems to be -
Customer creates “vibe coded” POC…
Vendor (partner agency or trusted SaaS) examines and offers to add to roadmap, or builds for client
Or - Customer proceeds to build and launch production-grade tooling, and agency maintains 9or customer team)
Less often, vendor builds new feature and releases for small batch of test clients who have asked
But these are uncertain times. This event was VERY well attended - about 81% rate of people turning up who registered. Considering the NRF paris disaster, Human X’s empty room in Amsterdam the week before, and some questionable numbers in the U.S. at Shoptalk - why is this?
Why did people turn up?
The message that “we’re in this together” seemed to really resonate. Nobody has the answer so let’s see if we can make progress through discussion - I think that honesty is one reason.
I also saw vendors in a lot of sessions. Listening and contributing - their views are really valid if they’re honest, and many were. A good number of people mentioned how much they enjoyed the dialogue on offer - more than the presentations in some ways.
I met a 5 agencies who claimed to have grown in the last 12 months. Maybe their death knell has been predicted too early?
From London this event was unrecognisable to be honest - a fully recovered and renewed ecosystem perhaps?
Slow down FFS
What I’ve always enjoyed about the process of putting an Agenda together is realising that customers broadly agree on where the problems are, and how urgent they seem. On stage there is sometime a critic who says that speakers repeat one another, but I’d argue that’s because what their saying is true in the Enterprise.
On this occasion the following were “true”:
There’s no Agentic traffic yet, so it’s next year’s problem and nobody is worried. Composable stacks are designed to add this channel easily.
AI is both everywhere and nowhere. Content and data enrichment (Y), Instant checkout (Y), eComm (N), Redundancies (N),
Discovery and search are more urgent. The older SaaS is already unsuitable and many are choosing to invest in a build of their own, making discovery part of their core IP.
There were three companies I chatted to who are weaning themselves off the Google/Meta tax. This in turn affects their their overall profit, their ability to invest, their NPS scores and repeat purchase rates. All were D2C pureplays
Amsterdam is beautiful and everyone wants to visit more often :)
A few other comments if you’ll forgive me.
It drives me mad when salespeople do not attend the sessions, and I did meet a group of 4 Talon One salespeople who spent the morning chatting to one another rather than doing this. I thought we’d learned that lesson.
I doubt we’ll run a “governance and security” track in the next MACH X in Boston, but the European Psyche enjoyed it enormously.
That’s all - #norocketships main issue goes out tomorrow as scheduled.
Jamie