Everywhere you look in commerce right now, AI is the headline. From generative product descriptions to predictive analytics, brands are being told that if they don’t move fast, they’ll be left behind.

But there’s a growing gap between the promise of AI and the reality for most DTC brands.

That gap was the focus of Driving eCommerce Growth in the Age of AI, an exclusive lunch session hosted by Webprofits, Yotpo and Process Creative earlier this month. Across acquisition, conversion, and retention, the event explored how AI is reshaping growth strategies and where brands should be investing their energy right now.

A key focus was the intersection of AI and commerce from a conversion perspective: what’s real, what’s noise, and how to build a durable competitive edge while everyone else is distracted by shiny tools.

The AI Reality Check

The narrative around AI is one of effortless efficiency: smarter insights, faster execution, better results. But for most merchants, that’s not been their experience.

Customer support data lives in Gorgias. Purchases sit in Shopify. Campaign engagement runs through Klaviyo. Reviews are captured in Yotpo. Each platform is building AI capabilities, but none of them talk to each other.

The result? A stack of disconnected “intelligent” tools that add more complexity, not less. It’s like hiring ten brilliant consultants who’ve never met and asking them to run your business. You don’t get clarity; you get chaos.

The Real Problem: Data Silos

The reason AI often disappoints isn’t that the models aren’t advanced enough. It’s that the data they’re drawing from is fragmented.

A customer complains on your helpdesk.
A week later, they made a purchase from your store.
The following month, they leave a review.

Individually, these signals are valuable. But because they’re trapped in separate platforms, no AI tool has the full picture. Even the most sophisticated chatbot can only respond to what’s happening in the moment, blind to the customer’s actual history.

It’s like trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle where each piece is locked in a different room.

What Hasn’t Changed

Before diving further into AI, it’s worth stating clearly: the fundamentals of good commerce haven’t changed.

A clear and differentiated brand story
A frictionless checkout
A culture of testing and optimisation
High-quality creative that showcases your product

SharkClean is a case in point. Their self-cleaning vacuum is a remarkable product, but difficult to communicate in static imagery. By switching to six-second product videos that demonstrated the feature in action, cart additions surged. No AI required, just customer insight and creative execution.

The New Fundamental: Unified Customer Intelligence

That said, there is one new non-negotiable in the AI era: unified customer intelligence.

Imagine your best in-store sales assistant. They don’t forget what a customer has said the moment they move from one aisle to the next. Online, that’s exactly what’s happening today.

Without a connected view of the customer, AI struggles to live up to its potential. With the right foundation, it becomes transformative, surfacing friction points, personalising experiences, and accelerating decision-making across the entire funnel.

Early Prototypes: What’s Possible

At Process, we’ve been exploring prototypes that bring this vision to life. In one experiment, we connected disparate data sources, ran it all through an ETL pipeline and stored the data in BigQuery, hooked up some AI tools and taught it to act like an analyst.

The result? The system could instantly flag when the same product was causing issues across multiple platforms, surfacing insights that would otherwise take days of manual analysis. Always awake. Always connected. Always learning.

This is just the beginning. We then connected this tool with Shopify's new Storefront MCP, integrated several AI voice tools to build an AI shopping assistant that has access to all your business and product data and can respond in real time, all with an Aussie accent.

The Moat: Your Data

Here’s the strategic truth. The underlying AI models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are rapidly becoming commodities. Soon, everyone will have access to the same base technology.

What remains unique and defensible is your customer data.

Unified, structured, and connected data becomes the moat that competitors can’t replicate. And the window to build that advantage is now, before the rest of the market catches up.

Where to Start

The good news is that building this foundation doesn’t require a six-figure enterprise project. Start small, prove the value, then scale.

A practical first step is to connect Google Analytics to BigQuery and establish server-side tracking. This creates a centralised, reliable source of truth for your data and sets the stage for layering on AI-driven insights later.

For many brands, working with a partner like ProfitPeak can accelerate this process. They help implement server-side tracking and ensure your data foundation is accurate, structured, and ready to support more advanced optimisation efforts.

The Takeaway

No one has all the answers on AI right now. The landscape is evolving too quickly. But one thing is clear: brands that unify their data today will have the foundation to adapt and thrive as new AI capabilities emerge.
Those who don’t will be left trying to stitch together a patchwork of disconnected tools, while their competitors accelerate ahead.

The message is simple: build your data foundation now, or play catch-up forever.

Ready to turn AI from hype into real growth? Get in touch with our team and start building your data foundation today.

Driving Growth in the Age of AI: What DTC Brands Need to Get Right Now