{"id":9430,"date":"2026-04-21T04:19:32","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T04:19:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/9430\/"},"modified":"2026-04-21T04:19:32","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T04:19:32","slug":"vtex-aims-to-conquer-the-e-commerce-market-with-ai-agents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/9430\/","title":{"rendered":"VTEX aims to conquer the e-commerce market with AI Agents"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At VTEX Day 2026 in S\u00e3o Paulo, VTEX presented its three products for the first time as a single integrated AI-native suite. With the new AI Workspace, a completely rebuilt CX Platform, and integration with Google\u2019s Universal Commerce Protocol, the company is focusing on an operational model where AI agents do the heavy lifting and humans take the lead. Co-CEO Mariano Gomide paints a picture of a market that is consolidating at the enterprise level into three platforms. VTEX wants to be one of them.<\/p>\n<p>The employee who spends their days browsing catalog pages, tweaking search terms, and rolling out promotions is disappearing. Not because the work is disappearing, but because AI agents are taking it over. What remains is a different role: people who direct, guide, and provide context to those agents. That was the central message at <a href=\"https:\/\/vtexday.vtex.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">VTEX Day 2026<\/a>, which took place on April 16 and 17 in S\u00e3o Paulo.<\/p>\n<p>This year, the event grew to become the largest commerce event in the world. All 50,000 tickets were sold out, and visitors from 22 countries had made the trip to Brazil. Techzine was on site and spoke with co-CEO <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/mariano-gomide-de-faria-vtex\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Mariano Gomide de Faria<\/a> and VP of Product <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/alexandre-gusmao-7a232423\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Alexandre Gusmao<\/a>, who is responsible for the product portfolio. Both left no room for misunderstanding: the change isn\u2019t coming\u2014it has already begun.<\/p>\n<p>Integrated AI-native suite<\/p>\n<p>For the first time this year, VTEX presented its three products as a single integrated suite: the Commerce Platform, the CX Platform, and the Ads Platform. Gomide describes it as a \u201ctripod of sustainable growth\u201d and explains what native integration means in practice. \u201cWhat used to be a decision that took one, two, or three months, backed by research and analysis, you can now test in a single day,\u201d he says. Because the CX Platform is built directly into the Commerce Platform, every VTEX customer can launch a working WhatsApp store within a day, complete with autonomous return tracking. Without the need to integrate systems from different vendors and without a weeks-long implementation process.<\/p>\n<p>The Ads Platform adds a third dimension to this. Over the past fifteen years, retailers could hardly avoid the Meta and Google duopoly when it came to driving traffic. Gomide is clear on this: \u201cRetailers and brands were held hostage by an expensive duopoly, and nobody complained.\u201d The emergence of new players like OpenAI and Anthropic as traffic channels is now beginning to break that duopoly, which he believes is actually good news for retailers. More channels mean less dependence and better margins. With the Ads Platform, VTEX aims to capitalize on this: retailers can use their own digital environments as advertising channels for brands and thus build a revenue stream independent of Meta and Google. During the keynote, VTEX demonstrated how an agent can create ad material within minutes, automatically check it against brand guidelines, and publish it, while another agent then monitors and adjusts campaign performance. Everything is integrated into the same platform that powers the store and handles customer service.<\/p>\n<p>AI Workspace: four agents, one cockpit<\/p>\n<p>The most significant announcement was the VTEX AI Workspace. The platform features four native agents, each monitoring a specific domain: catalog management, promotions, search optimization, and business insights. VTEX delivers these agents ready-to-use, pre-trained on its own best practices, and fully familiar with VTEX APIs and services. Merchants then add their own business context to this. A retailer with its own style of product descriptions writes its guidelines in plain language in a document and uploads it. The agent takes this into account with every recommendation it makes.<\/p>\n<p>Those recommendations are exactly where the system proves its value. Large retailers manage hundreds of thousands to millions of product references, known as stock-keeping units (SKUs). It is impossible to manually monitor the quality of all of them. A catalog agent does this continuously: it flags a sparse product description, a low-quality image, a missing specification, and proposes an improvement along with an implementation plan. The employee approves or makes adjustments. The agent executes the changes. If something goes wrong, the system automatically reverts the changes as soon as it detects a negative impact on a business metric.<\/p>\n<p><img title=\"\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/20260416_130418-1500x693.jpg\" alt=\"Een groot publiek zit tegenover een verlicht podium met VTEX DAY branding, agentic commerce graphics en VTEX AI Workspace displays op grote schermen in een ruim congrescentrum.\" class=\"wp-image-577204\"\/><\/p>\n<p>During the live demo on stage, Gusmao demonstrated the practical benefits of this approach. A search optimization agent that had implemented an adjustment a week earlier generated an estimated incremental revenue of eighty thousand Brazilian reais per month for that single client, equivalent to approximately thirteen thousand euros. \u201cThis is changing the operational model of e-commerce,\u201d he stated.<\/p>\n<p>Agent Marketplace<\/p>\n<p>In addition to the four standard agents, VTEX is announcing an Agent Marketplace within the Workspace. This means that third parties, such as software vendors and system integrators, will soon be able to build and offer their own specialized agents via the same platform. VTEX will open this marketplace to the entire ecosystem shortly. Exactly which agents will emerge from this remains to be seen, but the architecture is ready for it.<\/p>\n<p>As for the potential impact of the Workspace as a whole, Gomide leaves no room for misunderstanding: a retailer currently running its operations with 100 people will soon be able to do so with just 20. \u201cThose who have the courage and daring will reap the rewards,\u201d he adds. But Gusmao immediately qualifies that statement. \u201cWe\u2019re still in the early stages. We see thousands of recommendations generated by agents\u2014recommendations that simply wouldn\u2019t be made without this system. But exact savings in FTEs can\u2019t be quantified yet.\u201d For now, the benefit lies in revealing opportunities that human teams miss, not in directly replacing people.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat directors, owners, and founders need to figure out is what they\u2019re going to do with those 80 people,\u201d says Gomide. His answer: build new sales channels that don\u2019t exist yet. \u201cNew channels bring diversity in revenue, more revenue, lower costs, and organic channels. And then profitability suddenly grows.\u201d He also sees a broader shift in the types of people needed. Marketing departments now work almost exclusively with images. \u201cEighty percent of every retailer\u2019s spending goes toward images,\u201d he says. \u201cThat needs to shift toward words.\u201d The marketing department that acts quickly and adds copywriters who train agents to speak in the brand\u2019s voice has a head start.<\/p>\n<p>Built from the ground up<\/p>\n<p>The VTEX CX Platform is a different story, because it was literally rebuilt from the ground up. A year and a half ago, VTEX acquired the Brazilian company Weni, a conversational AI player built on workflow-based logic where every possible customer interaction had to be explicitly programmed. In the world of large language models, that paradigm had become obsolete. \u201cWeni\u2019s model was outdated, so we made the decision to rebuild the entire architecture from scratch,\u201d says Gusmao.<\/p>\n<p>The result is a multi-agent architecture in which a central agent manager communicates with specialized agents via the agent-to-agent protocol. If a customer asks a question about their order, the manager recognizes the context and activates the order management agent, which provides feedback to the customer via the manager. The setup is significantly simpler than the old workflow model. \u201cYou no longer have to anticipate every possible conversation path and question,\u201d says Gusmao.<\/p>\n<p>Concrete results<\/p>\n<p>VTEX demonstrated that the platform is already live and delivering results through three specific applications. The most concrete is customer service: questions about orders, returns, and payments are handled autonomously more than 90 percent of the time, without human intervention. Gomide cites figures from his clients who report that their call centers are handling 80 to 85 percent fewer calls.<\/p>\n<p>The second application relates to conversion. If a customer abandons their shopping cart without checking out, the agent detects this and proactively sends a WhatsApp message. This was demonstrated live during the keynote: the CEO of the CX Platform was interrupted in the middle of a purchase demo by a phone call from his daughter. After hanging up, he received a WhatsApp message from the agent who had picked up the abandoned purchase and helped him complete it.<\/p>\n<p>The third application occurs earlier in the purchasing process, during the so-called discovery phase. Especially in specialty stores, customers often have specific questions about a product before they feel confident enough to buy. VTEX has built the CX agent directly into the product page of the online store. A customer who is unsure can ask a question like \u201cis this right for me?\u201d and is immediately connected with an agent who knows the specifications, purchase history, and reviews. \u201cThat gives the customer more confidence in the product before the purchase,\u201d says Gusmao, \u201cand that has a direct impact on conversion.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Google UCP<\/p>\n<p>One of the most strategically significant announcements at VTEX Day was the integration with Google\u2019s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). VTEX is one of the first platforms in the world to be authorized for this. During the keynote, this was demonstrated live with the American golf retailer Worldwide Golf. A user in Google AI Mode asks for a suitable golf club in plain language, receives a personalized recommendation, and completes the purchase without leaving the Google environment. The order is processed via VTEX.<\/p>\n<p>However, there is an important caveat: the UCP integration is currently available exclusively in the United States. Gusmao states he cannot comment on a potential European rollout; that is up to Google. Gomide views the authorization as a strategic advantage that is difficult to replicate. Not every software provider operating in a retail environment automatically gains access to Google\u2019s compliance and privacy framework. VTEX does have that access.<\/p>\n<p><img title=\"\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/20260416_132007-1500x693.jpg\" alt=\"Een man in een roze VTEX-shirt spreekt op het podium over VTEX AI Workspace en agentic commerce; zijn afbeelding wordt weergegeven op een groot scherm achter hem met VTEX- en AWS-logo's.\" class=\"wp-image-577203\"\/>Mariano Gomide, co-CEO of VTEX<\/p>\n<p>Three platforms survive<\/p>\n<p>In a personal conversation with Techzine, Gomide offers a clear vision of where the enterprise commerce market is headed. He speaks from experience: VTEX has been around for over 25 years, and he has seen the market shrink from 42 e-commerce platforms to the current situation, where he counts only 6 serious players at the enterprise level. According to him, two of those are already up for sale, though he refuses to say which ones. He predicts that the market will eventually consolidate into three.<\/p>\n<p>He definitely<a href=\"https:\/\/www.techzine.eu\/news\/applications\/140494\/salesforce-merges-appexchange-slack-marketplace-and-agentexchange\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">\u00a0counts<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.techzine.eu\/news\/applications\/140494\/salesforce-merges-appexchange-slack-marketplace-and-agentexchange\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"> Salesforce <\/a>among those three. For the remaining spots, he names two serious candidates. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.techzine.nl\/nieuws\/applications\/538551\/manhattan-associates-en-shopify-bouwen-alomvattend-platform-voor-e-commerce\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Shopify is <\/a>the first, but with one key condition: the company must decide to become a software company rather than an aggregator and payment processor. \u201cThey have a great team, a great culture,\u201d says Gomide. \u201cBut if they make the move to enterprise, they\u2019ll lose their payment business. And the market won\u2019t appreciate that.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Adobe as a wild card<\/p>\n<p>Adobe is the second candidate, specifically not with Magento but with a successor to it. \u201cAdobe has a great stack and a great team. It\u2019s an incredibly profitable company. If AI doesn\u2019t destroy Adobe before Adobe transforms itself, it will become a major player,\u201d says Gomide. It\u2019s a statement that is both respectful and alarming. Gomide largely leaves SAP and Oracle out of the equation: they\u2019re fighting a different battle at the level of cloud and data infrastructure. Moreover, Oracle\u2019s commerce division has since been dissolved.<\/p>\n<p>Gomide leaves no doubt about where VTEX sees itself. \u201cWe are determined to be one of those three,\u201d he says. He backs up that ambition with a structural cost advantage that enables VTEX to compete with players that have much larger budgets. 100% of the engineering is based in Latin America, where, according to him, a top developer costs one-tenth as much as a comparable engineer in Silicon Valley while delivering equivalent output. \u201cThat\u2019s arbitrage. And arbitrage is the fastest way to create value,\u201d he says. Simplicity wins, he adds. \u201cSimplicity is the ultimate form of innovation.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Side Note<\/p>\n<p>Gomide\u2019s market vision is outspoken, and his ambition is unambiguous. But anyone spending two days at VTEX Day also sees a different reality. The majority of the sessions were in Portuguese. International clients were present, but they were predominantly local representatives of major brands who spoke in Portuguese about how well VTEX works. A handful of sessions were in English. The press conference for the international press was held in Portuguese.<\/p>\n<p>That says something. A company seriously aiming for third place in a global market worth two to three trillion dollars will ultimately have to make its move outside Brazil. Gomide mentioned triple-digit subscription growth in Europe but declined to elaborate further. The ambition is there. Whether the international scale is already in place is another question.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At VTEX Day 2026 in S\u00e3o Paulo, VTEX presented its three products for the first time as a&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9431,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[179,673,405,7537,8165,5329,132,205,8166],"class_list":{"0":"post-9430","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-agentic-ai","8":"tag-agentic-ai","9":"tag-agentic-commerce","10":"tag-ai-agents","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence-agents","12":"tag-cx","13":"tag-e-commerce","14":"tag-google","15":"tag-infrastructure","16":"tag-vtex"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9430\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}