From eComm to iComm:
What Really Changed

For years, automation meant rigid rules, triggers, and integrations. Useful, until growth added new channels, campaigns, and countless edge cases. Then brittle rules started breaking. Teams pivoted from strategy to firefighting: patching flows, maintaining playbooks, and chasing exceptions.

Today, a foundational change is here: Agentic Operations. These are workflows that learn, reason, and adapt. Instead of "set and forget," agents observe outcomes, improve continuously, and escalate to humans only when nuanced judgment is truly required.

A Look Back: From Brittle Automation to Adaptive Agents

(Bias acknowledged, I built a lot of systems this way.) A state change triggered an event (often a webhook with a JSON payload) that hits an async serverless API to update state in another system. We wrote logic, produced an output, and updated state. Classic commerce ops patterns included:

• Generating a return label and emailing a PDF to the customer.
• Processing a refund in Stripe after calculating deductions based on item condition.
• Looping through non‑returns and generating Stripe invoices.

In short: events → endpoint logic → state update → return. It worked, until it didn't. The GPT wave changed everything.

// Old Way: Brittle Rule-Based System
if (return.reason === 'damaged') {
  if (return.value > 100) {
    sendToManager();
  } else {
    autoApprove();
    generateLabel();
  }
} else if (return.reason === 'not_as_described') {
  // More nested conditions...
}

// New Way: Intelligent Agent
const agent = new ReturnAgent({
  context: customerHistory,
  policies: brandGuidelines,
  learning: historicalOutcomes
});

const decision = await agent.evaluate(return);
// Agent considers context, learns from outcomes,
// and makes nuanced decisions automatically

What Changes with Agentic Ops?

This feels less like brittle automation and more like a capable operator collaborating with your stack, 24/7.

"The future of commerce isn't about more automation—it's about smarter automation that learns from every interaction and improves continuously."

— Dominic Steil, StateSet CEO

What It Looks Like in the Wild

Adoption Made Simple

We hear it all the time: "AI Agents sound powerful and complicated." Our promise: we make complicated → simple; we make scary → not scary through our agentic flywheel.

How we de‑risk adoption:

On the Future of Intelligent Commerce: Cohesion Is Key

We're in the midst of a wave of generative and agentic technologies that let businesses scale faster than ever:

What's missing isn't capability; it's cohesion. We need a single intelligent commerce suite with a battle‑tested orchestration engine that coordinates these modalities safely, predictably, and at scale.

That's the future we're building at StateSet:

• Intelligent reporting in seconds across all commerce data.
• Order orchestration across Shopify, NetSuite, and your 3PLs.
• CX agents that handle order/subscription changes, replacements, and returns.
• Creative & social agents that produce on‑brand assets and publish to the right channels.

StateSet iCommerce orchestrates the operational stack end‑to‑end so your teams can focus on strategy, brand, and growth.

The Journey So Far: Why I'm Building StateSet iCommerce

My career has been shaped by two threads—language intelligence and distributed systems—leading directly to the founding of StateSet.

Why It Matters for Growth

How StateSet Makes It Real

At StateSet, AI‑native agents power the iCommerce Engine, connecting Shopify, Amazon, TikTok Shop, NetSuite, 3PLs, and more to deliver outcomes, not just actions.

Vision

Our goal is to partner with the top 5,000 Shopify brands for enterprise‑grade, agentic operations, plus hands‑on guidance on the latest models, modalities, and best practices to help you scale past $100M+.

Our team is committed to bringing the next generation of intelligent commerce to operators worldwide so you can move faster, de‑risk growth, and compound outcomes.

"Ready to transform your commerce operations? The shift from eCommerce to iCommerce isn't just about technology—it's about fundamentally reimagining how your business operates, learns, and scales."