The place of AI in the future of B2B eCommerce

In many separate arenas of the world of technology, COVID-19 has been the great accelerator. Cloud computing is perhaps the most obvious example, with the pandemic inducing heavy reliance on remote collaboration and communication tech; a surging interest in cybersecurity solutions is another; mandates for social distancing has also rendered traditional forms of commerce impractical and given rise to the ubiquity of eCommerce. B2B commerce has gone truly digital in the wake of the pandemic, and it's changed processes and behaviours for those on both sides of transaction – perhaps for good. "All of a sudden, you don't have the ability to have field reps out there, interacting with customers face to face," says PROS A/NZ managing director David Bray. "For a lot of organisations, it's limited their ability to be able to do things through call centres easily because their workforce had to move to work from home. "[There's been] a huge shift towards looking at how to use the eCommerce as part of a broader B2B engagement." Such a large shift requires an overhaul in the ways in which B2B organisations and their salespeople approach their role. It's no longer adequate to rely on in-person meetings with customers, lunches with clients or other physical events – salespeople must virtualise their role, and that requires the right tools. Buyers have taken full control of the buying process in this new virtual model of commerce, and this means the B2B seller has to step their game to earn customer loyalty by engaging with those customers where, when and how the customer wants. The key to this is AI. "B2B organisations that are selling typically have a large number of products and a large number of customers," says Bray. "With that comes a massive amount of data, and the challenge is to effectively use this data in real-time to provide a relevant experience to buyers.