Theresa Pham, Head of Product at Wayvia chats about the changing scope of ecommerce buying journeys in today’s AI driven ecosystem in this MarTechSeries interview:

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Tell us more about Wayvia’s new solution Shoppable Next Generation and how it benefits ecommerce marketers?

The problem we consistently hear from brands is that the growth of AI and social commerce has created new complexity that feels overwhelming. There are new channels, new paths to purchase, and they need fast, clear insights into what is converting and what’s not working.

Shoppable Next Generation is built to fix that. When a shopper interacts with a brand’s content, like a display ad or social post, we can display live pricing and inventory from available retailers. When they complete a purchase, that confirmed sale signal can go back to the originating ad platform, for example, server-side through our Meta Conversions API integration. That gives marketers closed-loop reporting between media spend and real retail outcomes, not just clicks.

We also built in three landing-page templates mapped to campaign objectives marketers already use: conversion, basket building, and awareness. Add last-mile delivery through Instacart and DoorDash, plus automatic demand protection when a product is out of stock, and you have something that works the way modern shopping actually happens.

What should e-commerce marketers keep top of mind in an AI-driven ecosystem?

The systems brands still rely on today were built for a simpler world. They assumed clear attribution, linear journeys and more direct brand-to-consumer relationships. That world is gone.

What has replaced it is much messier. It’s a world in which the way your brand appears to customers is mediated by an AI chatbot that may choose to describe the brand multiple different ways. AI also collapses the sales funnel with discovery and conversion happening at the same time.

Many marketers have to reframe how they think about control. Marketing can no longer be about aiming for perfect control over every consumer touchpoint.

New control means accurate representation and better signals. It means being intelligently represented wherever discovery happens, in AI interfaces, on social platforms, across retail media and beyond.

The destination is intelligent action and context-aware decisioning that lets brands react quickly.

That’s a mindset shift as much as a technology one.

For marketers looking to make their brands stand out in 2026: how can they tie in better experiences using modern ecommerce marketing tools?

One way marketers can stand out is to keep writing content for humans. That may sound basic, but I’m hearing so much chatter and noise about how PDPs need to be torn up and turned into data-heavy spec sheets that AI can ingest easily.

That’s an overreaction. It’s true that you need to re-assess your PDPs, including all your data and content, to make sure it’s in forms the AI can use. However, marketers have to remember that AI agents are going to search based on queries humans give them. If someone is looking for a gift for their spouse, or a carrier for their pet, or a new TV, or a new power tool, the LLM will be searching based on the context of the query, what the intended use is, and how well the brand is spoken about online. That’s all information that speaks both to shoppers and to AI. Data and stats will only ever tell part of the story.

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A few takeaways from leading ecommerce brands that you’d share with our ecommerce marketers?

We work with 2,000+ brands, and there are a few approaches that are common among those that are really leading right now.

First, they measure what matters. Leading brands have moved away from vanity metrics and built clear connections between media investment and confirmed retail outcomes. They know which channels are actually driving purchases, not just traffic.

Second, they are focused on building their data capabilities. The brands winning in AI-driven commerce are moving fast to structure their shopper and product data so it can power both human decisions and AI systems.

Third, they think through an omnicommerce lens. That means intelligence flowing across every touchpoint, so every interaction informs the next one, whether it happens on social media, in a chatbot, or on a brand’s website.

Five ways in which you feel ecommerce will shift as AI becomes central to the customer journey?

1. Shopper discovery will happen in many different ways. AI agents, chatbots and voice interfaces will become primary discovery surfaces.

2. AI agents will take more control but they won’t replace shoppers yet. There are a lot of predictions out there about how AI agents will be running everything from discovery to purchase soon. For small purchases, maybe. I’m sure people would be comfortable letting an agent reorder low risk items, like milk or kitchen towels when they run out. But for anything larger, human shoppers will still want to pull the trigger even if an AI ultimately executes the transaction. That’s an important distinction for how brands position themselves.

3. The consideration phase will get shorter, rewarding availability and penalizing friction. When an AI can recommend, compare and initiate checkout in one interaction, the window to influence consumers’ decisions is much shorter. Brands that have real-time inventory visibility and frictionless purchase paths will convert at significantly higher rates. Brands that don’t will lose the sale before they even know it was in play.

4. Confirmed purchase data will become an even more important metric. Engagement metrics were always a compromise. Marketers measured what we could, not what we wanted to know. As attribution technology catches up to how shopping actually happens, marketers will increasingly be held accountable to confirmed sales, not impressions or clicks.

5. The quality of your data could be a deciding factor. The gap between data-rich and data-poor brands will grow as AI amplifies whatever foundation you’ve already built. Brands with two decades of shopper data, clean product information, and real-time retail intelligence will use AI to compound their advantage. Brands that aren’t there yet will have to move quickly to build those muscles.

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Wayvia is the global leader in omnicommerce data and brand enablement. By connecting shopper and retail intelligence across every channel, brands gain deeper insight into consumer behavior and unlock new opportunities to improve the path to purchase, whether through offsite media, onsite experiences or agentic commerce. Backed by the world’s largest network of retailer and media partnerships, Wayvia offers brands the retail intelligence to power analytics, optimize shopping journeys and enable AI solutions.

About Theresa:

Theresa Pham is Head of Product at Wayvia. She has over 15 years of B2B Saas and eCommerce leadership, with a deep expertise in digital transformation and a proven track record of driving significant business growth. As a recognized leader in the technology space, including being named a Top Woman in Restaurant Technology, Theresa has made a name for herself as a visionary product leader who thrives on building disruptive technology and driving market differentiation. With a career forged at top-tier companies like Amazon, Olo and Loadsmart, Theresa brings a wealth of experience in building and scaling technology solutions that drive business growth.