eCommerce Today en CDMX: Building Toward the Agentic Future of Commerce
Inside the CDMX event exploring the next phase of composable commerce through real-world innovation and practical AI adoption
Mexico City is known for its dynamism and contrast, the steady thrum of more and next constantly pulsing through its streets. Last Thursday, the second annual eCommerce Today en CDMX harnessed that same energy, bringing together business leaders, technologists, and digital commerce practitioners to explore what comes after composable.
Hosted by Orium and Gluo, the half-day event opened not with promises of innovation but with a challenge: if digital commerce is already evolving toward intelligent systems that act on behalf of users, how are you ensuring your business is ready?
That readiness was the thread running through every conversation. Not readiness in the abstract, but in the specific architecture, data strategy, and executional mindset that lets businesses shift from manual orchestration to automated, agent-enabled outcomes.
From Agility to Intelligence
Over the past decade, composable commerce has helped brands move faster, integrate better tools, and become more resilient. But agility alone isn’t enough anymore. Jaime De la Fuente, VP of Commerce LATAM at Orium, opened the event by laying out what’s next: systems that respond quickly and act intelligently. These agentic systems are already emerging — not as moonshot prototypes, but as operational tools in search, payments, and digital experience.
Throughout the day, speakers showed what that shift looks like in practice: AI-powered assistants that manage checkout flows; search tools that understand a user’s intent without exact keyword matches; and CMS platforms that generate personalized content variations at scale. The speakers told a story wasn’t about a distant someday, but instead about today and tomorrow and the next day. They were sharing insights about what’s already here and what’s accelerating faster than most of the industry is keeping pace.
Experience Without Friction, Intelligence at Every Step
One of the clearest signals from the event was that frictionless experiences and intelligent automation are no longer separate goals. They’re the same ambition, expressed through different parts of the stack.
David Zuazua, Mexico Country Manager at Algolia, described search as a strategic asset, the place where discovery begins or ends. Search, he noted, is often the first point of interaction for a customer, and also the first point of failure when done poorly. Algolia’s evolution from keyword-based engines to neural search reflects a larger pattern: relevance is no longer about matching terms. It’s about understanding needs and surfacing personalized, high-confidence results in real time.
That real-time adaptability is what JR Leighty of Contentstack called the foundation of adaptive digital experiences. His message was direct: personalization isn’t broken because it’s a bad idea. It’s broken because content and data systems weren’t built to support it. Leighty argued that only 15% of leaders feel confident in their personalization efforts. That perilously low confidence level comes from an innate challenge those leaders face: activating that strategy means solving a thousand operational and creative challenges. The good news, per Leighty, is that AI doesn’t replace the need for creativity or structure, but it scales them far more effectively.
Automation That Pays for Itself
Bernardo Castañeda León of Stripe showed what happens when AI moves beyond the customer-facing layer and into the financial core of a business. Stripe has embedded machine learning across the entire payment lifecycle— not just to catch fraud, but to optimize payment method presentation, authorization retries, dispute resolution, and more. These enhancements, driven by behavioral and contextual signals, are producing measurable revenue gains, often without requiring additional engineering work from merchants.
In addition, these same capabilities are now being exposed to agent-based systems. Whether a voice agent managing refunds or a ChatGPT integration executing pre-approved purchases, the tools designed to improve human experiences are being extended to serve digital agents too. As Castañeda León put it, Stripe’s job now is not only to optimize checkout for people, but also for software acting on their behalf.
LATAM’s Inflection Point
While much of the event looked ahead, Oliver Cañedo of Google Cloud grounded the conversation in current benchmarks. Presenting research from the Retail Garage initiative, Cañedo revealed that many Latin American retailers are still early in their journey toward AI-powered experiences. Only a third are using natural language in their chatbots. Fewer still personalize product recommendations based on browsing history.
But that gap is also an opportunity. From multimodal search to AI-generated catalog enrichment, Google is helping brands move from static interactions to dynamic, context-rich engagement. Cañedo emphasized that AI isn’t just about optimization, it’s increasingly how new revenue streams are created, from retail media to hyper-targeted promotions.
From Insight to Action
What tied the day together wasn’t just the topic of AI. It was the question of how. How do you move from composable architecture to intelligent orchestration? From pilot experiments to scalable systems? From siloed data to adaptive experiences?
The answer — echoed by every speaker — wasn’t to build a master plan and wait for the perfect moment. It was to start with real workflows. Automate what’s repeatable. Pilot one agent. Track the time saved. Use it to do better work. And then scale from there.
Implementing AI and agents isn’t about replacing people, it’s about removing friction so people can do higher-impact work and about shifting from building systems that react, to systems that collaborate.
What Comes Next
eCommerce Today made it clear: Latin America isn’t catching up. It’s entering the AI era on its own terms — backed by pragmatic experimentation, composable infrastructure, and a growing appetite for results that go beyond optimization.
For those looking to dig into these topics more, the Humans + Agents ebook (available in English and in Spanish) offers a practical guide to thinking through agent-native workflows, composable foundations, and AI orchestration strategies. And be sure to sign up for the Composable.com newsletter— the next quarterly supplement focuses on AI and agents.
Leigh Bryant
Editorial Director, Composable.com
Leigh Bryant is a seasoned content and brand strategist with over a decade of experience in digital storytelling. Starting in retail before shifting to the technology space, she has spent the past ten years crafting compelling narratives as a writer, editor, and strategist.