Omnichannel commerce is constantly evolving, and the next decade of digital will be just as transformative as the last.
To explore what that means for brands, retailers, and consumers, Salsify and the Digital Shelf Institute (DSI) hosted the 2025 Digital Shelf Summit (DSS), bringing together leading experts, including Brooke Chambers, director of ecommerce at Kroger; Brian Bell, vice president of strategy and planning at Church & Dwight; Tyler Murray, chief client and commerce officer at VML; and Kavita Cariapa, senior vice president and head of commerce activation at Dentsu.
These commerce wizards all looked into their respective crystal balls to envision the future. Here are their perspectives on the dynamic, personalized, and increasingly consumer-driven future of commerce.
Chambers says it’s time to recast omnichannel as “unified commerce.”
Whereas omnichannel connects physical and digital touch points, unified commerce “really ties into loyalty,” Chambers says. She adds that customized search and filtering that tailors each consumer’s product assortment journey are hallmarks of this approach.
“When you think about omnichannel, it’s really about ‘Is the customer at that particular channel at that particular time, right?’ I think one of the things to really [home] in on with unified [commerce] is the experience. How is it tailored to you at that time? That's that next level,” Chamber says.
Unified commerce can materialize in several ways:
To put it simply, unified commerce will break down the current system, data, and channel silos. Instead, it will create a real-time, connected customer experience that delivers a seamless, continuous journey — regardless of channel.
There’s seemingly no solution we interact with today that doesn’t have artificial intelligence (AI) integrated into it. Bell says that, in the future, AI will be table stakes and embedded across every consumer interaction.
“In five years, like electricity, like the internet, like mobile — AI won't be special,” he says.
Bell contends that we’re already starting to see this with search engines that use AI to deliver contextual information when answering a user’s query. He says consumers are now accustomed to this level of personalization, which begs the question of what brands can do to differentiate themselves.
“It's more about what's your business strategy around this — not what you're going to do with the feature of AI,” Bell says. “It's less about chasing the feature and more about thinking about the strategies, the operating models, and the ways that we go to market in the context of our business.”
The bottom line is that AI is a tool just like any other. Brands that find a way to seamlessly integrate it to achieve their growth and profitability objectives will be better positioned for the future of commerce.
Just as embedded AI will become an integral part of brands’ and retailers’ operations, AI agents will become an important facet of the search, discovery, and shopping experience for consumers.
Murray discussed how he used ChatGPT to help him research baby strollers as an example. ChatGPT was able to take him from discovery and selection to purchase, landing him on the brand’s website to complete his transaction.
“If that does continue to grow, either that experience is going to live within a retailer's website or some other place,” Murray says. “It just intermediates a lot of the path to purchase, and you start to really wonder, ‘Does retail media exist in that world?’ ‘Does category management exist in that world?’ I don't know.”
Cariapa says yes. Retail media, she explains, will play a critical role in informing the output of AI agents.
“Retail media will continue to be a huge influence there. It's really an avenue where both the retailers and the brands have a common pathway, and that common path and goal is essentially customer satisfaction,” she says. “We're seeing the opportunity with retail media. It's the signals, it's the data that's going to unlock opportunity for brands and retailers alike.”
Retail media, Cariapa predicts, will be critical to enabling AI to improve the overall customer experience: “It's those commerce signals — like what's in your basket — it's product performance, it's pricing, it's what creative worked, and what channels within retail media actually worked as well that would be driving the training for these AI agents to fuel the recommendations and make those more seamless and ultimately beneficial for the customer.”
Brands have long struggled with the challenge of walled gardens and siloed data, but Murray says a new approach to data will reshape the future of commerce: federated learning models.
“It's a decentralized machine learning capability that, instead of requiring a retailer or some other third party’s walled garden to give you data access, it's more about deploying your AI model within their garden that then can understand consumer behavior,” says Murray. “Then, back through a clean room, it can provide predictions around consumer behavior and consumer experiences.”
We’ve seen the emergence of data clean rooms — or controlled environments where walled gardens like Google and Facebook, as well as retailers and brands, can securely and easily share data with one another. Tyler suggests that, in the future, clean rooms will be vital to democratizing data access and helping brands better understand their customers.
Chambers adds that better data collaboration is, at its core, about forging better relationships between brands, retailers, and other partners.
“No AI model is going to work without the proper data. So, it’s about really getting tight on your retail partnerships,” Chambers says. “How does your search work? How do I need to format my content in order to really drive the right conversion to have the right experience on your site?”
Whether it’s data collaboration, embedded AI, generative AI (GenAI) agents, or unified commerce, the future of omnichannel will look markedly different from its present. Technology will play a key role in that future, but it’s up to brands and retailers to figure out how to best leverage it to meet consumers’ ever-increasing expectations.
“You can kind of feel scared about this. But to me, it's the most exciting time to be in this space because, finally, the technology capability has now caught up with our ambition for what we want to provide to consumers, and our mission about how we want to serve that up in our special way for each of our customers,” Bell says. “Now, it's really possible.”