For all the excitement around AI, most commerce teams are still wrestling with the same challenge: turning intelligence into action.
Data remains fragmented, customer journeys remain disconnected, and scaling personalization continues to be harder than expected.
Anirban Bardalaye, Chief Product Officer of Bloomreach, explains why the future belongs to commerce platforms that can connect data, decisions, and execution—and how agentic AI is accelerating that shift.
What changed is that brands stopped asking for “more AI” in the abstract and started asking how to make AI operational at scale. The biggest blockers we consistently heard were the implementation gap between pilots and scaled reality, tool and data silos, AI governance and trust, and the organizational challenge of helping teams, processes, and roles evolve fast enough to keep up.
That is exactly why this is the right moment for agentic AI in commerce. The market does not need more disconnected point features. It needs AI that is grounded in the core systems brands already rely on, can act on live commerce data, and can drive measurable business outcomes across the customer journey.
Traditional personalization has often been too rigid, too channel-specific, and too dependent on manual work. Brands end up stitching together customer profiles, product data, channels, testing, and reporting across separate systems, and after all that effort, personalization is still often limited to a single channel, if that.
Our view is that personalization should not be a layer you bolt on after the fact. Loomi is the intelligence layer that understands every customer in context and tailors experiences in real time. The same data and AI that power personalization in email can also power personalization in search, on the web, and now in LLM-driven experiences, which is how you move from isolated optimization to truly connected commerce.
The hardest part is not just collecting more data. It is making fragmented customer, product, and behavioral signals usable across every touchpoint in a consistent way. Brands also run into a semantic challenge: teams and systems describe the same things differently, which makes it harder for AI to reason accurately across the business.
We are solving that differently by building a unified intelligence layer that connects the platform, the data, and the agents. That includes an agent-built semantic layer that can suggest definitions based on learnings across the customer base, with human approval at setup, as well as two-way data flows where interactions enrich the customer profile and the customer profile informs future experiences. Just as importantly, with Loomi Connect, we are making Bloomreach intelligence accessible outside the platform, so customers do not have to choose between a powerful commerce brain and an open architecture.
I think conversational AI becomes a new commerce surface, not a side experiment. With Loomi Connect, we can extend Bloomreach Discovery into environments like ChatGPT so AI agents can securely access live product catalog data, search results, inventory, and product details in real time.
The bigger shift is that product discovery starts to feel less like navigating a catalog and more like collaborating with an intelligent guide. And because Loomi Connect brings over the same ranking configurations, personalization models, merchandising strategies, and promotional logic brands already use on their sites, conversational commerce does not have to be a separate world. It can become a fully governed extension of the customer journey.
It has made me very pragmatic about innovation. I tend to look at product opportunities through three lenses at once: what is technically possible, what solves a real customer problem, and what can scale inside a complex business environment.
That is why I have a strong bias toward AI that is consequential, not cosmetic. In commerce, the most valuable AI is not the flashiest demo. It is the AI that can operate on real data, fit into real workflows, and help teams drive measurable growth with trust and repeatability.
For us, trust is not a brake on innovation. It is what makes innovation usable in an enterprise setting. Customers have been clear that governance, explainability, and ownership matter, and we have used that feedback to shape where we invest.
Practically, that means grounding AI in real-time commerce data, building stronger data and identity foundations, and creating systems where humans remain in control of critical decisions. You can see that in areas like the semantic layer, where suggestions are generated by AI but approved by humans, and in Loomi Connect MCP, where access is scoped to the APIs and parameters needed for a task rather than exposing everything by default. That combination of live data, clear guardrails, and customer control is how we think about responsible AI at Bloomreach.
Winning the AI-native future means commerce teams can move from manually orchestrating disconnected systems to setting goals and letting intelligent systems help execute across the entire journey. In that world, AI is not just helping teams create content or answer questions. It is helping them make better decisions, coordinate actions across channels, and continuously adapt experiences in real time.
That is why our biggest bets are both foundational and forward-looking. We are investing in stronger data and identity foundations, better everyday workflows, and clearer analytics and reporting in the core product, while also investing at the edge in agents for execution, agentic analytics, and new AI-native surfaces like Loomi Connect. We also believe openness matters, which is why open ecosystem thinking is a core part of the strategy. The companies that win will not just use AI to do the old work faster; they will use it to redesign how commerce gets done.
Anirban Bardalaye serves as Bloomreach’s Chief Product Officer, leading the development and execution of strategy to accelerate the growth of the company’s product pillars — Discovery, Engagement, and Content. Prior to joining Bloomreach, Anirban served as VP of Product Management, Commerce Cloud, at Salesforce. Before joining Salesforce, Anirban served as Head of Product, Platform Ecosystem & Marketplace, at Guidewire, and prior to that, co-founded VaycayHero, a B2B2C travel company backed by prominent technology startup accelerator Y Combinator.
More about Anirban: 
Bloomreach personalizes the customer experience for brands around the world. Loomi AI, its agentic platform, understands every customer in context — then tailors their experience in real time. Connected to applications at every touchpoint, Loomi AI brings personalization to life across email, web, messaging, mobile apps, search, and more. From retail to financial services, hospitality to gaming, Bloomreach powers end-to-end experiences for 1,400+ global brands, including American Eagle, Sonepar, and Pandora.
Learn more at bloomreach.com.
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