theCUBE + NYSE Wired: NRF Media Week, AI Retail Leaders | Jen Jones, commercetools

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Jen Jones

Chief Marketing Officer

commercetools

Retail’s future reimagined: AI, headless commerce and commercetools’ vision

Retail transformation has become a far-reaching imperative given the seismic shifts driven by AI, data and next-generation commerce platforms.The landscape is changing, and the onus is on technology advancements to keep pace with the evolving expectations of digital-native organizations. That imperative has spurred commercetools GmbH as it doubles down on the “headless commerce” ethos.Commercetools’ Jen Jones discusses new company announcements with theCUBE

play_circle_outline Commercetools' digital commerce platform for modern era

play_circle_outline Definition and benefits of headless commerce platform

play_circle_outline Driving Growth and Engaging Customers: Insights from Commercetools Elevate Conference in Miami Beach

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Jen Jones, commercetools

Jen Jones

Chief Marketing Officer commercetools

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What is the definition of headless in the context of a commerce platform at Commercetools? add

What is a headless commerce platform and why is it a beneficial approach in terms of flexibility and user interface? add

What is Commercetools Elevate? add

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Jen Jones, commercetools

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>> (music).

>> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE here in New York City. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're getting down to the end of the day. We'll get the closing bell soon. We'll get to our three days of wall-to-wall coverage as part of our media week of NRF coverage. We've had the industry leaders coming in all day. Here for the next two more days. We have a great guests here, Jen Jones, the CMO of Commercetools. You know that from theCUBE coverage. Jen, great to have you. Andrew Burton, the new CEO, is in town as well. The whole team here. Thanks for coming in.

>> Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

>> So, NRF. This is like the holy grail for retail-

>> Yeah....

>> industry tech as we see in every single event this year. CES just came back, all AI all the time. But we kind of saw this coming. But this is probably the year you start to see that tipping point, where the whole world goes, "Okay, tech, and data, and AI are all together." And you're seeing Amazon getting into retail with Just Walk In. You're seeing all kinds of new analytics out there. Martech stacks are being retrofitted. Commerce is changing. You've got headless systems, you got all kinds of tools. This is your wheelhouse.

>> Yes.

>> First, give us a feeling for how you guys think NRF is going relative to how it was. I mean, it's a lot more tech. What ratio are you seeing? What's the vibe? What are you seeing at NRF?

>> Yeah, it's an exciting year to be there. You could feel that even yesterday on the Sunday. And today was very, very busy on the floor. But you're right, just tech is taking over. I've been going to NRF for many, many years with different companies, and you really see that shift now, where it's all about, there's a lot of robotics on the floor. Talk about AI and data is certainly reigns supreme. So, pretty exciting starts to the year.

>> 30,000 plus people, the Javits. It's pretty packed.

>> Yes.

>> What I love about... I mean we never cover retail and we're, this is going to be a staple for us now going forward, because we saw it last year and supercomputing, we saw that four years ago. When we see it coming, we know it's here. It's kind of like, "Okay, the tribe is here, the concepts are here." We love IoT, we love edge Retail is the ultimate edge. Now you have the consumer wearables, you have handhelds.

>> Yes.

>> In-store, it's got IT. It's got everything data.

>> Yes.

>> And by the way, it's got to use ai, which means it's got to be re-architected.

>> Completely.

>> And so here we go again.

>> Here we go again. Yes. And when you look at how generational shifts are happening with new buyers, Gen Z coming into their buying power just at the beginning of that, and they're true digital natives. They have a different expectation for customer service and customer experience. You talk about wearables and AI, and that's what they've grown up with and expect. So, the landscape is changing, the technology landscape's changed, but the consumers, the buyers are changing too.

>> So, talk about the transformation of Commercetools, where you guys are at. You're in a much different place now than you were even a few years ago. For the folks watching, give the quick overview of Commercetools, when you guys are doing, how you guys solve problems, how you sell, what's the main benefits? And then we can get into some of the nuances of where the shift is happening. Because there is a huge shift.

>> There is. There is. So, at Commercetools, if you're not familiar, we are a digital commerce platform, composable, which has really been purpose built for this future world, where technology is changing fast. You need an open platform to drive the backend of all of your commerce business. So, that's been the heart of our business. Heavy influence in retail of course, but also across B2B, manufacturing, healthcare, other industries too.

>> Can you define what headless means? I mean, I always roll my eyes when I hear "Headless systems." Because there's a definition to this. I think this is what I find compelling, what you guys do, is the term headless commerce platform.

>> Yes.

>> What does that mean? Headless?

>> Yeah, it's an odd term. Friendlier than it might sound on the surface. But that really comes from the history of e-commerce. You go back in time to where e-commerce platforms were all in one, and they were this black box. You just got a site that looked like your next competitor's website, and that was it. And they were only really functioning on the web, as opposed to now we've got devices, wearables, hand-helds, you name it. And one of the things that our founder, Dirk Hoerig, realized early on was that separating the backend work from the front end, meaning the presentation later, what you interact with as a buyer was just really critical in terms of building that flexibility. And then you can tack our front end back onto it, things like that. But it's separating it is what makes us so-

>> So it's not monolithic and getting user interface dictate-

>> Exactly. Exactly....

>> what the proposition is basically.

>> Right. It was almost the tail wagging the dog. That front end was dictating what was possible on the backend. And now it's really the customer driving what they need.

>> You know what's exciting about your business? Big fan of it. Because we watched the cloud wave. I mean I've been doing theCUBE for 15 years. We get a little bit of a luxury to kind of say we've been around that long. But, the thing about is that when cloud came out, SaaS was really... Web went to mobile, mobile went to cloud. The SaaS app was just a mobile app that was from the web-

>> Right....

>> on the cloud. And great. And some had heads and one body, and cut the head off, everything fails. Then you started to see customization. Then you started to see cloud, I think around 2015, 2016 timeframe. Because the winners in SaaS were doing more to innovate, and they were building their own ecosystems.

>> Yes.

>> And APIs were now connective tissue. And we saw that data layer start to emerge, where customization and people were making money doing good things. New companies were being born on top of other platforms. Okay, great. Now we're in an era of scale. And this buy versus build, you mentioned black box. Nobody likes black boxes.

>> No.

>> I haven't met anyone who's like, "Give me a black box," because no one knows what's in there. If you build your own system and that person, say, who's running the database leaves, the black box becomes a time bomb.

>> Absolutely.

>> So, you're starting to see people who scale actually become a core competency of domain expertise as a service. And you're starting to see that kind of comfort. It used to be, "Don't outsource your core, core competency." Well, if you're in e-commerce, you're selling something. So, conventional wisdom would say I should own, build my own back end, multi-channel marketing system, first party analytics, APIs, with thread through, with state data. I mean like platform engine. Whoa, hold on. That's what you guys have been successful at. How is that going now, as AI is coming? Because it would almost be intuitive to say with AI and the creativity, that the front end having a headless system will give you more capabilities to use AI to make the front end better.

>> Absolutely. I-

>> On the business transformation.

>> Yes. And I think that's a huge trend in our industry that you're going to see more and more of, is AI being able to create better front end experiences, more dynamic front-end experiences. If you think about your own experience as a shopper, brands have so much information about us. They just do. We've chosen to give it to them in exchange for a better shopping experience.

>> Here we go. We get the closing bell. We got lucky. This is your time. We always take a break. We love the closing bell. We don't stop. We keep going.

>> Super fun.

>> So, you can see the closing bell right over here. Here we go.

>> Awesome.

>> That's the closing bell. End of the training day.

>> Very cool.

>> January 13th.

>> Very cool, very cool.

>> Jen. You're the lucky recipient.

>> There we go.

>> You win.

>> Lucky me.

>> You win.

>> That's awesome.

>> What prize do we have for Jen?

>> And I see it's our partners at Riskified too, so congrats to them.

>> Not going to lie. It's my favorite part of the day here.

>> That's got to be fun.

>> We watch opening bell from the floor. We're not online for opening Bell. NYC does that. So we get the closing bell, but-

>> That's great.

>> My favorite part of the day.

>> Super fun.

>> All right, end of the training day here at theCUBE. Again, more content covering coming from theCUBE here on our East coast super PoP, point of presence. We'll be bringing a lot of action. We'll get back to Jen and Commercetools. We're about headless systems and customizing, getting really... We haven't talked about microservices and Kubernetes yet. That's really a lot of fun.

>> Coming soon, coming soon.

>> Only kidding. We won't go there. But you guys do support that. I mean this is-

>> We do. Yes.

>> You're a full cloud-native platform.

>> Yes. Built from the ground up, originally, as cloud-native, digital first. Really built for this more modern era, which is what differentiates us from our monolithic competitors, who were just simply built for a different time. Technology has changed so much in the last 20 years.

>> What is the biggest customer needs that you guys are hitting on right now? If someone asked you why is Commercetools winning and why?

>> Yeah. Customers come to us initially for a couple of reasons. Usually they're hitting some boundary of their old system, right? And they've tried to patch it together and tried to change it. And they've got smart people working on solving that problem. And they just hit a wall of... Usually it's either scale, right? Their systems just cannot handle volume. So, scale is an issue that they come to us for. That's a real pain point. If your website's down on Black Friday, that's brutal. So, that's one. I think the other one is just flexibility. Flexibility to quickly launch a new brand, or to launch in a new country, or to make some changes, personalization, loyalty. All these things that really drive your revenue and your business. They're not able to do it with old systems. So, they come to us and that's usually where-

>> So, this is where I was getting at the whole buy versus build. Because when you hit a certain scale point, you become the core competency provider, because the alternative is to build it in-house.

>> Yes.

>> And sometimes these little nuanced technical things like, "Should we use a cloud platform?" seem trivial. I've seen meetings where it's like, "Well, if I could do that, that's college-level coding for this one thing." Or, it sounds a lot easier, but when they actually try to make it all work, too many fail points, and nevermind if someone leaves. So there's technical debt and then if it becomes a black box, you're dead in the water. You guys are doing things at scale so the customers don't have to worry about. That's what you guys do, right?

>> Exactly. So, we're handling the issues of scale ,security. There's the concept of maintenance goes away, really. And we're allowing our customers to either decide to just use as whole, as it is, and that's enough for some customers, and they're not doing a ton of building. But a lot of our larger customers are then investing their engineering resources on things that really move the needle. And they're doing some of the coolest stuff that you see out there in retail, because they're focusing on that, instead of trying to make this just core basics of commerce work.

>> Talk about the mix of business. What's the kind of profile customers you have? Can you share the mix?

>> Yeah.

>> The types of personas who are buying? Is it large commerce players that just want to outsource the supply chain? Or is it more retail? I mean, what's the mix?

>> Yeah, heavy retail of course, but not as heavy as you might think. I'm always amazed at some of the interesting personas and industries that come to us. We have one customer that sells Giant... Norman. They sell industrial-sized drills for mining, and they use us to sell replacement parts and things like that online and make that easier for their buyers. So, we have some strong B2B examples. Great examples of customers in healthcare as well. We're a HIPAA-compliant platform, which is another hurdle that some companies come to us to help solve. And then, in retail, of course that whole industry is moving so fast, like we talked about. So, some interesting things there.

>> I mean it's the about customization, efficiency. I mean, it's just really like buying any system.

>> Yeah. And whether you're buying a pair of sunglasses or you're buying replacement parts for your industrial drill bits, you want an easy customer experience. You want things to be streamlined fast, have some sense of who you are as a customer, and build that brand loyalty. So we-

>> What's the coolest feature people like right now that's resonating the most in Commercetool? How would you-

>> Well, I think one of the things that I'm excited about is, we launched a new product today called Commercetools in-store. And so a lot of excitement. We've been talking to some of our customers in early access, and over the last few months, and they're chomping at the bit for that one.

>> What does that do?

>> So, everything that we've been talking about from a digital standpoint that you think about. All that commerce work that happens in a digital sphere. There's always been a disconnect. That experience of then going to a physical retail store where they don't know who you are, and you can't search inventory easily, and your loyalty points... Maybe you remember to give them your phone number and get your loyalty points, but there's always that disconnect between that brand that feels like it knows you on your app, versus that in-store experience. And so our Commercetools in-store release today brings all of that core commerce capability into our physical store environment.

>> Well, Don Klein wanted me to tell you hello and say great to connect with you guys. I wanted to get it out there. When's your event coming up, and what are your goals as the CMO this year? We have a big CMO event, actually May 10th in Palo Alto.

>> Right.

>> You're invited. You're the invitee, like AI leaders. But what's your plan for the year? When's your event? Get the dates lined up, and then what are your goals?

>> So Commercetools Elevate is our... We'll be in year two of this. We launched a new conference last year, and it's really been a great place for users to connect, for prospects to connect. Just leaders in commerce. B2C, B2B leaders learning from each other. So, that's going to be in Miami Beach, May 21st through 23rd of this year.

>> All right. And your goals for the year?

>> Continuing to grow the company. Getting to know more of our customers. That's my favorite part of my job. I have the luxury of that all day long. And yeah, getting this in-store launch going and see what we can do in market.

>> I mean, retail commerce, I mean, I was joking with a guest earlier. I remember the days 25 years ago when IBM had e-business was the big thing .and it's like their whole marketing campaign was about today. Like what's happening now.

>> It is. And here we are.

>> They do those futuristic interviews. It's like, "Hey, you know?" But if you look at what's going on in retail, and other verticals like healthcare, you guys have a product that works for every industry, whether you're selling drill bits or medical stuff. If you don't want to deal with the pain and the backend building and costs, why not go to domain experts? You do the security. You do the backend. I mean, it's a-

>> Absolutely.

>> That value proposition is becoming this whole idea of "Don't outsource core competency."

>> Yeah, don't out-

>> Don't. This can be a core competency, because the domain specific is the retail. Is the-

>> Yeah. Focus your internal resources, talent, people on the things that will differentiate you, not those core capabilities.

>> All right, Jen. Thanks for coming. You got the lucky bell spot.

>> Awesome.

>> Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great to see you.

>> Thanks so much.

>> All right. We are here at the NYSC, winding down day one of three days of coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.

>> (music)