What VTEX’s AI push really means for European retailers

From complexity to simplicity

There is an irony in VTEX’s current positioning that is worth understanding. Until recently, the company was a prominent member of the MACH Alliance – the industry body that promotes microservices, application programming interface (API)-first, cloud-native, headless architecture, better known as “composable commerce”.

The philosophy behind MACH is the opposite of what VTEX now sells: a best-of-breed approach where retailers assemble their own stack from specialist components. VTEX left the alliance over a year ago – a break that did not go unnoticed.

When asked about the decision, Gomide is unapologetic. “When we saw that MACH Alliance was providing a stack of solutions that were killing the retailers, we said this is not for us,” he tells Computer Weekly. “Simplicity will win. Simplicity is the ultimate form of innovation.”

His argument now is that the complexity of connecting 30 systems via middleware has become unsustainable. “You want a car that’s best for skiing, and a car that’s best for the beach, and a car that’s best for the city,” he says. “But if you only have a garage for one, you need a car that does all of those things.”

It is a vivid metaphor. But for European CIOs evaluating a long-term platform commitment, the trajectory matters. A supplier that moved forcefully from composable to integrated could, in different macroeconomic conditions, move again.

Heather Hershey, research director for worldwide digital commerce at IDC, sees a pattern here. “The pendulum always swings back,” she says. “During Covid, composable commerce was the dominant model, fuelled by cheap capital. When interest rates rose and profitability started to matter again, the integrated suite gained ground fast. It could just as easily swing the other way.”

The direction VTEX is now heading, in other words, reflects a moment as much as a conviction. What that means for customers that commit to the platform on that basis is a question worth asking before signing. It is a question that becomes more pressing when you look more closely at the AI claims that sit at the heart of VTEX’s current pitch.

AI reality check

The AI Workspace is the centrepiece of VTEX’s current proposition. Alexandre Gusmao, VTEX’s product director, is careful to qualify Gomide’s 100-to-20 figure. “We’re still in very early stages,” he says. “We have yet to see how much impact the AI Workspace will bring in terms of optimisation.”

What he describes is agents surfacing recommendations, flagging poor product descriptions and identifying promotional opportunities based on inventory projections, rather than autonomous execution. Useful, certainly. Transformative in headcount terms? Not yet.

We’re still in very early stages. We have yet to see how much impact the AI Workspace will bring in terms of optimisation

Hershey puts the broader AI claims in a context that European IT leaders will recognise from their own supplier conversations. Most of what the industry currently calls agentic commerce, she argues, is not agentic in any meaningful technical sense. Real agentic AI has genuine autonomy: the system identifies the problem, loops through possible solutions, selects the best answer and executes, with or without human intervention, depending on the guardrails in place.

“The AI is prompting the human,” she says. “The human is not prompting the AI.” What most platforms are currently shipping is something considerably more modest: an LLM interface layered over existing functionality. “Sometimes vendors will just take an API connection to an LLM [large language model] and build a wrapper around it and stick it on top of their existing features,” she says. “That is an agent. But it is not agentic AI.”

Her assessment of the 100-to-20 headcount claim applies beyond VTEX: “It is noise, but not signal. It is smoke, but no fire.” Workflows still need monitoring, customer escalations still need human resolution and catalogue content generated by AI still needs checking. The efficiency gains from well-implemented AI tooling are real, but the organisational transformation implied by Gomide’s figures is not something VTEX is currently able to demonstrate with hard data.

European dimension

VTEX’s European client base is growing. Gomide confirms that subscription revenue growth in Europe is running at triple digits, declining to give a specific range. The most concrete European case is OBI, the German DIY retailer, which replaced a more than 10-year-old e-commerce platform with VTEX, integrated its 349 stores across Germany and Austria, and launched marketplace capabilities for third-party sellers.

Tim Engler, senior vice-president for group-wide IT at OBI, describes the most tangible result as a significant shortening of development and deployment cycles, the kind of operational agility a decade-old monolithic platform cannot provide.

Gokul Nair, global CIO at KitchenAid/Whirlpool, describes consolidating 23 separate market websites onto a single platform built around a 90% global core with 10% local variation, delivering improvements in uptime, page load times and fraud protection.

These are concrete outcomes. But Hershey raises a structural point that reframes how to read them. For European retailers that already operate mature best-of-breed stacks, the case for replacing everything with an integrated suite is considerably weaker than for a retailer genuinely trying to escape a legacy monolith.

“If you already have a CRM [customer relationship management], a PIM [product information management], an OMS [order management system] that outperforms what a commerce suite offers natively, why would you replace them?” Hershey asks. “Particularly if the suite is doing a less good job than those individual solutions.” The integrated suite makes most sense, she argues, for companies that lack those capabilities or are starting from a genuinely outdated base.

The regulatory environment compounds this. European retailers face complexity that neither Latin American nor American platforms are built around by default: not just General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), but the individual regulatory requirements of each EU member state, layered for any retailer operating across multiple markets.

Hershey notes that platforms originating in Europe tend to have a head start on this natively. VTEX’s strength, she says, lies in its developer tooling and extensibility. A competent implementation partner can build out the required compliance flows. But that is a different proposition from having it available out of the box, and it adds cost and complexity to any migration.

One of VTEX Day’s more forward-looking announcements illustrates this European constraint directly. The integration with Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, allowing purchases to be completed within Google AI Mode without visiting a retailer’s website, is currently limited to the US.

Gusmao won’t speculate on European timelines. Hershey is sceptical that a meaningful European roll-out is near, pointing to the Digital Markets Act, Digital Services Act and AI Act as frameworks designed specifically to constrain this kind of development. “The chances of that happening are not as robust as one might assume,” she says.

Takeaway for European CIOs

The questions VTEX is raising are relevant, even if the answers are not always what the keynote implied. The pressure to simplify fragmented commerce infrastructure is real, the cost of middleware-heavy architectures is measurable, and the shift in customer behaviour towards conversational and AI-mediated discovery is happening regardless of which platform a retailer runs.

VTEX’s CX Platform addresses a genuine operational problem. Gusmao says the platform resolves around 90% of customer service enquiries without human intervention, reducing call centre traffic by 80% to 85% in live deployments. It works across email, web chat and Instagram, as well as WhatsApp.

The more useful frame for a European CIO, however, may be less about VTEX specifically and more about the capabilities it represents. An embedded OMS with native inventory management across markets, a conversational customer service layer that reduces operational overhead, AI-assisted catalogue management for large stock counts – these are features worth evaluating across the market, not exclusively through a single supplier lens.

Hershey’s advice is straightforward: choose based on your business model, your existing systems and your go-to-market requirements. “Don’t make your decisions based on FUD [fear, uncertainty and doubt] and FOMO [fear of missing out] alone,” she says. A platform that cannot integrate cleanly with a legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) or warehouse management system creates new technical debt in place of the old kind.

Bold claims of survival in a consolidating market

The market for enterprise commerce platforms is consolidating. Of the 42 commerce platforms that existed when VTEX was founded in 2000, Gomide counts six serious enterprise players remaining, with two already for sale by his account.

“I believe it’ll boil down to three,” he says. Salesforce, he is certain, will be one of them.

Shopify is a candidate, but faces a fundamental choice: “If they move into enterprise software, they will be formidable. But that means giving up their payments business, and the market will not reward them for that.”

Adobe, he says, has the ingredients, but faces a race against time: “If they manage to transform themselves before AI makes them irrelevant, they will be a serious player.”

VTEX, in his telling, will be the third survivor. It is an expansive vision for a platform that currently ranks sixth in the global enterprise ecommerce software market, according to Apps Run The World, with nearly two-thirds of its customers based in Brazil.

What European CIOs need to evaluate is not whether the consolidation narrative is compelling, but whether the specific platform advancing that narrative is the right fit for their operational environment, their regulatory obligations and the systems they cannot simply replace.

Gomide may well be right about where the market is heading. The distance between that destination and where VTEX currently stands in Europe is part of what makes the journey worth watching.