The retail industry is a giant conglomerate made of many moving parts and departments, all needing to cooperate to create a seamless shopping experience for the buyer.

This requires retail companies to be especially vigilant regarding picking the best solutions and partners to power business and ensure smooth operations. With commercetools GmbH, companies can pick and choose the components needed to build an outstanding shopping and buying experience, all on a cloud-native platform.

“We think that being API-first and being cloud-native is the best foundation for gen AI or any sort of AI/ML use cases because we expose all the data, hence why we use MongoDB as well, there’s nothing proprietary or lockdown or a black box,” said Michael Scholz (pictured), vice president of product and customer marketing at commercetools. “We think we are at a good point from a company perspective to really do this well because we are exposed to everything.”

Scholz spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and John Furrier at the “Supercloud 5: The Battle for AI Supremacy” event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the significance of being API-first and cloud-native, the transformative influence of CodeWhisperer and generative artificial intelligence and how MongoDB Inc. powers commercetools’ platform.

The next generation of coding

Amazon has released CodeWhisperer, an AI-powered productivity tool that provides users with code recommendations in real-time. This is enabling a new generation of low and no-code DevOps, freeing up time and resources to focus on other important areas of development.

“The benefit that we have is all our API documentation is exposed. It’s beautifully written, it’s technical, but you have everything open-sourced, it’s very transparent,” Scholz said. “We’re still early in training these models. You have all these large language models out there, it’s almost like commercialized in the future, so I think you got to really figure out who’s the vendor that you want to go to market with.”

Commercetools follows a broader hybrid, multi-cloud strategy. The solution is available on some marketplaces and will be available on other marketplaces in the future, eventually unlocking the entire AWS ecosystem.

“Whether it’s certain vision APIs, big data aspects, we unlock all of that. Again, thanks to our platform and MongoDB, because all the data is there, it’s not buried or in a black box somewhere in a monolithic legacy platform, all the data is exposed via our APIs. So, that effectively can be pumped into any sort of AWS ecosystem partner, and they can use that data.”

MongoDB, a partner of commercetools, underpins everything it does, Scholz said. MongoDB acts as the data layer powering the entire platform, making everything possible.

“In the bare bone sense, we are a transactional engine, capturing every single digital and physical transaction for our customers. It’s important to use products like Search and Vector to figure out how we can better serve our customers so they can serve their customers better,” Scholz said. “Everything around the AI extensions, real-time data, being able to edit, capture, translate, enrich data and then serve that up back to our customers, is super important.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the “Supercloud 5: The Battle for AI Supremacy” event:

Photo: SiliconANGLE