The Five Questions Every Commerce Leader Should Ask After 2025
Commerce in 2025 moved fast. Organizations expanded digital channels, modernized legacy systems, and pushed the boundaries of customer experience across retail, manufacturing, and beverage. But it was also a year defined by trade-offs, where leaders were constantly balancing modernization with cost control, searching for improvements that delivered real impact without unnecessary disruption.
As 2026 approaches, the companies gaining the most momentum aren’t just layering on new tools. They’re stepping back and asking deeper questions about the architecture, experiences, data, and intelligence that will shape the next phase of digital commerce.
Below are the five questions that matter most as you build your roadmap for the year ahead…
1. Is our commerce architecture ready for what the business needs next?
The push toward modular, adaptable commerce stacks accelerated throughout 2025, and for good reason. Many organizations discovered that rigid, all-in-one platforms simply couldn’t keep pace with the growing number of digital touchpoints customers expect. Flexibility became more than a technical preference, transforming into the foundation for business agility.
Moving into 2026, this is the moment to look closely at how well your commerce architecture supports rapid change. Can your teams roll out new experiences quickly? Do integrations hold up under pressure, or do small changes cause ripple effects everywhere else? And perhaps most importantly: does your current environment still require heavy customizations that limit your pace of innovation?
Even if you’re not planning a full-scale transformation, strengthening the core now through incremental modernization will reduce technical debt, increase stability, and give you room to grow.
Key consideration: Is your architecture capable of evolving continuously, without forcing a re-platform every few years?
2. Are our customer experiences keeping up with rising expectations?
If 2025 made anything clear, it’s that customer expectations are rising across every industry. Buyers want faster checkout flows, real-time visibility into inventory, and seamless transitions between channels. They expect reorders to be simple, pricing to be consistent, and issues to be resolved quickly, whether through digital tools or in-store teams.
As you move into 2026, it’s worth taking a critical look at the journeys your customers experience today. Where do they still encounter friction? Are online and in-store experiences pulling from the same source of truth? Do product data, pricing, and inventory sync reliably? And when problems arise, how quickly can your systems and staff respond?
A customer doesn’t measure you against direct competitors anymore; they measure you against the best experience they had anywhere. Your job is to close that gap.
Key consideration: Are your customer journeys seamless enough to match what buyers now expect as the norm?
3. Is our data connected well enough to operate efficiently?
Many organizations spent 2025 improving customer-facing experiences, only to realize that their underlying data still held them back. Fragmented product information, inconsistent order histories, and misaligned inventory data made operations harder than they needed to be and added unnecessary manual work for teams already stretched thin.
In 2026, operational efficiency will sit alongside revenue growth as a top priority. This is the year to step back and evaluate how well your systems communicate with one another. If your teams are spending valuable time correcting errors, reconciling data, or bridging gaps between disconnected systems, that’s a clear sign the data layer needs attention.
Connected data is not just about analytics. It’s about smooth operations: orders flowing cleanly through the system, promotions syncing reliably, and inventory reflecting reality everywhere customers see it.
Key consideration: Do you have a data foundation robust enough to support efficient, scalable commerce?
4. Do our payment and checkout experiences reflect how customers buy today?
Payment behavior changed rapidly in 2025, and customers now expect checkout experiences that are fast, flexible, and nearly invisible. For many organizations, however, payment infrastructure remains a hidden source of friction and a quiet contributor to abandoned carts.
As you plan for 2026, it’s worth examining the entire payment journey from your customer’s perspective. Is checkout as fast on mobile as it is on desktop? Are modern payment methods available and easy to use? Do your systems integrate cleanly with ERP and order management? And if you serve B2B buyers, do you support terms, stored cards, and recurring orders in a way that reduces effort rather than adding to it?
With solutions like Evenica’s e4Payment emerging inside the D365 Commerce ecosystem, many businesses are beginning to view payments as a strategic opportunity rather than a technical obligation — and they’re reaping the results.
Key consideration: Is your checkout experience enabling purchases, or quietly standing in the way?
5. Are we preparing for the next frontier: Agentic AI in commerce?
While many organizations spent the past year making progress with headless and composable architectures, a new question is emerging as we enter 2026: Are we ready for Agentic AI?
Agentic AI represents the next leap in commerce evolution—systems that don’t just respond to customer behavior, but actively drive it. Unlike traditional automation or chatbots, agentic systems operate with autonomy, learning continuously and coordinating tasks across the customer journey.
For organizations already on D365 Commerce, this future is closer than it appears. The foundation is already being laid through structured data, composable services, and Microsoft’s broad push toward multi-agent AI models.
Agentic AI will enable:
- Proactive resolution of common customer inquiries
- Intelligent product recommendations that update in real time
- Personalized interventions that reduce abandonment
- Automated workflows across fulfillment, pricing, and customer service
- Self-learning systems that improve outcomes without manual reconfiguration
The shift is subtle but profound: from human-led systems supported by AI, to human-led environments where AI agents handle the operational heavy lifting.
The question for 2026 is not whether agentic AI will shape the future of commerce but whether you’re laying the groundwork today.
Key consideration: Are you preparing for a world where commerce platforms don’t just enable the customer journey, but actively orchestrate it?
Looking ahead: 2026 will reward leaders who prioritize flexibility, connection, and intelligence
If 2025 was about exploring possibilities, 2026 will be about strengthening the core systems that make those possibilities achievable. The organizations that enter the year in the strongest position will be those that have invested in:
- Architectures that can evolve quickly
- Experiences that meet rising customer expectations
- Data layers that remove friction instead of creating it
- Payment systems that enable (not hinder) conversion
- And early foundations for agentic AI
At Evenica, we’re helping D365 Commerce customers evaluate their current ecosystems, strengthen operational foundations, modernize payments, and prepare for the next wave of innovation. If you’re shaping your 2026 roadmap and want clarity on the right next steps, we’re here to help.