Elastic Path is the API-first, AI-ready commerce platform for brands with complex requirements: large catalogs, multi-tier pricing, and multiple brands and markets. Manufacturers, distributors, and retailers run account hierarchies, quoting, and negotiated pricing natively, not through bolt-on apps and workarounds.

Darin Lynch thinks most B2B companies measure commerce in the wrong place, and after listening to his conversation with Vinny O’Brien from Shoptoberfest, I mostly agree. Darin has run Irish Titan for 22 years, which puts him through more platform cycles than most people now selling agentic commerce.

Vinny opened with a number he says hasn’t moved in twenty years. By his count, eCommerce conversion has sat around 3% the whole time. Darin’s answer was that for manufacturers and distributors, a lot of the buying never touches the commerce platform’s checkout. Orders come in through punch out or go straight into the ERP, and more of them will start inside AI agents.

He splits agentic commerce into data enrichment, discovery and checkout, and wants each strand measured on its own. I’m with him on the diagnosis and less sure about the fix, because measuring whether your products are being found in an LLM is mostly done today with tools sold by the same companies offering to improve that visibility. I haven’t seen those numbers audited.

Darin also talked about pace. The industry has changed dramatically every three to five years for as long as he’s been in it, and Irish Titan has changed on a similar cycle. What’s different now is how much is moving at once. His clients are already dealing with tariffs and supply chains, and they want partners who can help with the agentic part on top of that.

He thinks partners need some humility about what they don’t know, along with enough confidence in their own experience to still offer a point of view. Most of the agentic pitches I’ve sat through this year have plenty of the confidence and very little of the humility.

Darin is a Shopware agency partner, so weigh his praise for the platform with that in mind. But he made an argument about timing that applies well beyond Shopware. When COVID hit, merchants had a short window to get online properly, and many of them chose platforms already established in the US over a newer arrival. In his view Shopware’s US entry came slightly too late for that wave, and it has spent the years since building back through its team and partner network.

I can see agentic commerce following the same pattern. Merchants who feel rushed tend to pick whoever is already in their stack, which favors the big platforms and payment networks over the agent-native startups raising money right now, even the ones with a better product.

If you want to hear an agency and a brand answer these questions together, Irish Titan is presenting with ElleVet at Agentic Island, Shopware’s virtual summit on agentic commerce, on October 29.

Register here for the Summit: https://streamyard.com/watch/W5CF8XC8xJCs

What I still can’t answer is who measures the strands Darin describes. If the agency and the AI company each report their own version of discovery, which number does the CFO believe?