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I sat down with Lennart Stevens to talk about Salesforce's Storefront Next, and I came away with a few takeaways worth chewing on.

For years, the knock on Salesforce Commerce Cloud was that standing up a storefront felt like a construction project. You needed a systems integrator, a long timeline, and a high tolerance for pain. Storefront Next goes straight at that. Click-based setup in Business Manager, a stack built on React, Shadcn, and Tailwind, an upgraded CLI, and a library of reusable skills. None of it is glamorous. All of it matters. Salesforce is trying to get its developer experience into the neighborhood of what Shopify made people expect a decade ago. They're late. But late and credible beats never, and running it headless on Managed Runtime keeps the existing data (catalogs, prices, promotions) intact while modernizing the surface. That's the right way to do it. You don't ask a billion-dollar brand to rip out its catalog.

Everyone is shipping loud AI right now. Chatbots that pop up, copilots that narrate, demos that look incredible on a conference stage, and then get quietly switched off in production. Storefront Next has a feature called product readiness scores that just flags when a merchandiser is missing critical product info. No fanfare. It does a boring job that costs real money when it goes undone. That's the AI I actually believe in for commerce. Not the agent that writes your product copy with a flourish, but the one that catches the SKU with no image before it tanks your conversion rate. Keep building in that direction, and you earn trust faster than the vendors shouting about agents.

The Real Bet Is Agentic Channels, And It's Still a Bet

Agent shopper, agentic merchandising, support for UCP as a channel-selling standard. This is Salesforce's positioning for a world where shopping doesn't happen on your storefront at all. It happens through an agent talking to your SCAPI layer. I think that world is coming. I don't think anyone knows the timeline, the economics, or who owns the customer relationship when an agent does the buying. Building the pipes now is smart. But let's be honest: standardizing on UCP and shipping agent tooling is laying track before we know where the train goes. Reasonable risk for a platform this size. For a smaller brand, I'd watch before I bet my roadmap on it.

So: a genuine developer-experience upgrade, one genuinely smart AI idea, and a forward bet that's more interesting than it is proven. The thing I'll keep watching is whether those turnkey industry templates convert the way they claim, because "high-converting out of the box" is a promise every platform makes, and almost none keep.