I want to say something that might be unpopular in a space where everyone is racing to announce their AI strategy.
Most AI in ecommerce right now is theatre.
Not fraud. Not entirely useless. Theatre — designed to be seen, to signal modernity, to reassure investors and press that a company is keeping up. It performs the idea of AI without delivering the substance of it.
What the theatre looks like
You’ve seen it. A major retailer announces an “AI-powered shopping assistant.” You click on it. It answers three questions about returns and then routes you to a human. A marketplace launches “AI recommendations.” They surface the same brands you bought last month and two sponsored products. A fashion platform introduces “AI styling.” It’s a quiz with a dropdown menu.
None of this is nothing. But none of it is transformation either.
The tells are consistent. The AI is always a layer on top of something that already existed. A chatbot on top of an FAQ database. A recommendation widget on top of a purchase history table. A search enhancement on top of a keyword index. Remove the AI and the platform still functions. That’s the test. If the AI is decoration — and in most cases it is — the platform underneath it hasn’t changed at all.
Why it happens
The honest answer is incentive structure.
Rebuilding a platform from first principles for AI is expensive, slow, and carries real risk. It disrupts existing revenue streams. It requires engineering decisions that are difficult to reverse. It means temporarily degrading the experience while the new architecture matures.
Adding an AI layer to an existing platform is fast, cheap, and visible. It generates press coverage. It satisfies the board. It checks the box. And it delivers just enough improvement to the user experience that no one can definitively say it doesn’t work.
The result is an industry full of AI announcements and a shopping experience that is, for most people, barely different from five years ago.
What genuine AI in ecommerce actually requires
For AI to genuinely transform ecommerce — not improve it at the margins, but change what it fundamentally is — it needs to be the foundation, not the feature.
That means natural language as the primary interface, not a supplement to keyword search. It means discovery driven by intent rather than browsing history. It means recommendations that start from what you actually need rather than what you last bought. It means a relationship between the shopper and the platform that is collaborative rather than transactional.
None of this is achievable by bolting AI onto architecture that was designed for a different era. It requires building differently from the start. That’s slower. It’s also the only way to do it properly.
Where ShopWithMore fits in this
I’ll be direct: ShopWithMore V1 is not the AI-native experience yet. It’s a deliberately lean, fast, affiliate-driven platform — proof of concept, built to establish the foundation and demonstrate the model works.
The AI layer comes in V2. Conversational discovery. Intent-driven search. The full vision. We’re building toward it with the infrastructure that makes it real rather than cosmetic.
What I can say now is this: we are not going to build theatre. When the AI experience launches on ShopWithMore, it will be structural — not a chatbot on top of a database, but a platform where the intelligence is the architecture.
The ecommerce industry has plenty of AI announcements. It has very few AI-native platforms.
That gap is where we’re building.
What do you think the most overhyped AI feature in ecommerce is right now? Genuinely curious what you’re seeing.
Justin Hodnett — Founder, ShopWithMore
shopwithmore.co.uk
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