B2B COMMERCE & AI AGENTS: COMPETE ON SERVICE, NOT PRICE | Intershop - INTERSHOP COMMUNICATIONS AG

We will continue our next keynote in English and global competition is tougher than ever and matching low prices from overseas suppliers is often a race to the bottom for western manufacturers. So how do you win when you can't be the cheapest? We would like to answer that question because you become the easiest to do business with with the best service that's the key that's what says uwe stefan fricke from intershop and he will show us how b2b commerce and ai agents can turn service into your ultimate competitive edge reducing friction and securing long term loyalty. Please welcome Uwe Stephan Fricke. Thank you very much. Hello, everybody. How do you feel? Are you okay? Are you so happy with the event so far? For me, it's after a long time, I would say five or six years, a return to this show. And for me, I see a lot of improvements. I also see a lot conversations about AI and how the industry is striving to. I would like to use the next 20 minutes in order to explain our views how B2B commerce will involve in a time where competition is rising, where we have a lot of insecurity in the economic landscape. And that's why I was calling the presentation, if you can't out-price them, and them means all the competition. And one of the answers is out-serving, yeah? And this is not a surprise. And what we see is that, in general, the world is getting harder for everyone in the field, especially for Western European manufacturers. We see not only macroeconomic problems, we also see a lot of competition arising. So there are some facts that companies cannot really control on their own. One thing is that within the European Union or Western Europe, the GDPR growth are only by 1.6%. All the European companies are in itself have a big disadvantage when it comes to energy costs. And we also see, and this is something that is also stated by the European Union and by Brussels, that the burden that we have on the bureaucratical side are so high that this is leading into an economic and also competitive disadvantage. These are fields that companies cannot really control. But companies have the chance to use their own company elements to improve the situation. There is one specific thing which comes on top, which makes the situation for manufacturers and wholesalers a little bit more complicated nowadays. That is, there is much more competition coming from Asia. If you take only three stats here, and this is coming also from the European Union, we see that especially Chinese industries and Chinese companies are entering into high technology spaces like robotic, into AI, into car manufacturing, where a lot of competency is needed. and on the other side, where you have a lot of complexity. On the other hand, we see that China itself is counting for more than 14% of the worldwide trade, and we also see that the surplus with the EU is, at the moment, in 2025, €360 billion. So, what does it mean? If you see this kind of environment, there are only a few things that a company can do. If you know from the electricity prices you cannot outbeat them, if you know that from the labor costs you can't do this, you need to concentrate on your own ways and your own company and all the levers that you have. So meaning competing via price, maybe it's an idea, but it's not the ideal way to do. Is it maybe best or better customer business? Of course, all the relationship that you have as a manufacturer with your wholesalers, with your customers, you can improve. And what does it mean? At the end, it's all about meeting the requirements of your customers. So, if you see that, revenue growth for a company is the ultimate goal. If you can't achieve that because you can only grow in major industries by 5%, maybe 7%, then you need to go on the productivity area. You need to optimize your processes, your factories, whatever you have. At the same time, you needto work on customer retention, and that all improves your competitiveness. But there is one element that comes on top. Here in Western Europe, we are also short and educated people. So that means if you can't hire more people to get the jobs done, you need to automate your processes. I think this is fully understood by everyone. But when it comes to e-commerce and serving your clients in the right way, and probably at least 50% of the audience have studied economics, if you are talking about a manufacturer and a wholesale organization, what is important? You as an organization need to build an assortment. You need to find prices. Everything is related to that in a historical way. You need a catalogue, you need product data sheets, you need sales reps that communicate complex products, and you need also technical expertise. All that needs to be transferred also in the electronic way and in the electronics world, and that is you need to have search and recommendation engines included. You have to have a visual product finder, even for complex products. You need to have co-pilots for buyers so that you can use your normal personal and individual language to address a specific topic and a company and the prods should give you the right products back. And that is needed 24 hours, 7 days a week. So if you see that and if you are coming back maybe to a very concrete situation, if you're a manufacturer of a big machine and this machine is very important to run the production line, then it's absolutely valid that you have to serve zero outage. So, for instance, there is a problem and someone, a human, is reaching out and saying, oh, I need a spare part. The big question here is, what is the right spare part? What is the price? What is The SLA behind? When can I deliver? Do I have it on stock? What is next client that can do that? And that automatically, in the historic way and world, leads to manual order entry. Someone needs to work on it, needs to make that into a system. Maybe we deliver the wrong part, and that needs another manual rework. Or sales is answering questions where you have high-educated people doing standard jobs again and again. And that is really cost, in a sense. And this is cost that you need have to serve in order to outspeed the competition that has an advantage in the production cost world. The good answer and the good thing is AI is probably changing the entire situation here. And we see AI not only as a chatbot, for us AI is part of an operating model. That means not only experimenting with AI as a technology, integrating AI into all the standard processes that you see in the e-commerce world. I have a few information for you guys. So, how is AI adopting in the industries? And there is one thing that you could see. Since 2024, people said, okay, we need to implement, we needs to work on something. that is the experimental phase and this was also continuing in 2025 where we see more and more companies are getting on the train trying to adopt trying to learn this is what we call the experimental phase what is also important is only a few companies had no plan to really go into the AI world and do something more and the others are planning to do that so if you take 52% 43% so it's not a secret anymore everyone is talking about AI everyone is trying to use AI no one is really knowing how to do it because mostly they are forgetting a few things that are important but this is something that I wanted to make clear to the audience here AI and the genetic e-commerce go along. Both things belong to each other and that means we have the aim to have a zero-click result for specific products that you need to have in the B2B or B2C world and we also need to include intent based solutions and personalization and all these kind of things you will find in the next few months months automatically I would say in at least every 30% of e-commerce solutions. The other point is whatever you do you need a platform that is future proof from the architecture that understands large language models, small language models, that is also working with agents and more important is composable from the architecture so that you have the freedom to include whatever you want from the technology point of view now and in the future and this is what we see AI is not an experiment anymore AI is first of all a way to survive in the competition via price and if we see that what is our answer to that we have built a platform that is supporting two things and we need to distinguish on the left side we have co-pilots and this is also for the people that really need to that or at the beginning of the journey co- pilots assist people so what you find here is chatbot capabilities connected with data that give feedback to questions that got answered that got raised by people within the organization or from the customer side to improve their daily work on the right side we have also agents and this is so to say the next level where agents help to execute standard jobs in an automated way to provide better results faster results and that can go from product content definition product content production from localization support meaning translating our RFP documents data sheets, whatever, knowledge agents, also to combine the know-how that you have. And we were speaking about the advisory function a few slides before. That all comes together in the agent. But the most important thing is you need a core in between that gives you the context to that. Because if you have co-pilots and agents without the contextual and the context engine, everything what you do is only a chatbot. Because the engine itself also needs to do which spare part is relevant for which customer, which price was defined, where is the next place where this spare part can be delivered. And all that is combined into the commerce core, and this helps you to get even faster in the future with your business. If you are considering all of these elements, there is the next evolution to that. At the moment, I would say only 10 to 15% of the companies worldwide are working on that layer. But the next evolution boundary is coming across, and that is agentic commerce. So that means the other models that I described, people were searching for products. People were starting a conversation with your customer. Here in the agentic world, machines will answer questions to your organization and also machines will answer back to the organizations on behalf of your company. And that's why a lot of new standards came up, mostly developed by OpenAI or by Google or by Anthropic. I don't want to go into detail about all of these standards the model behind is in the future e-commerce applications and organizations are talking via this kind of specific standards the good answer news here is so we are prepared for that because we are working with all of this tech players together and on the other side we also keep the eyes open and we're also representing the business side to use these technologies wisely and also to have the benefits included for the merchants and the B2B clients. And if you see that, and I was only giving you a first glimpse of where we are at this moment with AI, agentic commerce, there are one thing and two things that are very important. And maybe I start this slide from the right side, not from the left side. What we identified with all of our projects that we did in the last years, we saw there is one success guarantee in it. And that is, don't start a project only because you want to do AI. You should identify a problem first. You should have an owner that is working on that. And you should always define a KPI that you are working against. If you don't do this, most of these initiatives will only be a pilot, will never make it in production. And this is what we see. This is where we bring our expertise to, where we have our colleagues and partners that are helping to identify that. And I think this is also the new way how e-commerce vendors like Intershop need to interact with potential customers and with the customers that we have as an installed base. Because nowadays it's more important to have partnerships on eye level. So meaning talking client, vendor, technology vendor plus implementation partner exactly about these topics. And that is also going along with the change management behind. If you have KPIs defined, if you have a plan, you need to think on the adoption. Nothing is more important and a better proof point than adoption. And that ist classic project management, even in the time of AI. If you want to make an AI initiative a success, concentrate on project management and also manage to get there. And there is another layer, and this is more where we are on the middle pillar here. This is security, and it's also sovereignty. What we also see in Europe is there is a tendency that companies in Europe also remember that we are a very attractive market, and we should also use our rights and our power to have at least some initiatives to stay independent from highly dominated U.S.-American hyperscaler business as well as from some new rising stars from Asia. That's why serenity is a topic and we as a company invest heavily also in exactly this kind of areas because European companies should have the chance to use an alternative that is European-based. And we as a company, we are 100% European by financial structure as well as by operational model. And we also work closely together with all the analysts because analysts are good in order to structure problems. And this is what we do. And since a decade and even longer, we have really good ratings about B2B capabilities and what we do and which is our solely job to do is to bring the best ideas together, put that into our standard B2D functionalities and serve the market with solution that is at the end nearly 100% on the feature completeness list. This is the promise that we made and don't take our words for that, maybe to see what companies could achieve if they are going with good project management, if they're building up portals for spare parts and that can give you a tremendous boost in productivity when it comes to the interaction between your organization with your partners and your end customers. And what you see is adoption by working in a kind of structured approach where you have a manufacturer plus a distribution channel behind is it's not only about technology to onboard an organization technology-wise. It is really to bring the user to the point to use AI and applications. That also means it needs to serve a problem that the people have. But on the other side, it's also a huge boost for your organization to improve productivity. So it is a little bit of, let's say, high-level discussion, because if we would go into all the specific details, it could be a very boring conversation. But what I want to say and want to give back to you is, if you are in the situation as an organization that competition is very strong and you see cost deficits or, let's say, productivity deficits on your side, use AI, try to use your interaction and your relationship to your end customers, to your partners, and optimize that. Because if you can't be the cheapest in the price, you need to find better ways to interact with your customers and clients. Service has been always a good alternative because companies go for uptime, they are going for SLAs, they are also taking into account that companies that are reliable can also have higher price on the product side. Do not only concentrate on efficiency in the production, use your time also to look very concrete in the relationships that you have, all the touch points to your end customers, to your outer world, meaning repair shops. portals knowledge transfer and this is my recommendation to you all all of you if you have specific questions on that I'm happy to support I will be also there in the speaker launch for further questions there are also a few colleagues of mine around so happy to further discuss this thank you very much Thanks for watching!