When AI Became Real in Commerce — and Why Experience Still Won

The Gist

• Commerce is becoming experiential, agentic and ambient. Justin Racine’s work tracks how AI is reshaping buying behaviors — not just improving checkout flows, but redefining how consumers discover, decide and delegate purchases.
• AI is both the engine and the interface. Across his CMSWire contributions, Racine explores AI as infrastructure and as a front-stage participant in commerce, from conversational CX to agent-driven shopping.
• Human experience still anchors digital commerce. Even as automation accelerates, Racine consistently grounds emerging tech in emotion, culture and real-world behavior.

Justin Racine has spent the past four years translating the fast-moving worlds of commerce, customer experience and AI into insights leaders can actually use. As principal commerce strategy at Perficient, he works at the intersection of technology platforms, brand ambition and consumer behavior — a vantage point that consistently shows up in his CMSWire contributions.

In 2025, Racine’s writing stood out for its ability to make sense of acceleration. While AI dominated headlines, his work focused less on novelty and more on consequence: how buying habits are changing, how brands must respond and how experience — not efficiency alone — will determine who wins.

Editor’s note: Justin Racine is a four-time CMSWire Contributor of the Year. His 2025 work continued a defining pattern — connecting emerging technology to lived experience, cultural moments and the emotional drivers that shape commerce.

Table of Contents

• A Trusted Lens on Commerce, AI and What’s Actually Working
• Why 2025 Marked the Shift From AI Buzz to AI Reality in Commerce
• Why Data, Voice and Human Judgment Still Matter in an AI-Driven Commerce World
• Human Connection as the Constant — and Why Racine Keeps Going Back to the Field

A Trusted Lens on Commerce, AI and What’s Actually Working

Part of why Justin Racine’s voice continues to resonate with CMSWire readers is consistency — not just in output, but in perspective. Year after year, his work reflects what brands are actually wrestling with in the field: rapid change, competing priorities and the growing pressure to understand how AI is reshaping buying behavior in real time.

Racine’s vantage point comes from listening closely to brands navigating commerce transformation from the inside. As I note, Racine acts as a filter — absorbing what retailers, manufacturers and commerce leaders are seeing on the ground, then stepping back to make sense of it. His writing doesn’t chase speed for speed’s sake; it creates space to understand what’s changing, what’s sticking and what’s still unresolved.

That role as translator is especially valuable in a year defined by acceleration. In 2025, the intersection of digital experience platforms, AI and commerce became impossible to ignore. Racine’s work helped leaders pause long enough to ask better questions: Where is AI actually helping? Where is it complicating decision-making? And how do brands adapt without losing sight of the customer?

It’s also why CMSWire remains his go-to source — and why his work continues to stand out within it. Racine doesn’t write from a distance. He writes from the middle of the conversation, bringing insights from conferences, client discussions and day-to-day brand challenges back to a community of leaders trying to keep up without losing their footing.

Related Article: What the ManningCast Teaches Us About Conversational CX

Why 2025 Marked the Shift From AI Buzz to AI Reality in Commerce

From Racine’s vantage point, 2025 stands out as the year AI stopped being abstract and started becoming operational. While artificial intelligence has existed for decades, the past 12 to 24 months pushed it into the mainstream — and this year, brands finally began putting it to work in tangible ways.

Rather than remaining a consumer-facing novelty, AI increasingly showed up inside organizations. Brands began using it to improve product information, streamline operational tasks, predict trends and support personalization efforts across commerce experiences. “This year it’s been much more tangible,” Racine explains, as companies moved from experimentation to hands-on execution.

He likens the moment to the early days of e-commerce — a “.com boom 2.0.” Just as brands once realized they needed a website to compete, they are now confronting the reality that AI is no longer optional. Consumers are already using these tools, and organizations are under pressure to figure out how AI fits into their roadmaps in practical, scalable ways.

That transition has not been seamless. Racine notes that many brands are still grappling with how to integrate AI meaningfully into their existing operations. While the potential is enormous, turning AI into something that actually works inside a complex organization remains a challenge — and this moment represents only the first wave of what will be a much longer transformation.

At the same time, Racine sees AI influencing commerce in two distinct ways. In some cases, it facilitates the existing playbook — improving product descriptions, personalization and checkout experiences behind the scenes. In others, AI becomes the playbook itself, with agentic tools and conversational commerce beginning to reshape how buying decisions happen.

Looking ahead, Racine expects these models to converge. Over the next few years, traditional browsing-based commerce will increasingly blend with agent-driven experiences, where AI understands individual preferences and acts on behalf of consumers. For brands, the imperative is not to flip the switch overnight, but to start integrating AI into current experiences now — building comfort, gathering data and learning when the moment is right to evolve more dramatically.

Underlying all of this, Racine points to a fundamental constraint: data. No matter how advanced the tools become, AI is only as effective as the information it consumes. Without clean, structured and trustworthy data, even the most ambitious agentic or generative commerce strategies will fail to deliver.

Why Data, Voice and Human Judgment Still Matter in an AI-Driven Commerce World

For all the progress brands made with AI in 2025, Racine remains clear-eyed about its limits. Tools can generate content instantly, but speed alone does not equal confidence — especially when decisions need to hold up in the real world.

As Racine and CMSWire’s editorial team have both seen, AI can produce something that looks right in seconds. The harder question comes afterward: can you defend it? When customers, stakeholders or teams ask why a particular path was chosen, “the bot told me to” is not an answer that holds weight.

That realization has shaped how Racine thinks about AI’s role inside organizations. Rather than replacing judgment, he views AI as a powerful assistant — an intern that can surface patterns, summarize history and accelerate thinking, but not substitute for experience or accountability. When AI is grounded in trusted data and authentic brand voice, it becomes an amplifier rather than a liability.

This balance between automation and authorship mirrors Racine’s own approach to writing. Across his CMSWire contributions, one trait stands out consistently: voice. His work draws from lived experience — whether that’s watching the ManningCast, visiting Red Lobster, talking cars in a parking lot or observing how people actually behave when they shop. Those moments become lenses for understanding larger shifts in commerce and customer experience.

Racine is deliberate about that process. If he doesn’t feel inspired by a topic, he won’t write it. Inspiration, for him, comes from life — not trend decks. That grounding allows him to translate complex, fast-moving technologies into stories people recognize and trust, making AI-driven change feel less abstract and more human.

That human-first mindset also underpins his caution about where the industry is headed. Racine worries about a future where AI-generated content feeds more AI systems, stripping creativity and originality from the ecosystem. “AI doesn’t hang out outside a 7-Eleven talking about cars,” he notes. It doesn’t experience culture. It doesn’t feel friction.

The opportunity, he believes, lies in collaboration. Humans bring context, emotion and lived experience; AI brings scale, speed and synthesis. When those roles are respected — not confused — brands can use AI to enhance storytelling, sharpen insight and deepen connection, rather than flattening it.

Justin Racine’s 2025 CMSWire Contributions

These articles reflect the themes, trends and CX principles that defined Justin Racine’s CMSWire work in 2025.

Human Connection as the Constant — and Why Racine Keeps Going Back to the Field

For all the tools reshaping commerce, Racine comes back to one belief that hasn’t changed: humans still want to connect with humans. AI can accelerate work, surface insights and improve efficiency, but it cannot replace critical thinking, lived experience or emotional understanding.

Racine is optimistic about AI’s potential — cautiously so — when it is used as a tool rather than a substitute. In his view, technology works best when it helps people communicate better, understand themselves more clearly and collaborate more effectively. The risk comes when organizations lean too heavily on automation at the expense of judgment, creativity and firsthand experience.

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That philosophy explains why Racine continues to prioritize being in the field. Each year, his CMSWire coverage begins with boots-on-the-ground reporting from NRF, where conversations on the show floor, keynote insights and real-time observations shape his perspective on where retail and commerce are actually headed. Those moments — not roadmaps alone — inform his analysis.

It’s also why his writing consistently resonates. Racine didn’t set out to become a four-time CMSWire Contributor of the Year. His first article appeared in early 2021 after a cold outreach to the editorial team. What followed was a steady rhythm of insight driven by curiosity, inspiration and a belief that experience — both customer and human — still has the power to shape outcomes.

At its core, Racine’s work reflects a simple idea: products and brands matter because of how they make people feel. When commerce creates moments of happiness, confidence or fulfillment, it does more than convert — it connects. That belief continues to guide his writing, his strategy work and his contributions to CMSWire as the industry moves into its next phase.