AI Predictions: Insights from Leaders at Top Web Platforms and Tech Firms

At Americaneagle.com, we partner closely with many of the world’s leading web platforms and technology providers. These strong relationships allow us to connect with some of the industry’s most influential thought leaders and innovators. To help digital marketers, technology professionals, and other business leaders better prepare for the year ahead, we asked those experts to share their honest opinions on the biggest AI issues, challenges, and opportunities they see coming in the next 12 months. From agentic ecommerce to the unseen impacts on talent, explore the expert AI predictions below to go inside the minds of today’s top technology leaders.

Operations Evolve with Maturing AI Tools

AI is rapidly becoming foundational to core business operations, and nearly every expert agrees this trend will continue in the year ahead. As intelligent tools are woven deeper into the fabric of organizational workflows, the way teams collaborate, make decisions, and execute will fundamentally change. Tech leaders say the organizations that succeed in this new era will be those that intentionally evolve their processes to fully harness the transformative power of AI.

“This will be the year agents hit scale in production. Functions like sales, support, and engineering will be transformed by agents handling the work humans never wanted to do—research, drafting emails, writing unit tests—freeing people to focus on the highest-value work that creates meaningful improvements in customer experience. The companies generating ROI are looking well beyond ‘Where can we add AI?’ and asking, ‘Which workflows can AI actually do?’" – Jeanne Grosser, COO, Vercel

“We see a shift in how organizations integrate intelligence into their operations. Rather than relying on rigid, vendor-defined AI features that often force a business to adapt its processes to the software, enterprise leaders are prioritizing adaptable AI that conforms to their specific operational requirements. This approach enables the deployment of custom AI agents that work alongside human teams to manage complex, multi-actor workflows, such as automating content compliance reviews or predicting supply chain risks before they impact production. The result is a transition toward unified intelligence, where no-code tools provide a shared structure that empowers both IT and business teams to create, test, and deploy custom AI capabilities across their entire organization, instead of being limited to a fixed set of features pre-configured by their vendor.” – Bryan Cheung, CMO, Liferay

“AI is becoming less about isolated tools and more about how work actually gets done. For our customers, that means fewer manual steps, fewer handoffs between teams and systems, and faster movement from idea to execution. AI is increasingly helping marketers make decisions, validate changes, and act on insights in the moment, not days or weeks later.” – Dominik Pinter, CEO, Kentico

“The biggest marketing crisis won’t be AI misuse, it'll be AI overuse. The number of companies with fully AI-led processes nearly doubled last year, and the pursuit of high-volume output has proven that more content doesn’t equal better content. This “AI workslop”—generic, low-value messaging—dilutes brand identity and audience trust. Even personalized campaigns risk falling flat if AI is used without intent, treating people as data points rather than real customers. Marketing teams should be clear about what role AI plays in their workflows. For some, AI will handle mundane tasks like translation. For others, AI will serve as a starting point for creative development. The key is understanding where the machines should stop and where the humans should take over. Brands that fail to be disciplined on roles and responsibilities will spend more time undoing AI workslop than creating business impact.” – Elizabeth Maxson, CMO, Contentful

“AI will be less about experimentation and more about operational leverage. The most forward leaning CMOs will see AI fluency as a change management leadership discipline, rather than technology effort this year.  AI will also fundamentally change how customers are acquired, as discovery shifts from traditional search toward AI-driven answers and recommendations. The organizations that win are gearing their sites and marketing activations for Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), treating their website as a living system that learns, adapts, and compounds value over time. The biggest gains won’t come from automation alone, but from leaders redesigning how decisions get made.” – Guy Yalif, Chief Evangelist, Webflow

“AI will force enterprises to rethink how they and their content are discovered in the first place. For years, everyone optimized their sites for search engines, but now they’re confronting a future where AI platforms choose whose content gets included and who gets ignored. That puts pressure on brands to ensure their content is structured, trustworthy, and portable across platforms. In 2026, discoverability  won’t just be about how you rank – it will be about whether AI systems recognize you as a credible source at all.” – Brian Alvey, CTO, WordPress VIP

“Many enterprise leaders are underestimating how quickly AI agents are becoming decision-makers on behalf of buyers. The focus is often on using AI internally for efficiency, while far less attention is paid to the rapidly changing buyer journey. The first step of this evolution is that humans are beginning to use AI/LLMs instead of search engines. But that will quickly turn into agents doing the research and proactively bringing new solutions to the humans. This means companies need to be thinking about how to increase brand discoverability and sentiment in LLMs now. Leaders need to recognize that brand, content structure, and digital trust signals now influence not just people, but also machines that are increasingly shaping purchasing decisions.” – Darcy Kurtz, CMO, WP Engine

Reshaping Ecommerce and the Buyer’s Journey

AI is fundamentally changing the ecommerce experience for both buyers and sellers. Brands that can effectively leverage AI systems to reduce friction for human and agentic buyers will be better positioned to achieve their revenue goals.

“In the next 12 months, we’ll start to see agentic platforms pop up. In the next two years, we’ll see fashion brands implement agentic assistants to their apps. And in five years, manual browsing will lose its appeal as the shopping journey shifts towards choosing from small, hyper-personalized, curated product selections. Agentic systems could completely change online shopping, and for fashion brands, it’s just another development to adapt to.” – Tarek Müller, Co-founder & Managing Director, SCAYLE

“AI will be the label and sometimes, the technology used to automate more workflows within manufacturing and distribution in 2026. LLMs will be increasingly used as the communication layer between buyers and sellers helping to digitize a lot of the “buy-by-email” processes that clog team productivity. AI is going to make digital commerce both easier to adopt, and more valuable to implement.” – Aaron Sheehan, VP of Strategy & Partnerships, OroCommerce

“AI will be embedded into core enterprise decision-making—not as a tool, but as a capability. We’ll see AI driving autonomous forecasting, real-time pricing and margin optimization, intelligent sales and service orchestration, and more resilient supply chains. For enterprise leaders, the impact will be measurable in faster time-to-market, improved capital efficiency, and the ability to respond to disruption with far greater agility. Analysts already expect 30% of all consumer purchases to be delegated to “machine customers” by 2030—and that figure could easily exceed 60% for commodity or replenishment buys.” – Jason Nyhus, President & GM, Shopware North America

Supporting AI Investments and Organizational Change

To achieve the full promise of AI systems, technology leaders say businesses need to focus on the supporting infrastructure and policies that foster successful adoption.

“Enterprise leaders often underestimate how much organizational adaptability now matters in an environment shaped by constant change. Many organizations remain structured around rigid roadmaps, fixed architectures, and siloed teams, even as markets and customer expectations evolve more quickly than those models can support. The gap between companies that can adjust quickly and those that cannot is widening. The growing risk is not choosing the wrong technology but being too slow to respond when conditions shift.” – Sharon Gee, SVP Product, AI, Commerce

“Many enterprise leaders are still underestimating the operational work required to make AI effective at scale and not just governance and data readiness, but team enablement. AI productivity gains don’t happen by default: organizations need to invest in training, workflow redesign, and configuring AI tooling with the right guardrails so outputs are consistent and safe. For example, coding assistants become dramatically more useful when teams standardize context and steering (e.g. conventions, patterns, and guidance files) rather than letting everyone vibe code. Without that enablement layer, AI adoption stays shallow, results vary widely, and the ROI looks far smaller than the technology’s true potential.” – Marc Sanfaçon, CTO & Co-Founder, Coveo

“Enterprise leaders need to pay more attention to how AI will affect talent. While AI will enable brands to do more and at scale, it will change team dynamics and how they think about developing their talent and their future leaders. As AI takes away more hands-on keyboard work, organizations must teach lower-level employees the skills they need to grow in their careers. The future leaders of most companies will look very different from today.” – Lauren Livak Gilbert, Exec. Dir. of The Digital Shelf Institute (DSI), Salsify

“One thing that still doesn’t get enough attention is trust. AI is only as useful as the data behind it, which makes clean data, clear consent, and transparency essential. Brands that know what data they have, how it’s connected, and why it’s being used will be better prepared as customer expectations and regulation continue to rise. This is an area where having a unified customer platform—rather than scattered tools—can make responsible AI much easier to manage.” – Joan Morales, Head of Field & Partner Marketing, Klaviyo

Meeting Customer Expectations and Achieving Real Results

Changing customer expectations for enterprise user experiences have forced brands to adapt new AI-powered personalization strategies. This trend is expected to continue even as expectations from business leaders change as well. Tech leaders say organizations are now starting to demand more tangible impacts from their AI efforts.

“AI has fundamentally changed the way people engage with brands. Today’s users expect interactions that feel relevant, conversational, and deeply contextual. Static, menu-driven websites are being replaced by systems that deliver dynamic and adaptive experiences that provide users with a more modern and natural experience that is hyper-personalized and dialogue-based. AI and conversational interactions are becoming an expectation from users. Companies need their technology providers to rapidly integrate AI features into the platforms they use, to help their employees do their jobs better and more effectively, and to empower those employees to deliver better, modern customer experiences.” – Loren Jarrett, EVP & General Manager, Digital Experience Business, Progress Sitefinity

“We're seeing a profound flip in the brand-consumer power dynamic that many leaders haven't fully grasped. As one of our merchants puts it, ‘In the past, bigger brands would dictate what the trends were... That has sort of gone away.’ Today's consumers expect to participate in your marketing, provide direct feedback, and be heard…We firmly believe that commerce is increasingly about authentic storytelling and building genuine connections. Whether through AI-powered channels or through high-touch, personalized experiences, the brands that will thrive are those who make customers feel truly seen and valued.” – Eduardo Frias, Field CTO, Commercial, Shopify

“Many of our customers this year are looking to adopt real AI that has impact; not just a CEO mandate, but tangible results—whether it’s in the top line or efficiency of process, efficiency of people, or truly simply looking to do more with less—versus just a promise of AI. Our customers specifically are looking for measurable results, explainable results, and controlled use of AI.” – Piyush Patel, Chief Ecosystem Officer, Algolia

Improving Discoverability in AI Search

AI has given marketers the ability to create content at scale and personalize user experiences in profound new ways. But experts remind us that as good as your strategies and governance policies may be, if your content isn’t discoverable by AI, you could be wasting resources.

“The discovery journey is fundamentally changing. AI isn't just giving people a place to start anymore; it's often giving them the answer itself with no clicks, no scrolls, and no next step. When that happens, brands lose the ability to shape meaning during the journey. Reputation is increasingly formed upstream, shaped by how generative engines interpret, connect, and explain who you are. What they say about you will matter as much, if not more so, than what you say about yourself. That reality requires brands to think differently and be more intentional in how their messaging is created, communicated, and reinforced.” – Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek, CMO, Sitecore

“We’re all feeling the shift from traditional search to AI search in our own personal search habits; and as marketers, we are seeing that performance play out in real time. But here’s what many marketers forget: if both people and AI can’t easily find, read, and understand your content, they won’t trust or recommend your brand. Yet a significant share of enterprise websites still fail basic accessibility standards, making much of their content invisible to AI discovery. As AI increasingly determines what content gets surfaced and shared, inaccessible content is simply filtered out. Leaders who miss this are not only creating ethical and compliance risks, but also making their brands harder for consumers to find.” – Christy Marble, CMO, Siteimprove