New offering combines vendor-neutral advisory with engineering delivery to keep commerce and AI programmes under one accountable team
Forte Group has unveiled Intelligent Commerce, a new practice created to address the disconnect that can arise when commerce and AI strategy is developed by one organization and implementation is entrusted to another, creating additional cost and slowing progress.
The new practice brings commerce strategy, AI advisory and implementation together under a single accountable team through ForteNext, Forte Group’s commerce and Salesforce delivery arm.
The separation of strategy and delivery can create challenges for organizations investing in commerce transformation and AI. Traditional consulting engagements may end after a roadmap is delivered, while implementation partners may subsequently build solutions without the original business case or strategic context. Intelligent Commerce is intended to remove that break between planning and execution.
The practice provides three standalone entry points: commerce strategy and optimization, AI strategy for commerce, and platform selection and procurement advisory. Each is vendor-neutral, allowing organizations to use one service or combine several. Implementation can continue seamlessly into solution architecture, systems integration, composable and headless commerce architecture, data and AI infrastructure, and go-live support.
Projects are guided through five phases: Assess, Prioritize, Plan, Transform and Optimize. The process is designed to identify and establish baselines for the most valuable AI use cases within two to four weeks, alongside board-ready ROI reporting established from the start.
“After more than 300 commerce implementations, the pattern is consistent,” said Alex Kolesnichenko, Chief Technology Officer at ForteNext, Forte Group’s commerce and Salesforce delivery arm.
“Organizations that try to replatform and adopt AI at the same time, without a vendor-neutral roadmap guiding both, spend more and get less. The ones that plan first, even for a few weeks, move faster in the end. Intelligent Commerce exists to make that planning phase short, objective and directly connected to what gets built afterwards.”
Because Intelligent Commerce is platform-agnostic, the practice can work with an organization’s current commerce ecosystem or help evaluate potential replatforming options. ForteNext’s recent work includes a Salesforce Commerce Cloud implementation for Armor Express, which delivered more than $500,000 in revenue within three months of launch. Other projects include a B2B dealer portal featuring a custom product configurator for SoundOff Signal and a B2B marketplace migration for Procure Impact.
“A roadmap is only as good as the team’s ability to execute it,” said Maksym Koval, Chief Delivery Officer at ForteNext.
“When strategy and delivery sit in different organizations, the plan gets reinterpreted the moment it’s handed off, and re-scoping eats the months a client thought they’d saved. Keeping one team accountable end to end is what lets us commit to a timeline at the start of the engagement and hold it.”
As an initial engagement option, organizations can commission a fixed-fee Discovery Workshop lasting a small number of weeks. The workshop assesses commerce maturity, identifies the highest-impact AI opportunities, evaluates platform health and establishes a prioritized 90-day action plan. Results are delivered through an executive briefing, with no requirement for the organization to proceed with further work.
Intelligent Commerce is available now for mid-market and enterprise organizations across healthcare and life sciences, financial services, logistics, software and SaaS, manufacturing, retail and higher education.
Further information is available at fortegrp.com.
