Mariano Gomide de Faria, CEO VTEX
VTEX began as a software company focused on the textile industry. In 2001, it launched its first e-commerce store, Sacks, which was later acquired by Sephora. Over the years, VTEX evolved into a leading digital commerce platform, achieving unicorn status in 2021. The company has expanded globally, establishing offices in multiple countries and serving a diverse clientele.
VTEX operates on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, offering a composable and complete commerce platform. Its revenue streams include fixed subscription fees and a take-rate on client sales, allowing scalability and predictable income.
Under Mariano's leadership, VTEX has expanded its presence to over 40 countries, serving more than 2,500 brands and retailers worldwide. He oversees the company's global growth strategy, encompassing marketing, sales, delivery support, and go-to-market operations. Mariano's vision emphasizes simplifying complex e-commerce operations and enabling businesses to adapt to rapidly changing consumer behaviors.
Mariano has been vocal about the challenges associated with the "best-of-breed" approach in composable commerce. In 2025, he announced VTEX's decision to suspend support for the MACH Alliance, critiquing the complexity and hidden costs of assembling disparate systems. He advocates for solutions that balance technical capability with business practicality, emphasizing out-of-the-box integrations and lean architectures.
Evolution of the Commerce Platform in the Age of AI
In the age of AI, commerce platforms are undergoing a profound transformation. No longer is it sufficient to merely offer a storefront or an engine for digital transactions. The very nature of how consumers discover, evaluate, and purchase products is shifting—from clicking through websites to delegating decisions to intelligent agents. This transition is shaking the foundations of traditional commerce platforms, compelling industry players to rethink not just their technology stacks, but their entire role in the commerce ecosystem.
Historically, commerce platforms evolved to digitize the physical shopping experience. They replicated catalog browsing, checkout counters, and customer support with websites and apps. The best platforms offered flexibility—plug-in ecosystems, APIs, and design freedom. But the rise of AI has introduced a different paradigm, one where the consumer is no longer the primary operator of the commerce interface. Instead, intelligent assistants—whether embedded in chat, voice, or video—are beginning to intermediate the entire shopping journey.
In this new landscape, success is defined not by how customizable your storefront is, but by how seamlessly your platform can interact with autonomous agents. These agents are not just chatbots—they are decision-makers, shoppers, concierges, and analysts. They sift through massive amounts of data, understand intent in nuanced ways, and increasingly act on behalf of users. This evolution is rendering traditional browsing experiences secondary, even obsolete in some cases. It’s no longer about guiding the customer to the buy button—it’s about giving AI agents the tools to place the order themselves.
Industry leaders are responding in different ways. VTEX, for example, has taken a bold stance against the growing complexity of composable stacks that rely on endless integrations and vendor dependencies. Their pivot is toward what they call “concierge commerce”—a world where the platform itself anticipates needs and automates actions, rather than requiring merchants to wire together an endless series of services. For VTEX, the future is not in giving brands a Lego box of disconnected tools, but in delivering a commerce system that feels more like a service than software.
Shopify, by contrast, is leaning heavily into its ecosystem. Its AI efforts are focused on enabling individual merchants with powerful assistants like Shopify Magic and Sidekick, which help write descriptions, generate campaigns, and manage store operations. Yet even Shopify is beginning to realize that the end-user may increasingly bypass storefronts altogether, especially as large language models and multimodal interfaces become the first stop for consumers seeking advice and action.
Other platforms like Salesforce and BigCommerce are embedding AI into their workflows, seeking to maintain relevance by supercharging merchandising, inventory planning, and customer service. But this is still a transitional stage. The real shift will come when platforms are designed primarily for machines to use—not just humans. That means thinking beyond product grids and search bars, and toward APIs, structured data, and real-time responsiveness that cater to agents making autonomous decisions.
There’s a subtle but crucial distinction here. AI is not simply another feature to bolt onto a commerce platform. It redefines the very architecture of commerce. In a world where agents shop for people, marketing becomes less about human psychology and more about machine semantics. Attribution shifts from clicks to intent resolution. Customer journeys are compressed into moments, often invisible to traditional analytics tools.
The implications are immense. Platforms that were built to support page views and funnels must now support event streams and decision logs. Product catalogs must evolve from image galleries to structured, semantically rich databases that an AI can reason through. Even checkout flows need reimagining—what does frictionless payment mean when there’s no visible “checkout” at all?
The survivors in this new era will not be those with the most features, but those with the clearest philosophy on how to serve both people and the intelligent agents that increasingly represent them. They will understand that commerce is becoming ambient, embedded in life’s rhythms rather than confined to shopping sessions. And they will build accordingly—not just for merchants, but for the agents that will define the next generation of consumer experience.
As with all technological revolutions, the leaders of yesterday may not be the leaders of tomorrow. AI is not just changing commerce—it is changing the nature of platforms themselves. Those who adapt will become the infrastructure beneath a new kind of economy. Those who don’t may find themselves sitting on elegant ruins, while commerce flows through entirely new channels built for the age of autonomous intent.
VTEX
https://www.investors.vtex.com/overview/default.aspx
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