Take X. Add AI. Pray. Join me for a webinar.
Everyone's pitching agentic. Almost nobody's data is ready for it. Forty minutes on 11 June to fix that. Right, let's go.
Kevin Kelly has a line that’s been doing the rounds in every pitch deck for two years now: take anything, add AI, and you’ve got a business. “Take X. Add AI.” It became the shortcut everyone took. The bit most people skipped is the part underneath the X, the data the whole thing is standing on, which in most B2B businesses is held together with a CRM that disagrees with the ERP, an ERP that disagrees with the storefront, and a very tired ops person who is the only one who knows which of the three is lying.
That’s the conversation I’m hosting on Thursday 11 June, 11:00 BST. It’s free, it’s forty minutes, and there is no slide about synergy. I checked.
EVERY BOARD WANTS AN AI STRATEGY. ALMOST NONE OF THEM CAN ANSWER THE QUIETER QUESTION.
Here’s the quieter question. Before “what’s our AI strategy,” there’s “is our data actually in a state to support one.” For most B2B businesses the honest answer is not yet, and until the orchestration is solved, an AI strategy is just a slide with a nice gradient on it.
We’ve been threading this one for months. The agentic future keeps getting announced like a product launch when it’s really a weather system, something Kelly would call inevitable and most operators would call Tuesday. The capability is racing ahead. The plumbing is not. That gap is the whole story.
THE NUMBERS ARE WORSE THAN THE HYPE LETS ON.
This isn’t vibes. It’s YouGov fieldwork across UK B2B decision-makers, gathered for The Inevitable Shift guide with Glass Atlas, PayPal and Commerce. Three numbers do the heavy lifting:
44% aren’t planning to invest in their stack in the next twelve months. 42% are operating today with no ecommerce stack at all. And 52% describe themselves as “hybrid,” which is the polite industry word for neither fully manual nor fully modern, the digital equivalent of still having a fax machine but being embarrassed about it.
If you’re reading this from across the water, here’s the Atlantic flip. America is busy livestreaming its agentic awards ceremony. UK and Irish B2B is quietly running a multi-million-pound operation on email, gut feel and a spreadsheet named FINAL_v7. Both things are true at once. Only one of them is on stage at the conferences.
FORTY MINUTES. FIVE BEATS. NO VENDOR THEATRE.
Here’s the actual shape of it:
The hook, smart AI, dumb data, with a real-world read from inside Sweet Squared rather than a hypothetical. Then the three orchestration breakdowns that silently kill every AI initiative: product data (the SKUs that don’t match), customer data (the CRM and the storefront swearing the same person is two people), and transactional data (what the ERP claims versus what the order is actually doing). Then the intelligence layer itself, what a composable, ROI-led architecture looks like when it’s working. Then what agentic actually does once the foundations are right, the useful stuff like context-aware quoting and margin-aware pricing, not the theatre. And finally a data-readiness self-assessment you can run the same afternoon you watch it.
You submit a question when you register and we fold the best ones into the discussion. So it’s less a webinar, more a room you get to talk back to.
OPERATORS, NOT PANELISTS.
This is the part I care about most. Nobody on this is here to read a brochure at you.
Martin Rogers runs IT at Sweet Squared, the beauty distributor that supplies professionals across the UK and Ireland, so he’s the merchant who actually lives inside the data mess we’re describing. Pete Robertshaw of Glass Atlas spends his days bridging IT, ecommerce and ops, which is exactly where these breakdowns happen. Lance Owide leads B2B at Commerce and has been a straight-talking voice on what genuinely moves the needle versus what just demos well. And I’ll be reading the data line by line so you don’t have to.
A merchant, a solutions director, a platform VP, and an Irishman who is immune to the hype. That’s the room.
FORTY MINUTES THAT’LL SAVE YOU A QUARTER.
Free to attend. The replay and the data-readiness self-assessment go to every single person who registers, so even if 11:00 BST is mid-meeting for you, sign up anyway and watch it with a coffee later.
This is the follow-up to the conversations we started at B2B eCommerce World London and to The Inevitable Shift guide itself. If you’ve been reading along as the agentic-commerce story has built week over week, this is where the vision stops being a keynote and becomes a Wednesday-afternoon to-do list.
Register free, takes 30 seconds →
Thursday 11 June. 11:00 BST, 12:00 CEST. Forty minutes. The calendar hold lands the second you sign up.
Bring a question. Bring your worst spreadsheet. See you in the room.