with Ian Bezanson

In this latest Ateko Talks session, Ian Bezanson, Commerce Cloud Practice Lead, explores how AI-powered merchandising is helping retailers move beyond manual rules and spreadsheets, enabling teams to focus on strategy while automation handles execution.

Transcript:

Ian: My name is Ian Bezanson,

And I’m the Commerce Cloud Practice Lead,
with Ateko Salesforce

Today, I’m going to talk to you about,
advances in merchandising through AI

Why is your team still staying up until midnight to launch a sale?

If you’re running a large e-commerce site, you know the “Midnight Launch”.

Your team is sitting at their kitchen tables

at 11:59 PM, hitting refresh, making sure the sales prices actually trigger and the right banners show up.

It’s stressful, it’s prone to human error,

and frankly, in 2026, it’s unnecessary.

Whether you’re on Salesforce, Shopify, or BigCommerce, we are moving away from Manual Merchandising

and toward Goal-Based Automation.

Instead of your team writing a task list of what to change at midnight,

you give the platform a business goal.

For a few example:

‘Launch the Black Friday collection at midnight and automatically bury anything that hits low-stock levels.’

Or,

‘Keep this flash sale live until we hit our revenue target for this category, and then flip it back to MSRP.’

Or, ‘Boost our high-margin items across the site, but only while they have a 2-day delivery window available.’

The system senses the time, the inventory, and the margin;

and then it responds instantly.

Now, I know what you’re thinking:

“Ian, I can’t just hand the keys to my margins over to Artificial Intelligence”.

And you’re right. You shouldn’t.

The transition from “Rule Writer” to “Strategist” isn’t about “set it and forget it.”

It’s about setting guardrails.

Modern agentic tools allow you to set the boundaries, such as

“never discount below X%” or “always keep my hero products at the top of the listings”.

You aren’t losing control; you’re finally getting out of the engine room so you can actually steer the ship.

But here is the catch:

The level of automation only works if your data is unified.

If your inventory system doesn’t talk to your storefront in real-time, the AI is just going to make mistakes faster.

Stop managing tasks. Start managing goals.

But first? Get your data house in order.