Why agentic commerce (and why now)
Ecommerce discovery has been dominated by faceted filters and hand-tuned rule trees—systems that strain as catalogs and inventories grow. The next era is agentic: AI that asks, reasons, decides, explains, and renders a personalized experience—end to end.
Octane AI is leading this shift on Shopify. With CORE-1 and Agentic Commerce Quizzes, every store can now deploy a native AI shopping agent trained on its products and its brand voice.
The combinatorial trap
Traditional quizzes are one-size-fits-all by design. Every shopper sees the same questions, the same answer options, and the same generic copy—regardless of who they are or what they need. The experience feels mechanical because it is.
The math makes personalization impossible: a modest quiz with 8 questions and 5 answers each produces 390,625 possible answer combinations. No team can manually design outcomes, write personalized copy, and code custom result pages for every path. So brands settle for broad segments, generic messaging, and templated layouts that feel mass-produced.
Even when teams invest in branching logic, the system becomes brittle. Products go out of stock. Collections change. New SKUs arrive. Each update requires re-mapping rules, testing paths, and hoping nothing breaks. The quiz that took weeks to build becomes a maintenance burden that drifts out of sync with your catalog.
And the results pages? Most teams lack the design and development resources to make each outcome feel premium. So they default to generic product grids that look identical for every shopper—missing the opportunity to explain why these products matter for this person.
How agentic commerce solves this
Agentic commerce replaces rules with intent. You describe the outcome in natural language; an AI agent plans and executes the steps to deliver it—reliably, at scale, and in your voice.
True personalization at scale. Instead of writing copy for 390,625 possible paths, you write one brief. The AI generates personalized copy for each shopper based on their specific answers—every headline, every product description, every explanation tailored to that individual's needs and preferences.
Dynamic outcomes, not predetermined paths. The AI doesn't follow branching logic—it reasons about what each shopper needs and composes the right set of products in real time. No more mapping rules for every possible combination. The agent understands your catalog and your merchandising strategy, then applies both to each unique shopper.
Self-maintaining experiences. When products go out of stock, new SKUs arrive, or collections change, the agent adapts automatically. It works against live inventory and makes intelligent substitutions that preserve your merchandising intent. The quiz you launch today keeps working as your catalog evolves—no manual updates required.
Beautiful results pages, coded for you. The AI doesn't just recommend products—it designs and codes custom result pages for each outcome. Premium layouts, structured copy, brand-aligned styling, all generated automatically. Every shopper gets a results page that feels handcrafted for them, without your team writing a single line of HTML.
Octane AI brings this capability to Shopify: store-trained AI experiences that live natively on your site, adapt automatically, and stay on-brand.
Introducing CORE-1
To make agentic commerce real, we built CORE-1 (Commerce, Orchestration & Reasoning Engine)—a proprietary AI model trained specifically for commerce.
General-purpose language models excel at conversation, but struggle with the nuanced reasoning required for merchandising: understanding product attributes across dimensions, reconciling conflicting shopper preferences, evaluating fit in context, and explaining recommendations with brand-appropriate rationale. They weren't designed to curate.
CORE-1 was built from the ground up to handle these tasks. It trains on your website and full product catalog to develop a private, store-specific understanding of your merchandise—then uses that knowledge to perform multi-constraint reasoning, compose coherent product sets, and generate personalized explanations in your brand's voice.
Think of it as encoding your best salesperson's expertise—their product knowledge, their ability to listen and reason about what fits, their skill at explaining why—and making it available at scale, for every shopper, in real time.
How CORE-1 works: the VIP shopper analogy
A great in-store associate does five things well: learns the brand, listens, plans, checks the floor, and presents. CORE-1 does the same—end to end, at machine speed.
Learn your brand
With your permission, CORE-1 is trained on your website and catalog, developing a private understanding of products, variants, pricing, and inventory context—without any rule coding.
Listen to the shopper
The quiz gathers the information a real associate would: budget tier, size, shade, style, concerns, goals; optionally a selfie or inspo image.
Plan the set
You maintain a standing brief describing how the agent should act (priorities, exclusions, tone). CORE-1 performs multi-constraint reasoning to satisfy hard requirements and align with your merchandising strategy.
Walk the floor
CORE-1 works against live inventory and composes a coherent set that fits together—stock-aware, with automatic substitutions that preserve the brief if something is unavailable.
Present & explain
The agent renders a personalized results page—complete with AI-authored HTML sections, structured copy, and reusable variables—and explains why each product was chosen, in your brand's voice. The same structured context flows to Klaviyo and Postscript for follow-up.
This isn't a black-box recommender trained on someone else's data. It's your brand's best shopper—encoded.
What we're launching
Today we're introducing six AI-powered capabilities that work together as a unified agentic commerce system—all powered by CORE-1 and available now in Octane AI for Shopify.
Smart Products (powered by CORE-1)
Turn natural language instructions into ranked product picks, bundles, outfits, and routines. Works for catalogs from 5 to 100,000+ SKUs with rule + AI matching (must/should/exclude, boosts), stock-aware fallbacks, and automatic substitutions that preserve your merchandising intent.
Smart Quiz Builder
AI drafts complete quizzes from a single prompt—questions, logic, and results—optimized by automatic store and catalog analysis. The agent generates conversational questions tailored to your products and creates custom result pages with brand-aligned HTML, CSS, and copy.
Shopping Assistant
Deploy AI shopping experiences anywhere on your site: widget, welcome popup, on-scroll trigger, or page embed. Flexible display and targeting options, welcome and exit triggers, and seamless Shopify integration. Launch in minutes, not weeks.
Smart Copy
On-brand copy that explains "why this product for this shopper," writes structured routines for email and SMS, and maintains your tone and style automatically. Generates personalized headlines, product descriptions, and explanations based on each shopper's specific answers and needs.
Smart Properties
Reusable AI variables you can show, hide, and render anywhere with {{property_name}}. Power HTML blocks, email campaigns, and SMS flows with dynamic, personalized content. Auto-syncs to Klaviyo and Postscript. Perfect for segmentation, lead generation, and maintaining context across channels.
Image Analyzer
Analyze customer photos to personalize product recommendations. Skin-tone analysis for beauty brands, wardrobe analysis and styling suggestions for fashion, and "find this look" product matching from inspiration images. Turns visual input into merchandising intelligence.
These aren't separate tools—they're components of a single agentic system that reasons about your products, understands your shoppers, and delivers personalized experiences at scale.
Integrations with your email and SMS stack
Agentic commerce doesn't stop at the quiz results page. Everything CORE-1 learns about each shopper—their preferences, constraints, recommended products, and personalized copy—flows seamlessly to your existing email and SMS platforms.
Native sync with Klaviyo, Attentive, Postscript, and Recart. Product recommendations, Smart Copy, and Smart Properties automatically sync to your email and SMS tools. The same AI-generated context that powers on-site experiences continues the conversation off-site—no manual data mapping required.
Hidden properties for backend workflows. Not every Smart Property needs to appear on the quiz results page. Create properties specifically for email and SMS segmentation—customer intent signals, preference scores, product affinities—that live in your marketing stack and power automated flows without cluttering the shopper-facing experience.
Structured data for follow-up campaigns. Instead of generic post-quiz emails, your campaigns can reference specific products the agent recommended, explain why they fit, and maintain the personalized tone established during the quiz. The agent's reasoning becomes the foundation for your entire customer journey.
One conversation, multiple channels—all powered by the same intelligence.
Build your brand's AI shopping agent
Connect your Shopify store and grant access.
Our AI trains on your site and catalog and builds a private, store-specific product map.
Get agentic quiz proposals—or request your own.
The AI suggests high-impact quiz types for your customers, or you describe one in natural language.Let the agent build it—including code.
The agent generates the full quiz and a bespoke results page with custom HTML/CSS/JS to match your brand.Describe how to curate; CORE-1 does the rest.
You set a standing brief explaining how the AI should act. Shopper answers supply the data; CORE-1 performs multi-constraint reasoning to select and arrange products—live and stock-aware.Continue the conversation off-site.
Structured data and variables flow to email and SMS, so your follow-ups stay personalized by the same agent.
You're not filling a template. You're directing an agent.
Why teams are switching
Speed – From concept to fully personalized page in minutes.
Scale – Works for five to 100k+ SKUs without logic sprawl.
Resilience – Stock-aware by design; automatic substitutions keep flows live.
Brand control – Train on your content; enforce constraints; edit tone and code.
Continuity – Email/SMS follow-ups reuse the same context produced on-site.
What's next
Agentic Commerce Quizzes are the first step. We're building toward a future where every touchpoint on your site is adaptive, contextual, and intelligent.
Fully agentic result pages. The AI will soon generate not just copy, but complete custom layouts and interactive components for every outcome—product carousels, comparison tables, educational sections—all coded automatically and personalized to each shopper's needs.
Context-aware Shopping Assistant. We're evolving Shopping Assistant into a persistent AI agent that knows each customer and adapts in real time. It will surface personalized quizzes when a shopper has been browsing, recommend complementary products at cart, assist with search queries, and guide discovery based on where each visitor is in their journey—all powered by the same CORE-1 reasoning engine.
Specialized merchandising tools. Starting with Shade Map for beauty brands—a centralized shade-matching system that works across all your quizzes and experiences. Define your shade range once; CORE-1 applies it everywhere, automatically.
Conversational commerce. An AI chatbot integrated directly into Shopping Assistant, capable of answering product questions, making recommendations, and guiding shoppers through complex decisions—all while maintaining your brand voice and merchandising strategy.
The vision is simple: every interaction on your site should feel like it was designed for that specific shopper, at that specific moment. We're building the infrastructure to make that real.
