Bloomreach CEO Raj De Datta on agentic commerce, AI-powered shopping, and why the future of retail will move beyond the traditional website.
Raj De Datta has spent over a decade building Bloomreach into one of the most quietly formidable companies in commerce technology. With $260 million in ARR and customers like American Eagle and SPANX, the platform’s AI engine — Loomi — isn’t a bolt-on feature. It’s the whole architecture. But as generative AI rewrites the rules of how people shop, discover products, and interact with brands, De Datta is less interested in celebrating how far things have come and more focused on what comes next.
In this conversation, he makes a case for why the traditional e-commerce site is becoming infrastructure rather than interface, why personalization and automation are converging faster than brands are ready for, and why the winners of the next era of commerce won’t be those who automate the most — but those who automate responsibly.
Excerpts from the interview;
Bloomreach just crossed $260 million in ARR, powered by Loomi AI and brands like American Eagle and SPANX. What did you get right in scaling an AI-native platform — and what nearly broke along the way?
We got a few core decisions right early. First, we built Loomi AI as the foundation, not as a feature. It is the intelligence layer that powers our applications and agents across email, search, personalization, and conversational shopping. That architecture meant that as AI advanced rapidly over the past few years, we remained ahead of the curve.
Second, we focused on real-time data and first-party context. Loomi AI combines customer and product data with real-time infrastructure, AI decisioning, and orchestration across channels. That allowed us to deliver personalization that compounds — every interaction feeds the system and improves the next one.
Third, we invested early in agentic capabilities. Nearly half of our customers now use at least one next-generation AI tool, and that adoption has more than doubled in the past year. We also saw strong engagement with our conversational shopping agent, including a significant uptick during the recent holiday season. That momentum reflects a clear product direction: move from static tools to systems that can take action.
The one ongoing challenge — though really more of an opportunity — was the pace of change in AI. Every day unlocked a new possibility. We constantly had to examine what we were building to ensure it was maximizing AI’s potential. That meant a lot of rapid iteration and required us to be willing to take products we thought were great and challenge ourselves to make them even better.
The past two years have rewritten the rules of AI almost quarterly. How do you build a durable product strategy when the underlying technology shifts this fast?
The technology will keep changing, and our strategy is to stay one layer above it. We built Loomi AI as the intelligence layer beneath all of our applications and agents. Because that foundation is consistent, we can adopt new AI capabilities as they emerge without rebuilding the core each time the model landscape shifts.
Durability comes from that architecture — every interaction feeds back into the system, so the platform continuously improves. The goal isn’t to predict the next breakthrough. It’s to build a system that seamlessly incorporates it. That’s what allows us to move quickly and keep innovating while maintaining stability for enterprise customers.
You’ve spoken about agentic commerce. What changes when AI stops assisting shoppers and starts transacting on their behalf?
When AI moves from assisting shoppers to acting more autonomously, commerce shifts from reactive experiences to outcome-driven ones. Instead of simply answering questions or suggesting products, AI can understand context, predict intent, and guide the entire journey in real time — from discovery to decision to purchase.
But this changes a great deal for brands. It means they risk losing control over customer journeys and relationships. That’s why this is such an inflection point for businesses right now. The brands actively investing in agentic commerce — preparing catalogs for agentic discoverability, building their own apps — are the ones that will be prepared for this new era of commerce.
If AI becomes the primary interface for product discovery, what happens to the traditional e-commerce site? Is the homepage becoming obsolete?
It’s more a case of “the website is dead… long live the website.” In reality, the website becomes infrastructure rather than interface, as we know it today. All of the data it houses — about your products, about your customers — remains as relevant as ever. But that data and infrastructure will transcend the website, too. It’ll extend into conversational experiences in AI apps, and into channels like email and mobile, as it already does today. The homepage isn’t obsolete. It just isn’t the front door anymore.
Every AI transformation has its blind spots. What assumptions about AI in commerce turned out to be wrong?
There were assumptions about speed and scale that were somehow both too big and not big enough. At the onset of generative AI and large language models, there was real fear that e-commerce would become irrelevant almost overnight. Obviously, that hasn’t been the case.
But at the same time — it will, and already is, wholly transforming what commerce looks like. The way people discover products, compare brands, build wardrobes — all of that is now done with AI in ways we couldn’t have imagined a few years ago. And I think the scale of that transformation hasn’t even peaked yet.
At what point does personalization cross into automation? And how do brands ensure agency remains with the consumer?
Personalization becomes automation the moment systems start acting without asking. That’s the real inflection point. For years, personalization meant better recommendations or more relevant messaging. Now, with agentic AI, systems can execute decisions across channels. The question isn’t whether that’s possible — it’s how it should be governed.
Brands need to be clear about intent. Automation should reflect what a customer has already signaled, not replace it. When AI is grounded in real customer context and real-time signals, it can reduce friction and help people complete their journey. When it drifts from that, it stops being helpful and starts becoming opaque.
Agency remains with the consumer when technology is designed to respond to their intent, stay transparent in its decisioning, and keep humans in control of outcomes. The more autonomous systems become, the more important those guardrails are.
In this next phase of AI, the differentiator won’t be who automates the most. It will be who automates responsibly — and keeps the customer at the center of that automation.
In 2030, what will feel outdated about how we shop today — and what will Bloomreach have built to stay ahead of that shift?
Today, much of e-commerce still centers on browsing: navigating pages, filtering options, and manually managing campaigns across channels. But the shift we’re already seeing is toward agentic experiences — systems that understand intent and take action in real time. As AI moves from insight to execution, customers will expect more conversational, personalized, and responsive interactions, not just better search results or product recommendations.
What will matter most is whether brands can operate across touchpoints as one connected system. Experiences won’t be confined to a single website or channel. They’ll need to work across email, messaging, mobile, search, and beyond — with intelligence that adapts instantly to customer context.
