New practice closes the strategy-execution gap that stalls commerce and AI investment, keeping planning and delivery under one accountable team
Forte Group today announced Intelligent Commerce, a new practice built to solve a problem that stalls most commerce and AI investments: the strategy and the build are usually owned by two different teams, and the client absorbs the cost of the disconnect between them.
Intelligent Commerce puts commerce strategy, AI advisory and implementation under a single accountable team, delivered through ForteNext, Forte Group’s commerce and Salesforce delivery arm.
Organizations typically engage a consulting firm that produces a roadmap and departs, or an implementation partner that builds without the business case behind the build. Intelligent Commerce is designed to remove that handoff entirely.
The practice is built around three entry points: commerce strategy and optimization, AI strategy for commerce, and platform selection and procurement advisory, each vendor-neutral and each able to stand alone. Organizations may engage one or all three, and implementation continues from any of them through solution architecture, systems integration, composable and headless commerce architecture, data and AI infrastructure, and go-live support.
Engagements follow five phases: Assess, Prioritize, Plan, Transform and Optimize, with the highest-value AI use cases identified and baselined within two to four weeks, and board-ready ROI reporting established at the outset.
“After more than 300 commerce implementations, the pattern is consistent,” said Alex Kolesnichenko, Chief Technology Officer at ForteNext, Forte Group’s commerce and Salesforce delivery arm.
“Organizations that try to replatform and adopt AI at the same time, without a vendor-neutral roadmap guiding both, spend more and get less. The ones that plan first, even for a few weeks, move faster in the end. Intelligent Commerce exists to make that planning phase short, objective and directly connected to what gets built afterwards.”
The practice is platform-agnostic and works with existing commerce ecosystems as well as with organizations evaluating replatforming. Recent ForteNext delivery work includes a Salesforce Commerce Cloud implementation for Armor Express that generated more than $500,000 in revenue within three months of launch, alongside a B2B dealer portal with a custom product configurator for SoundOff Signal and a B2B marketplace migration for Procure Impact.
“A roadmap is only as good as the team’s ability to execute it,” said Maksym Koval, Chief Delivery Officer at ForteNext.
“When strategy and delivery sit in different organizations, the plan gets reinterpreted the moment it’s handed off, and re-scoping eats the months a client thought they’d saved. Keeping one team accountable end to end is what lets us commit to a timeline at the start of the engagement and hold it.”
Organizations can begin with a fixed-fee Discovery Workshop, which runs over a small number of weeks and produces a commerce maturity snapshot, a shortlist of the highest-impact AI use cases, a platform health assessment and a prioritized 90-day action plan, packaged as an executive briefing. There is no requirement to continue beyond it.
Intelligent Commerce is available now to mid-market and enterprise organizations across healthcare and life sciences, financial services, logistics, software and SaaS, manufacturing, retail and higher education.
Further information is available at fortegrp.com.
