Keeping Commerce Weird Podcast: Open Platforms, Open Opinions, No Clear Winner

Nobody wins the platform wars

Every few years, the commerce industry convinces itself there's about to be one winner — one platform, one protocol, one AI model that runs the table. Except that moment never quite arrives. 

What's actually happening right now is less dramatic and more interesting: AI is quietly changing what platform value even means, and nobody's fully agreed on what "open" looks like anymore.

That's the terrain this episode of Keeping Commerce Weird covers. In "Platform Hunger Games: Open Platforms, Open Opinions," Travis Hess sits down with Brent Peterson, B2B commerce strategist and one of the industry's most respected, platform-agnostic voices.

This episode covers what made Magento's early community impossible to replicate, why AI is currently making platforms feel less valuable rather than more, and why merchants are more focused than ever on owning their data and experience instead of renting it.

Here are the key insights from the discussion.

Keeping Commerce Weird Podcast Recap: Platform Hunger Games: Open Platforms, Open Opinions

Magento’s open-source culture has never been replicated.

Travis Hess: You look back at those early days of Magento — the culture, the vibe, the events. Have you seen anyone else come close to replicating that since?

Brent Peterson: "I think it's very hard to do that in the U.S. The whole culture is different for all of us.

The other part of it is that it was really a developer-led experience. It was always a struggle to get merchants at any of those Magento events. It did spawn something in Europe, and Magento right now is making a resurgence there, but it's pretty flat here in the U.S. I serve on one of the committees for the Magento Association, which has now taken over the name, and I think all of that is unique.

Imagine if Shopify were to spin off an open-source, free version of itself and have some association keeping track of a community. I don't think that's going to happen."

Key takeaway

Magento's early success wasn't just about the technology. It was a developer-led movement with its own culture, its own events, and eventually its own governing association — something no other major platform has tried to recreate since. That kind of organic community is difficult to manufacture, and it's part of why the Magento era still gets talked about the way it does.

Right now, AI is making platforms feel less valuable.

Hess: Teasing out the ask here — does AI make platforms more or less valuable in your opinion?

Peterson: "Right now, I think it's making platforms less valuable. I mentioned earlier that I had offboarded from a service, and one of the questions was, 'Did you rebuild our service with AI?' That's perfectly feasible depending on how complicated it is. You're not going to rebuild BigCommerce or Commercetools with AI overnight, but a lot of people are going down that custom route for no reason at all.

I've talked to the CEO of VTEX quite a bit, and he talks about this idea that 90% is good enough. You'll pay an agency half a million dollars to get you that extra 10%, or pay 50 bucks a month for something that gets you 90%. That's where AI plays a very valuable role, but don't overuse it. You don't need it to do everything on your site. You just need it for the things that get you your biggest wins, and watch your token usage.

I saw the CEO of Zapier say a company had used up all their tokens for the entire year in four months, when they could have used a simple if-then statement in Zapier and never touched a token."

Key takeaway

AI is lowering the cost of building custom solutions, which means platforms can no longer coast on being the only option. The pressure now is to prove they deliver more value than a team could patch together on their own, especially as "good enough" custom builds chip away at the case for buying rather than building.

Merchants want sovereignty, not to rent their future.

Hess: Will merchants ultimately own the customer relationship in an agentic world? Everyone's fighting for it, and the value in the stack comes from whoever owns that intelligence layer. Is that layer portable, or are merchants held hostage by their own stack?

Peterson: "This is actually a Roy Rubin statement — he thinks websites will be dead in the next few years, that the whole shopping experience will just happen within something like ChatGPT. I believe merchants want to own their experience. That's the most important thing. You might be renting your data from a SaaS platform or housing it somewhere else, but you still want to own the experience.

The same push and pull that happened with 'I need an Amazon store, I don't need an Amazon' is happening again with AI. Do you want to give up your customer experience to Amazon? Do you want it to live inside Gemini, where it's basically a Google card that says, 'here's where you go,' but also hands your competitors to that same customer in the same breath? Unless you're a truly unique brand, you're just a commodity. That's exactly what happens on Amazon. You're just a commodity."

Key takeaway

As AI surfaces multiply, from chatbots to answer engines to agent-driven shopping, the risk isn't losing a sale. It's losing ownership of the relationship entirely. Brands that hand their customer experience over to a third-party AI surface are betting on being remembered as something more than a commodity, and that's a bet only the strongest brands can actually win.

Autonomous buying agents are coming sooner than you think.

Hess: What's a prediction everyone thinks is crazy, but you believe it?

Peterson: "I do think those little buying agents are going to be running around buying stuff for us. At first, they're going to give you a wall of a hundred choices, and you're going to have a book longer than any James Michener novel to read. But they'll figure out how to refine it down to a bullet list of five choices, and you're going to buy one. I think that's what we're going to see sooner than we think, even though everybody thinks it's not going to happen.

The commodity purchases are a no-brainer. I just want the cheapest paper towels I can get. But what I don't like is an agent buying something on my behalf and then leaving me to deal with the returns. That happens to me once, and I'm annoyed. It happens twice, and I'm done. I'm never doing it again."

Key takeaway

Agentic buying is easy to overhype and easy to dismiss, and Peterson does a little of both on purpose. The technology is coming faster than most expect, but trust will be won or lost on the boring stuff: whether agents actually understand a shopper's preferences, and whether the returns process is painless enough that a bad pick doesn't sour someone on the whole idea.

AI can write it. A human still has to check it.

Travis Hess: You made a comment about governance being one of the most valuable things going forward, regardless of how content gets produced. Do you agree?

Peterson: "Absolutely. I actually have an AI detection tool, and I'm always training it. Even if you're writing something yourself, people perceive it differently now. I've called out other people, asking, 'Did you actually write this?' And they'll say, 'Yes, that's just how I write.' Okay, but it sounds like AI now. Unfortunately, if we think about it, AI got its style from everybody else, so if you write that way, you're getting punished for it.

My new mantra is: don't let your content go out before a human reads it. I made a gamble last year and bought a company that has human beings write content, thinking I was buying at the trough of people not wanting humans involved. I was wrong. People still aren't valuing humans enough in content.

I came up with a landing page idea with a cow chewing green cud, with cucumber spots on it. I don't think ChatGPT is going to come up with that. That's my idea, and I'm going to hold onto it."

Key takeaway

AI can produce content at scale, but scale isn't the hard part anymore. The differentiator is whether a human actually shaped the idea and checked the output before it went live. As AI-generated writing becomes harder to tell apart, the brands that protect a human point of view in their content will be the ones that still sound like themselves.

The final word

Openness keeps showing up in every corner of this conversation — open-source culture, open opinions, open platforms, and, increasingly, an open question about what AI actually deserves ownership over.

Brent's take across the entire conversation comes back to the same idea: nothing gets easier by handing over control. Magento's community couldn't be bought or replicated because it was built by developers who cared. AI doesn't make platforms less necessary, but it does force them to prove their value instead of assuming it. Merchants who protect their sovereignty and keep a human in the loop on content will end up more differentiated, not less, in a market where everyone has access to the same tools.

None of this suggests AI is a mistake or that platforms are dying. It suggests the winners will be the ones who stay honest about what still requires a human, a community, or a genuine point of view, and who resist the urge to hand any of it over just because a shortcut exists.

If you want the full conversation, listen to "Keeping Commerce Weird Podcast: Platform Hunger Games: Open Platforms, Open Opinions" on Spotify.