How AI Is Transforming E-Commerce with Zero Code | Kumar Senthil, CEO of Firmly

Welcome to the Biz to Biz Podcast, your number one source for all business news. Don't forget to follow B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz Podcast on YouTube. Interviews, insights, payment news, and real business talk every week. Hit subscribe, link in description. You're now watching B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz Podcast hosted by Allen Kopelman, powered by Nationwide Payment Systems, the number one solution for payment processing. Hey everybody, welcome to today's episode of B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz Podcast. Sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems and our new gateway, NPS1, that does everything from API payment links, webhooks, and more. For more information, go to nationwidepaymentsystems.com. And thank you for listening to today's podcast. And we have a special guest. All the guests are special. And we, you know, we always try to bring on interesting conversations here and talk about things that are relevant and in the news that, that people are talking about to educate business owners. So today we have Kumar Senthil from Firmly.ai, and we're going to be digging into agentic commerce, AI agents, and how that is all— what is going on with that in the world today. So introduce yourself to the audience, Kumar.

Thank you. Thank you for having me on the show, Allen Kopelman. So to introduce myself, I'm Kumar Santhil, who is the CEO for Formly. Before starting Formly, I used to run Samsung.com, and we built the e-commerce platform for Samsung, rolled out to 20 countries, and built the business from a $50 million to a billion-dollar-plus business. And, uh, and prior to that, I built a goods business for Groupon. And prior to that, I was at Microsoft, launched Office 365 and Windows Azure as a part of the V1 team. Those are all fun experiences. And what led me to start this company was basically I was looking at the space where, you know, when I was at Samsung, a lot of partners would come and pitch me saying, hey Kumar, I can help sell Samsung products in different places. And I just says, oh, that's great. So, uh, but then the key kicker would be that I need to integrate with them, right? I was like, okay. I did few, my share of integrations, and then I realized, man, I cannot integrate my way out of this. New party, new channels, new, you know, destinations that this is keep coming interesting ones. And then I kept integrating, but then it became untenable, right? So as you integrate more and more, then it becomes burden of maintaining the integration. Some integrations worked because they produced orders. Some just didn't produce anything. So then once something didn't produce, next time you go ask the team saying, hey, can you do the on-board integration? They look at you as in, what are we talking here? So are you not learning, Kumar? What are you talking, man? So it becomes a burden for the product leaders saying, okay, how do you try to innovate? Bring in new customers, new channels, but at the same time not, you know, taking on this integration burden or integration tax. That's where I start thinking, okay, this is not going to be a Samsung problem, it's going to be a global problem. How do we handle this? How do we tackle this? So that's how we started the company, and the North Star for the company was zero change for merchant. I love the engineers, but if I have to talk to any engineer in any company, then which means it's not going anywhere because, okay, always have a, you know, 18 months of roadmap and, and adding one more thing to the roadmap means it's just not going to go anywhere. So that's where we started with this thing. How can we come up with a tech that we don't have to ask the engineers to do anything on the merchant side, right? So that's how we started the journey. And true to that North Star, we're still being able to—

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To hold that, you know, principle together. And we've been able to do it. So for us, for a merchant to enable Agent eCommerce, they don't have to do any engineering work. That's how we started the company and we've been able to do it. But I'll let you pass next. I hope so.

Somebody has an e-commerce site, you can help them with Agent eCommerce.

Correct. With no engineering work needed. Zero.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

So what's the— so how does— so how does that help a business to make more sales?

Correct. So now, as a merchant, right, as an e-commerce merchant, you want to sell in, you know, any LLMs or social platforms or publishers on all these new upcoming channels, CTV and so on. Because organically you may get— you may be able to attract certain population, but then there is a different set of population, you know, be available in different segments. You, you probably have to go and figure out how to get yourself into those, each one of those channels to try to get new audiences or new customers. And to do that, you will have to do the integration. That's where the blocker comes in and saying, okay, most of the merchants, they get excited initially saying, oh, I want to sell in this channel, new channel. But then what do I have to do? Then I have to integrate. Okay, it stops right there. Right, right. So, so that is where we come in and we tell the merchant, listen, once we, we basically go and integrated the merchant. Right? So we understand a website, how it talks to its backend, and then we connect to the same mechanism. For example, you go to say bestbuy.com and you add an item to a cart. There is some set of a mechanism that's used to talk to the backend. So we understand like that. There are 72 integration points in a merchant's website. Our AI platform does the inferencing and understand all those points, how it talks to it, and generates code to talk to the same backend.

So besides Best Buy, smaller businesses can use this too?

Any size. It doesn't matter. As long as you have a e-commerce website, we can enable it.

Okay. So, you know, everybody throws around a lot of terms today— AI, agentic commerce, You know, we got e-commerce, you know, then we talk about all these AI agents and AI-assisted shopping, right? And there's been some talk about like, oh, what if, you know, you had an AI-assisted shopper and they had your credit card and the AI-assisted shopper, you know, went I, Robot or went Terminator, right? And, and started charging your card everywhere. So what kind of, you know, how is all that like getting worked out, like in the, in the whole world? I know you're laughing, but these are things that are being discussed, you know, around the, you know, around in the payments world, you know, when I'm at conventions or I'm talking to people, you know, this is the stuff that people bring up. They're like, oh, you know, what, what's going to happen if somebody's AI, you know, even a card issuer, right? Somebody gets a hold of my Capital One and goes crazy, right? Charges up $40,000, $50,000. All of a sudden I'm getting all kind of deliveries from everywhere, right? But you know, how is all that, you know, being controlled?

Yeah, great, great question. That is in fact indeed is, is a, is a real threat. And if, if it, if it, uh, you know, if an agent goes wild Now, there are two aspects to it. One, the autonomous purchasing agent as we speak today still don't exist. They don't exist.

Right.

Right. So basically, Allen, can you pause this recording for a second? Okay, so as I was explaining, so the autonomous purchasing agent as a concept still don't exist yet, meaning, I mean, there may be one or two fringe scenarios that may be existing in all LLMs and all use cases where a customer is present today. Right, right. So the only plausible situation right now could be that an agent, once a customer has identified a specific product— for example, let's say you want to buy a TV and, and you know what TV you're buying— then you can say, tell an agent saying, okay, I want to buy this TV when the price drops to X.

Right, right.

So which means the product discovery part is you already finalized. It's just that somebody is monitoring the price for you, and then when it gets to the, the whatever threshold you're set, it can go and make a purchase. So which means there is a clear purchase intent that is attached to that request, right? You, Allen, as a customer, you're authorizing that agent saying when the price drops below $500 for this particular TV, buy it for me. And by the way, this authorization I'm giving it up to 30 days, right? Whatever, right? So you're giving explicit instruction with a purchase intent that can be attached to an agent. And now when that goes downstream to make the transaction, if the agent goes let's just say the price is $1,000 and the agent tries to make a purchase as a rogue agent, right?

The rogue agent.

Rogue agent. Now, if it had the purchase intent, it's carrying the purchase intent along with it, right? Then when it— when the purchase intent goes downstream to the PSP, when it— to— for the authorization, it will get rejected. Because, you know, the purchase intent is authorized only for $500, right? Purchase price is $1,000, so the rogue agent cannot, you know—

yeah, I guess you would have to use like a virtual card and put a limit on it so that way you can control it more. I did an experiment in OpenAI, so I put in there that I wanted to buy some headphones, noise-canceling headphones to wear on the airplane. So I I don't hear any noise. I don't hear people talking, kids crying, right? Because I was going on a long plane trip and I got to have these headphones. So what I did was, is I put that in OpenAI and then I saw the price was more than I wanted to spend. So I said, when you see this on sale, notify me. You know, it sent me a, it sent me a, it sent me an email. Said, oh, these are— you can get them, they're on sale now. Instead of $399, they're $189. And then, you know, I went and bought them. So it's pretty crazy, like what, you know, even on Amazon you can say, you know, when you don't want to buy, you know, you put something to the— you can tell it you don't want to buy, you're looking for a product, and then A few days later, you might get an email or, or a little push notification from them saying, oh, the price of this product dropped, or it just shows up in your feed when you log in showing what's on sale of things that you bought before, you know. So, Reed, you know, merchants, business owners, right? So how, how soon do you think it's going to be when You know, like, how, how, how, let's, let's ask a better question. Like, how big of a, of an e-commerce merchant do you have to be where you can afford to, you know, implement all this AI commerce so that you can bring, uh, more business in to your business?

So, I mean, for, I mean, as an industry, it is evolving. Because there's— this is right now, it's all infrastructure is getting built out, right? One is the network level, which Visa, MasterCard, Amex, Discover, they're doing whatever they have to do. And then there's PSPs are getting ready for some aspects of it. And, and PSPs are also looking at saying, okay, how can I also play the role of, you know, cart and catalog cart and checkout orchestration? But, and then they are all taking different approaches for whatever reason, they are taking different approaches. But they all converge to one solution of enabling agent e-commerce across different platforms. Right. And the mass scale adoption could have got accelerated had Gemini and OpenAI and and others have driven this more broadly. But there is a bit of a start-stop, uh, actions that has happened, uh, and which has slowed down a little bit. But I, I think that it is just slowing down to accelerate again. That's how I see it. Yeah, it's going to happen.

Yeah, I've seen where Perplexity, if you go in and ask a question about certain products, you will get ads in Perplexity. They have, you know, it'll say ad. I haven't seen that yet in like Claude or OpenAI because I go in and I test them just to test, you know, just for fun to see like what's, what, what's going on or what did they change or, you know, I watch the videos or things like that. So, you know, so, so, you know, businesses, you know, everybody's sitting around going, oh, AI, what do I do? What do I do? Everybody's sitting around, you know, wondering, you know, how are they going to take advantage of this whole AI boom that's going on, right?

Right.

And how are— and how are they going to handle it? And, you know, there's been issues with tokens and token usage and the prices of the tokens going through the roof. And, you know, and it's kind of like Bitcoin when everybody was mining crypto and using up a ton of electricity and getting a massive electric bill, right? And now we're having the same thing go on with, with, with AI. So, you know, I mean, are we going to see like payment processors and gateways and shopping carts like WooCommerce and companies like that, um, you know, start to partner with agentic commerce companies to bring AI commerce to their merchants? Like, is that where you see this kind of, kind of going, or is it going to be merchants like installing some kind of plugin on their website to enable all of this?

No, I mean, every merchant in— I mean, the standard platforms like Shopify or others, uh, maybe, you know, there is a, a path, easier path for them to enable agent e-commerce. Whereas, you know, non-standard platforms, Magento or Salesforce or custom platforms, and even to a big extent, even WooCommerce sites, they're all not standard. Everybody have their customized, whatever they want customized to their needs. So which means it makes it harder for themselves to just plug into the AI platforms.

Yeah, I saw where Shopify was at one point, you know, made a big announcement. Oh, we're going to have a button. You enable your Shopify store and magically all your product is going to appear inside OpenAI. And then that got— that ended like really quick for them. So I think, you know, Everybody's just sitting and waiting. So, you know, you founded this company, so this is like probably the fastest moving technology, okay, that I've seen in my lifetime, okay? I mean, AI is just from one day to the next, something is going on, right? So how do you know how— and, and definitely I think AI companies in general, you know, you know, have to balance, you know, innovation, you know, what is the real-world commercial adoption of whatever it is that's AI, and also, you know, build trust. That's probably the biggest one is, is so many of these AI products that come out and they flop, you know, or they don't live up to like what they're doing, or companies ran into problems where all of a sudden their token usage was through the roof and they have to tell the customers, oh, sorry, this was $99 a month, now it's $999, right? And I've seen that, I've seen that happen. Or they just shut down, or they cut back what they can do. So how, how are you balancing that? And, and through, through all the things that are going on so that you're ready when, when— because you're like in a— you're like in a race, right? You're over here building what you're building, and then everything else is coming up, you know, the credit card companies, the, the credit card processors, the card issuers, the gateways, all the platforms. Like, how is that, you know, you have to manage like what's going on and watch what everybody else is doing so that your platform can be, you know, functional at when it's ready to— when everybody's ready.

Yeah. So good thing is we started 6 years ago.

It's what?

We started the company 6 years ago.

Oh, wow. Okay. You were really ahead of time.

Way ahead of time. And even before the term agent e-commerce existed, we were doing this. And because, as I was explaining earlier on, that I anticipated new channels would come up. Now, LLM is a, is a new channel. That's one of the channels of 10 others we enable, right? And, uh, because we had the head start, we actually, uh, had time to understand all the nuances, all the complexities involved in a, in a e-commerce platform. Like a diverse, uh, a variety of e-commerce platforms. There is a custom platform, there is standard platforms and semi-custom platforms and so on. Because we, we've had that intrinsic knowledge, now we're able to accelerate things as the AI is becoming more and more, you know, uh, powerful. So that's one. Uh, number two is this no-code solution which I talked about. Nobody has except us.

That's definitely going to be a big differentiator in the market, especially for smaller businesses.

Exactly. Even large businesses, it is super helpful because they all have their own business to run and they have complexities to deal with. They would rather just make it easy. If we go make it easy for them, they're very happy, right?

You want to put— people want to push the easy button. But a lot of times when it comes to technology, smaller businesses are kind of shut out because they don't have the money, money, or the force to implement some of these technologies.

Exactly. So we make it easy for all types of merchants. So that's number one. Number two is also we're, we're a neutral party, which means we work with pretty much PSPs and issuing banks or whomever that may be, the networks. And so we're a neutral party, so we can work with everybody. So that gives, you know, a lot of players to work with us rather than— because they all go try to do themselves and quickly learn that, okay, this is way harder than we thought. Then they turn around and say, okay, whom can we partner? And we become the obvious candidate. Because we've been talking to pretty much everybody for the last 4 or 5 years. They all know we exist. And now this market is ripe for this type of solution. They all come to us and says, okay, how can we partner? There is— in the coming months, there's a lot of big announcements on our partnerships are going to come. I can't share right now yet because it's—

Mom, you gotta hear some secrets. No, I'm just kidding.

They're coming up soon. As a major partnership. So they all are going to accelerate things in the market as well, for them as well as for the whole ecosystem.

So, so like, if you had to take a guess, when do you see, like, in another year, or like you see like this, this starting to like happen, you know, soon?

It's gonna happen soon, and probably in this holiday season you would see the ramp happening, but mostly the infrastructure buildout is happening this year and with a reasonable ramp in Q4 and next year, definitely it will, it will go.

So if a business owner has a website, should they be looking at your company or should they just be watching? Just, huh?

Just go to firmly.ai and there is what we call is a Firmly Connect.

Right.

It's a product you can just sign up free to sign up. Anybody can sign up.

Oh, okay. And then you can sign up now.

Yes.

Oh, okay. So you can sign up now. Then what happens after you sign up?

Once you sign up, you get to choose where you want to sell.

Okay.

And we, we, we can go live like tomorrow. Oh, wow.

Okay. So it's only people like selling e-commerce. What about informational websites and things like that?

I mean, for them, I don't know what can we enable. There's not really much we can do. No.

Okay.

I don't think something, then obviously happy we can help you to sell more and reach different audiences if you're not selling anything.

Well, everybody's selling something, but, you know, sometimes you have to go, you know, so I imagine a lot of companies that are selling, you're listening to this podcast and you want to get AI enabled on your website, you got to visit Kumar's website, firmly.ai, and you can find them on LinkedIn, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

And what other tips do you have for businesses besides sign up now so that you can get— get— be— be in the— be a, uh, it's a summer special to get it signed up for free.

It's what A summer special. You're just to get it there for free to sign up.

So you're giving it away for free?

To sign up, obviously.

Oh, you sign up for free. Okay. All right. Something costs somewhere, some in there. I don't know what it is. I guess you can find out more about, about, you know, because this is coming, you know, we're seeing talk about this, you know, from Visa. I was at a convention, they talked about it. Other card brands are talking about it. There's podcast talking about it. I think P— Agenda Commerce is also going to spur the use of, um, virtual cards that people can set to certain amounts so that they don't get a Terminator card that goes wild and half of Amazon gets delivered to your house. So, you know, there's a lot of things going on with that. So if you have to give business owners 3 tips if they're an e-commerce business right now, they're selling something on their website. What should they do today to get ready for, for, for the AI explosion?

Yeah, there are 2 or 3 things. One is obviously we have just sign up with us. We help you to enable selling in different channels. Number 2, is if a customer comes to your own website and they have questions about your product, because nobody has patience to read through all the content on your website. You may have brilliant content on your website, but nobody has patience to read it. They all want instant answers. So we provide a, a shopping assistant on your own website. And all you need to do is just put one line of script we provide on your website. Instantly you will get a shopping assistant, AI-powered shopping assistant running on your site.

That's amazing. Okay.

Right. So now this will answer all the questions on your website, content on your website. And if you ask something else outside of the shopping experience, then it will say, sorry, I'm a shopping assistant. I can answer only shopping questions, right?

Okay.

And it can return— talk about your return policy, refund policy. It can talk about your order status, everything about your business. It can talk about it. And sometimes what happens is customers may ask some questions where your website may not have content, but it may be a relevant question. Now we record those Okay. And give you a report saying that, hey, dear merchant, here are the questions customers asked on your website but you don't have answers to. So now as a merchant, you can now see the dashboard and says, okay, great question, here is the answer for that. You can just update the answers and it goes into the AI memory. So next time a customer comes and asks same question, it will answer that.

Wow, that's amazing.

Yeah. So that way, because a lot of times what happens is customers may have real intent to purchase, transact on your site, but they come and they didn't find an answer to the question they had, so they leave, which means you did all the hard work paying for advertisement or SEO, whatever, and then you brought the customer to your site. And they didn't find the content, whatever they're looking for, or they didn't find an answer quickly. Now they're leaving. So that's, that's a real loss for you as a merchant. We solve that problem for you.

Okay, so that's one, two. Is there a third one?

Third one is we're easy to work with. Okay, right. So no engineering needed. Just, you know, easy conversation and you're up and running immediately.

All right, well, thank you for joining us on the podcast today. Was super interesting, and I would encourage anybody, if you have a website, especially an e-commerce website, you're selling something on your website, visit Firmly.ai and see what that can do to start jumpstarting your business into getting into the world of AI, bringing AI to your e-commerce website. And thank you for joining us. Any final words, Kumar?

Yeah, definitely. And in terms of security, we take it super seriously. We're end-to-end, you know, we're PCI compliant, DSS 4.0 certified company, and we make sure the data, especially the PCI data, is not stored, never stored anywhere on the pipe. It's, you know, transmitted securely to the merchant so that the merchant remains the merchant of record. In all our use cases, we keep the merchant as the merchant of record. They get all the first-party data and zero operational overhead because there's a lot of new solutions people are spinning up, right? What they call as a— the solution, which I'll just mention here, is called a store sync. The store sync technology, uh, some of the competitors are having— what happens is, as a merchant, the step number one you have to do is you have to go integrate into their store. Oh, okay, their store sync. Now, once— okay, fine, I'll bite the bullet and I go to do the integration. Life doesn't end there. Life just starts for that if you're there, because the nightmare starts right there. You have to make sure whenever you update your price or your inventory in your website, you have to update the store sync, right? Otherwise, this store sync is going to be reflecting a different price to the LLMs or wherever they are enabling. And you are going to be— see, customers going to see two different price. They come to your website, they'll see a different price. When they go to LLM, they'll see a different price. That's a very bad experience for a customer perspective. You lose the trust as a customer. They lose trust on this.

People want— people don't want to get confused with what they're doing.

Exactly. All these infrastructure problems, we solve it by making sure you don't— as a merchant, we don't add any operational overhead. Because you know to operate your website, all your operational teams are clearly into it. So which means your inventory price updates, whatever happens on your website, it will real time reflect everywhere. Whatever channel we enable, they will see the same price on always.

Right. So it's basically like very little code to get going with firmly.ai.

Not very little, zero code.

Zero code.

It's very important.

Yeah, just, you're just basically saying like you drop a link in and you're ready to go, you're operational.

Exactly.

So yeah, this is a, I really appreciate you coming on. It was super educational for me. I hope anybody who's got an e-commerce store, you listen to this. This is a must-listen podcast and get on firmly.ai and get an account set up. So thank you for listening to B2B Vault today, the Biz to Biz Podcast. Everybody have a great day. Peace out. Carpe diem. Seize the day.