AI Commerce Best Practices
A practical guide to identifying, prioritizing, and scaling AI across modern commerce, written by the experts at McFadyen Digital.
What You'll Learn
Apply AI to Real Commerce Problems
Make Smarter Investment Decisions
Build AI That Scales and Lasts
About the Book
AI Best Practices for Commerce is a hands-on reference for business and technology leaders navigating the rapid adoption of AI in commerce. Written by the McFadyen Digital team, the book draws on decades of experience in ecommerce, marketplaces, and enterprise platforms.
Rather than focusing on tools or theory, the book is organized around real business use cases and end-to-end commerce value streams, helping leaders move from pilots to sustained results.
In this book, you’ll find:
What's Inside the Book
AI’s Role in Modern Commerce
The book begins by establishing why AI has become a core capability in commerce rather than a standalone initiative. It explains how AI fits into enterprise strategy, where organizations typically struggle, and what conditions need to be in place before meaningful results are possible.
This section covers data readiness, organizational alignment, and the human dimension of AI adoption, helping leaders understand what it really takes to move beyond experimentation.
Practical AI Use Cases Across the Commerce Lifecycle
At the core of the book is a detailed collection of AI use cases organized around the four phases of commerce: Market, Sell, Fulfill, and Support.
Each use case focuses on a specific business problem and explains how AI is applied in real operating environments today. Examples show how leading organizations are improving forecasting, personalization, merchandising, pricing, fulfillment, customer service, and operational efficiency.
ROI evaluation tools help teams compare opportunities, prioritize investments, and decide which initiatives to pursue first.
Scaling AI with Discipline and Trust
The final section focuses on execution at scale. It addresses the practical realities of adoption, implementation, and governance as AI moves into daily operations.
Readers learn how organizations align AI initiatives with business goals, measure cost and return, manage organizational change, and embed accountability into workflows. The section also covers governance, responsible operation, and trust, showing how mature organizations make AI dependable, transparent, and sustainable over time.
About the Author
With 20+ years of hands-on experience across hundreds of digital commerce and marketplace projects, Tom McFadyen is a pioneer of platform commerce. As founder and CEO of McFadyen Digital, he has helped some of the world’s most recognizable brands design, launch, and optimize enterprise marketplaces that now generate tens of billions in annual revenue.
Tom is a respected leader and frequent contributor to NRF, YPO, and EO communities. This book brings together the collective expertise of McFadyen’s global team of strategists, architects, and implementers — making it the most practical and complete marketplace reference available today.
Contributors include:
- Jeff Mikos – Writing, Editing
- Devon Hillard – Editing, Proofreading
- Martin Rafael Perrota – Writing, Editing
- Vivek Harikrishnan – Writing
- Don Davis – Editing, Proofreading
- Mark Brohan – Editing, Proofreading
- Thiago da Silva Cruz – Layout and Design
- Sandro Batista – Illustrations
Digital Future—Together
