@sytaylor@Adyen The 'universal translator' framing is apt. On the terminal side of payments, the fragmentation is brutal before you reach the agent layer: one processor can mean several connection modes that behave differently. Agentic commerce lives or dies on that plumbing, not the model.
@gokulr@lennysan Lived this building a retail platform mostly solo. Code stopped being the constraint fast. The new bottleneck is deciding what not to build and getting the judgment calls right, pricing, permissions, migrations, the ones AI quietly gets wrong. It moved from typing to deciding.
In distribution, the margin does not live in the dashboard.
It lives in the boring plumbing nobody wants to own: price files, new-item files, vendor formats.
Own the plumbing.
The most valuable "AI for retail" we shipped this month uses zero models.
It pulls vendor price files off FTP/SFTP/email on a schedule and imports them, so nobody retypes a spreadsheet on Monday.
The model gets the headlines. The plumbing gets the hours back.
Onboarding a new vendor's CSV used to mean an engineer.
Now it is a template an operator edits, reusing the same import engine the catalog already uses.
No-code is not a buzzword when it deletes a ticket.