Vendor-neutral advisory and engineering expertise are brought together under one team to help organizations move from planning to implementation
Forte Group has launched Intelligent Commerce, a new practice aimed at helping organizations overcome the execution gap that can undermine commerce and AI programmes when strategic advice and technical delivery are separated across different providers.
Through Intelligent Commerce, commerce strategy, AI advisory and implementation are delivered by a single accountable team through ForteNext, Forte Group’s commerce and Salesforce delivery arm.
The conventional model often separates strategy from execution. A consulting business may develop a roadmap and leave before implementation begins, while an implementation partner may be asked to deliver technology without the strategic rationale or business case that informed the original plan. Intelligent Commerce brings these responsibilities together.
Organizations can enter the practice through commerce strategy and optimization, AI strategy for commerce, or platform selection and procurement advisory. All three services are vendor-neutral and can be used independently or in combination. From these starting points, clients can move into solution architecture, systems integration, composable and headless commerce architecture, data and AI infrastructure, and go-live support without changing teams.
The delivery model spans five stages: Assess, Prioritize, Plan, Transform and Optimize. High-value AI opportunities are identified and baselined within two to four weeks, with board-ready ROI reporting put in place from the beginning.
“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.”
Intelligent Commerce is platform-agnostic, allowing it to work alongside existing commerce technology or support businesses assessing whether replatforming is appropriate. ForteNext’s recent delivery experience includes a Salesforce Commerce Cloud implementation for Armor Express that generated more than $500,000 in revenue during its first three months, a B2B dealer portal and 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.”
For organizations seeking a defined starting point, the practice offers a fixed-fee Discovery Workshop delivered over a small number of weeks. The workshop results in a commerce maturity snapshot, a prioritized selection of high-impact AI use cases, a platform health assessment and a 90-day action plan, all presented in an executive briefing. Clients are not required to continue beyond the workshop.
Intelligent Commerce is available immediately to mid-market and enterprise organizations in healthcare and life sciences, financial services, logistics, software and SaaS, manufacturing, retail and higher education.
Further information is available at fortegrp.com.