Forte Group Launches Intelligent Commerce Practice, Combining Vendor-Neutral Commerce and AI Advisory With the Engineering Team to Deliver It

New practice bridges the strategy-execution gap that holds back commerce and AI investment, placing planning and delivery under one accountable team

Forte Group has announced the launch of Intelligent Commerce, a new practice built to address a problem that derails most commerce and AI investments: strategy and delivery are typically owned by separate teams, leaving the client to absorb the costs that result from the gap between them.

Intelligent Commerce brings together commerce strategy, AI advisory and implementation under a single accountable team, delivered through ForteNext, Forte Group’s commerce and Salesforce delivery arm. Most organisations end up either hiring a consultancy that hands over a roadmap and walks away, or an implementation partner that starts building without any business case underpinning the work. Intelligent Commerce is designed to eliminate that handoff altogether.

The practice is structured around three entry points: commerce strategy and optimisation, AI strategy for commerce, and platform selection and procurement advisory. Each is vendor-neutral and each can function independently. Organisations may engage with one, two or all three, with implementation continuing from any of those starting points through solution architecture, systems integration, composable and headless commerce architecture, data and AI infrastructure, and go-live support.

Engagements are structured across five phases: Assess, Prioritise, Plan, Transform and Optimise. The highest-value AI use cases are identified and baselined within two to four weeks, with board-ready ROI reporting established from the outset.

“After more than 300 commerce implementations, we keep seeing the same pattern,” said Alex Kolesnichenko, Chief Technology Officer at ForteNext. “Organisations that attempt to replatform and adopt AI simultaneously, without a vendor-neutral roadmap guiding both workstreams, end up spending more and achieving less. Those that invest even a few weeks in planning first move considerably faster once execution begins. Intelligent Commerce exists to make that planning phase brief, objective and directly tied to what gets built.”

The practice is platform-agnostic and can work within existing commerce ecosystems or alongside organisations that are actively evaluating replatforming options. Recent delivery work by ForteNext includes a Salesforce Commerce Cloud implementation for Armor Express that generated more than $500,000 in revenue within three months of going live, as well as a B2B dealer portal featuring a custom product configurator for SoundOff Signal and a B2B marketplace migration for Procure Impact.

“A roadmap is only worthwhile if the team can actually execute against it,” said Maksym Koval, Chief Delivery Officer at ForteNext. “When strategy and delivery sit in different organisations, the plan gets reinterpreted the moment it changes hands, and re-scoping consumes the time a client believed they had saved. Holding one team accountable across the full engagement is what allows us to commit to a timeline at the start and stand behind it.”

Organisations can get started through a fixed-fee Discovery Workshop, which runs over a small number of weeks and delivers a commerce maturity snapshot, a shortlist of the highest-impact AI use cases, a platform health assessment and a prioritised 90-day action plan presented as an executive briefing. There is no obligation to proceed beyond that point.

Intelligent Commerce is available now to mid-market and enterprise organisations across healthcare and life sciences, financial services, logistics, software and SaaS, manufacturing, retail and higher education. Further information is available at fortegrp.com.