Commerce has outgrown the org chart

Eighty-three percent of commercial leaders say commerce is expanding faster than their organisation can adapt to it, and only about one in five say they run it profitably. Those two figures describe the same problem from different ends.

Channels were added one at a time, each with its own team, targets and technology. The customer experiences the result as one company. The company experiences it as six.

Where the margin goes

Duplicated technology, duplicated content production, and reconciliation work between systems that were never meant to agree. None of it appears as a line item called "fragmentation", which is why it survives budget reviews.

It shows up instead as a cost-to-serve that creeps upward while everyone reports hitting their channel targets.

Consolidate the layer, not the teams

The instinct is to reorganise people. The higher-return move is usually to consolidate the shared layer underneath them — catalogue, pricing, inventory, identity — and leave channel teams to do what they are good at on top of it.

Composable architectures earn their keep here, not because they are fashionable, but because they let one source of truth serve surfaces that will keep multiplying.

Sellers need the same thing buyers do

More than half of sales leaders name seller effectiveness as their priority, and around seventy percent are putting generative AI against it. The wins are concentrated in preparation and follow-up rather than in the conversation itself.

A seller who walks in knowing the account's history, open issues and likely objections is worth more than one with a faster way to log the call afterwards.