New practice brings vendor-neutral strategy and implementation together to eliminate the disconnect between planning and execution
Forte Group today announced the launch of Intelligent Commerce, a new practice designed to address a common barrier to commerce and AI investment: the separation of strategic planning from implementation, which can leave organizations paying for delays, misalignment and duplicated effort between teams.
Intelligent Commerce combines commerce strategy, AI advisory and implementation within one accountable team, delivered through ForteNext, Forte Group’s commerce and Salesforce delivery arm.
Organizations often turn to a consulting firm for a strategic roadmap before handing delivery to another provider, or appoint an implementation partner to build without a clear business case underpinning the work. Intelligent Commerce eliminates this transition by keeping strategy and execution connected from the outset.
The practice offers three primary entry points: commerce strategy and optimization, AI strategy for commerce, and platform selection and procurement advisory. Each service is vendor-neutral and can be commissioned independently, while organizations can also combine multiple services. Implementation can then progress directly into solution architecture, systems integration, composable and headless commerce architecture, data and AI infrastructure, and go-live support.
Engagements are structured across five phases: Assess, Prioritize, Plan, Transform and Optimize. The approach identifies and baselines the highest-value AI opportunities within two to four weeks, while establishing board-ready ROI reporting at the beginning of the engagement.
“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.”
The practice remains platform-agnostic and can support organizations working within their existing commerce environments as well as businesses considering a move to a different platform. Recent ForteNext projects include a Salesforce Commerce Cloud implementation for Armor Express that produced more than $500,000 in revenue within three months of launch, a B2B dealer portal featuring a 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.”
Organizations can start with a fixed-fee Discovery Workshop delivered over a small number of weeks. The workshop provides a commerce maturity snapshot, identifies the highest-impact AI use cases, assesses platform health and creates a prioritized 90-day action plan. These findings are delivered as an executive briefing, with no obligation to proceed with additional services.
Intelligent Commerce is now available to mid-market and enterprise organizations operating across healthcare and life sciences, financial services, logistics, software and SaaS, manufacturing, retail and higher education.
Further information is available at fortegrp.com.
