Every year the flavour changes
Every few years our industry falls in love with another Kool Aid “silver bullet”.
A new technology arrives which builds expectations and produces success stores. Conferences fill their agendas with it, and LinkedIn fills with opinions about it.
Every industry has its Kool Aid, and the digital/eCommerce industry has been like this for as long as I can remember.
One technology after another becomes the answer to almost every business problem and each time the name changes but the pattern is the same.
The flavour changes but the pattern is the same. In the past it was ecommerce platforms, Mobile APPs, juggernaut marketplaces, headless/composable architectures, and now its AI.
Without realising it, businesses stop asking: "What future are we trying to create?"
And instead start asking: "How do we implement this?"
That's where expensive mistakes begin.
The Kool Aid Trap
To be clear, this isn't a criticism of technology vendors.
Innovation moves our industry forward, and companies like Adobe, Shopify and many others continue to push what is possible. Their job is to build great products and paint a picture of what those products can enable.
The Kool Aid never comes from a single source. It comes from our own industry ecosystem…
- Vendors provide the ingredients.
- Agencies add flavour.
- Conference speakers stir the mix.
- LinkedIn keeps topping up the glass.
Eventually, the narrative becomes accepted wisdom. It’s human nature to gravitate to what’s new, what’s innovative, and what everyone is talking about: the buzz.
Businesses don't make poor technology decisions. They fall into a trap of answering the right technology question at the wrong time: too soon.
The responsibility sits with business leaders to decide when to have technology discussions that guides their future. And whether that future is right for their business and their customers.
Avoiding the Kool Aid Sugar High
Businesses rarely make bad technology decisions; they make them too early. Questions such as…
- "Should we move to Shopify?"
- "Do we need AI?"
- "Is composable the answer?"
Are all great questions! They just should not be happening until a business understands what it’s trying to achieve.
And when the sugar high of the Kool Aid takes over, I have been witness to projects delivered exactly as planned, only for the business to discover very little had changed.
- The technology worked.
- The commercial outcome didn't.
It's OK to Sip the Kool Aid
There is nothing wrong with paying attention to the latest ideas. Good leaders stay curious.
The businesses that make better decisions don't ignore innovation.
They simply refuse to let hype dictate the order in which they think.
Technology should enable the future your business is trying to create. It should never define it.
Every major technology decision shape the experiences you create, and ultimately what your business becomes.
That's why technology decisions are never just technology decisions.
They are business evolution decisions.
So by all means, take a sip.
Just make sure you are still the one deciding where your business is headed.
Sip don’t gulp.
This article was as tagged as AI eCommerce , Best Practice , Digital Strategy , eCommerce Consulting