OUI the People makes each of its fragrances by hand in New York, using ingredients sourced around the world. Until this year, shoppers had to click up to four times to reach a product page, and the rich storytelling that made the brand worth buying also made the site load very, very, slowly.

Karen Young, OUI’s founder and CEO, spent years looking for "the magic person or the magic agency" to close the gap between storytelling on the brand’s website and effective conversion rate. She closed it herself this year with Codex, a GitHub repository, and a written set of rules for what the machine could and couldn’t touch.

58% of AI users say they’re producing work they couldn’t a year ago. Among more advanced users, that number climbs to 80%

- Microsoft, 2026 Work Trend Index
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Matt Maher, Founder and CEO of M7 Innovations, experienced this transformative moment himself when he spent a few hours with Claude Code and ended up building a new website. He won’t ultimately launch it, but it helped reframe the way he thinks about who can and should build with AI. In his work advising Fortune 500 brands on emerging technology, he has seen the strategy shift. Initially, organizations were focused on mass implementations of one specific model and hoped meetings would get shorter and teams would get more productive. Now, he explains, the real transformation is happening inside functions.

“The narrower the use case of the AI tool, the more powerful it becomes,” Maher told Future Commerce. The data is getting closer to the people who need it, and now AI is giving them the autonomy to actually do something with it. “The CFO can go into the dashboard. It doesn’t have to be the data scientist.”

This access brings inherent risk, especially when teams implement disparate tools without strategy or intention. Maher calls this “millions of solutions desperately looking for problems.” 

The antidote is a crawl, walk, run approach, with clean data at the foundation: 

• Crawl: Name the problem and determine if AI is the way to solve it
• Walk: Test in-market and learn along the way 
• Run: Implement and connect the systems, and monitor results 

“We’re close to technological parity with all of these tools,” Maher said. “It’s how you apply it and how you customize it within your business that will actually give you the outsized gains.” 

The “how” part of the conversation is inherently human, and it makes culture the real deciding force, for better or worse. 

Future Commerce spoke with two leaders to see what this looks like. While they live in two separate worlds—one a founder of a five-person fragrance company and the other a CIO of a national wine and spirits distributor—both show how AI is reframing the culture of commerce while putting power into operators’ hands

Teaching Codex the Brand’s Taste

Up to 76% of small businesses use AI, according to Goldman Sachs. While most report positive results, only 14% have fully embedded AI into their core operations. 

The data reaffirms the value of the crawl, walk, run approach Maher outlined earlier, especially since founders and owners typically spearhead these initiatives. OUI the People is one example of a brand on this journey, using AI to power a business built on craft, heritage, and storytelling.

Karen Young’s OUI the People is a multi-million-dollar fragrance and body-care brand sold on its own direct-to-consumer site and through retail partners including Nordstrom, Sephora, and REVOLVE. It’s also a brand powered by five full-time employees, including founder Young. 

The brand’s essence lies in its storytelling, a creative vehicle powered by Young herself. The heart of the website experience is a message from Young, who uses the real estate to make a promise of sorts. She noted that “scent was never just perfume. It was memory.” 

“OUI was created to bottle those moments and transform them into modern fragrances that feel intimate, transportive, and deeply personal.”

That promise is upheld through the product development process, as a small team hand-makes all fragrances in New York, with raw ingredients sourced globally. It’s sprinkled in every perfume bottle and told through stories that reveal the intention behind every fragrance name and combination of top, heart, and base notes. But Young realized she couldn’t commit the time or energy she wanted to ensure the eCommerce site effectively reflected her mission and vision. OUI the People had a 2019-era site that took up to four clicks to get customers to a PDP. The rich content that made the brand story shine also took too long to load, turning a rich experience into a major CX lag. 

“You were always trying to find the magic person or the magic agency,” Young said in an interview with Future Commerce. “Then you plugged in something else, and then the whole system would absolutely break…it got to the point where I can’t even say I owned [the experience] creatively because my capacity felt stifled between what I envisioned and what was feasible in-house or affordable with any agency.” 

Building a Site by Speaking Vision

As a non-technical founder, Young started tinkering with AI and has since made it the “engine” behind her brand’s story. She described it as the “intersection between real, honest, authentic storytelling, and AI supporting the engine of my company.” 

“AI isn’t helping our company grow,” she added. “It might be helping me scale in some elements, but it’s also freeing up my capacity to do what moves the needle for us as a fine fragrance brand—and that is storytelling beyond measure. It’s also tapping into culture and the genuine human side of what people want when they come to a brand for fragrance.” 

Young worked with her husband and his agency, Superculture, to develop the operating system and strategy that would eventually support a complete rebuild led by Codex. They developed a comprehensive brief that highlighted the goals and priorities, and used a GitHub repository as “the shared, versioned memory of the site.” Young also developed written rules for what Codex could and could not change; this was the source of truth that held everyone, and everything, accountable. She then used Codex for wireframing, chatting with it organically (using “real talk”) to build a model page for a single fragrance. Once she and Codex effectively iterated the experience to meet her vision, they scaled the design to other product pages and site sections. 

“I had to figure out how to merge culture and conversion rate optimization (CRO) into one comprehensive experience,” Young said.

Subculture handled the launch, including a final performance pass that reduced the homepage’s initial transfer by 94.1% on mobile and 89.6% on desktop.

The site relaunch has inspired Young to explore the other ways Codex can support her and her budding business. She is now building several agents, including a lifecycle agent and a digital chief of staff, to explore “how we can talk together like humans on the back end.” 

But Young also understands AI’s limitations. Her team oversees customer service, marketing, and finance, and she doesn’t see AI replacing those roles. Instead, her team should be “ready and willing” to use AI. For instance, she and her head of marketing have decided to invest more budget in pop-ups and in-person events to elevate the craft behind the brand. They used Claude to map the New Jersey and New York-area customer base and find the right pop-up partners that aligned with the highest-density areas. 

Young will share more of her story at VISIONS Summit on November 3, during a panel discussion focused on how proof of work is letting craft and heritage shine in the AI era. REGISTER HERE to be in the room.

Powering Valuable Decisions at Scale

Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits (SGWS), a wine and spirits distributor that operates in 47 US markets and Canada. Through its Travel Retail Sales & Export Division, brokerage operations extend to the Caribbean, as well as Central and South America. 

Within these operations, thousands of small decisions are made daily, including where to stock items and how to best route shipments. As SVP and Chief Information Officer, Stephen Bronson ensures his team makes the best possible decisions, with data, analytics, and AI rolling up into his purview. He offered insight into what AI implementation looks like for a larger, more complex organization, especially when teams have different operational mandates and micro-cultures. For him, it’s not about the “whiz-bang,” but practical models grounded in human experiences.

“AI adoption can’t be driven solely by IT,” Bronson said. “We can be the stewards, we can be the technical experts, and we can help build things, but it also can’t be just driven by business functions and leaders, either.” 

To embed AI thoughtfully into the culture, SGWS has adopted a governance model of sorts that includes the following stakeholders: The “executive committee,” which includes the CEO, CFO, President of Commercial Sales, Chief Strategy and Growth Officer, and Bronson himself, who acts as the “steward for the company and the conduit into our AI senior executive committee.” Then, there are the business leaders who identify where AI can solve real-world problems for the business. Beyond that, AI is “federated” across the entire business.

Bronson calls the arrangement a “symbiotic” approach, with everyone sharing responsibility. He has been with SGWS for a little more than a year, and the organization’s AI work has predated his tenure. But his goal was to implement a “methodical approach” built on a “community of practice” that encompasses three categories, each with its own success measures: Enablement, Augmentation, and Reinvention.

A team member using Claude or Copilot can measure productivity by getting a 15-hour task down to 20 minutes. Conversely, warehouse automation is measured through improved fill rates, order accuracy, and increased capacity in existing facilities.

“I think most organizations start with that enablement piece, mainly because it’s easy to create momentum. You can see immediate gains through productivity,” Bronson said. “But when we start thinking about ROI and savings, we’re looking at those augmentation and reinvention cases to help us mature. We look at these use cases as three different things, mostly because they require different investment levels and different measurement because they provide different value.” 

Following their rapid growth through mergers and acquisitions, Southern Glazer's faced operational fragmentation, with over 20,000 active reports across multiple legacy platforms leading to inconsistent metric definitions. In response, Sankar Chidambaram led an effort to streamline these into 600 certified metrics tied directly to core business processes, establishing a unified semantic layer as a single source of truth.

With this foundation, business users (even leadership) can submit data requests in plain English through a portal. Behind the scenes, specialized analyst and engineer agents build, test, and deploy custom reports for under 50 cents each.

Much like OUI’s strict guardrails, this governed structure grants non-technical leaders direct access to actionable insights without relying on dedicated data teams.

How Southern Glazer's Measures AI at Scale

As a large organization, SGWS looks at AI through the lens of different use cases and KPIs. But Bronson knows, perhaps better than most, that people are at the center of the journey. That’s why AI transformation is just as much a cultural shift as it is a technical one. He shared the components that go into that “community of practice,” so they can be adapted for other organizations: 

1. Education first. AI transformation can live and die by top-down mandates. Executive leadership needs to invest in ongoing education and enablement, and SGWS has made this a key investment.
   
   
2. Create forums for sharing. SGWS has developed forums where team members can learn from the real-life examples, experiences, and ideas of their peers. This is the heart of the “community” in “community of practice.”
   
   
3. The right community lead. The person running the company’s community of practice has a strong commercial and operational background in the business, but a deep passion for understanding AI. For this role to be successful, Bronson knew technical depth was secondary to community trust and cultural immersion.
   
   
4. Hiring the “AI native.” Bronson believes this is the next wave of the workforce, and the SGWS team is actively hiring people who can bridge technical and workflow gaps because AI has been so innate in their daily lives.
   
   

Bronson has found that when you provide the tools and forums for individuals to share their learnings and experiences, it can create a “groundswell” of enthusiasm.

“Once people see real examples—that somebody from California, for example, figured out how to do something better and then it gets spread out from a peer network and shared with somebody in New York—it spreads so quickly,” he said. “We love having our executive sponsors, and they’re very important for strategic direction and guidance. But these peer-to-peer learning and success stories are the most powerful tools in our kit.” 

‘AI-in-the-Loop’

Despite sharing some positive outcomes from SGWS’s AI efforts so far, Bronson made one clear distinction about the role he believes the technology should play in our lives: “There’s a common statement around AI that says ‘human in the loop,’ but I’ve gone on the record saying I don’t agree with that. I think it’s ‘AI in the loop,’ and it’s surrounded by humans.” 

Both cases show how AI is merely an enabler; a force for efficiency, iteration, and collaboration. For OUI the People, it helped a busy founder double down on the creative vision that initially inspired her to start a fragrance brand. For SGWS, it helped a massive community rally around a joint mission statement to serve its network of customers. 

And in both cases, AI is the conduit. It’s not the source material and certainly doesn’t replace the meaning behind each business and its people. 

Over the past two years, we have seen AI transform commerce. Now, it is doing the same to culture. And there is no better way to visualize and comprehend its impact than looking inside the four walls of a brand, whether that be in the leadership team, the customer support group, or associates in stores. 

“True connected commerce is this constellation of touchpoints that are all interconnected, all talking to each other, and the humans evolved to be the brand ambassadors of who they work for,” Maher said. With AI now empowering the organization, “this team can now essentially work together as a super team better than they ever were together.”