Composable commerce trends: A Q&A with Acquia CTO Dries Buytaert and commercetools CPO Kelly Goetsch. Acquia's co-founder and CTO Dries Buytaert and commercetools CPO Kelly Goetsch discuss composable commerce trends. Get the gist Acquia and commercetools discuss composable commerce, which allows businesses to build flexible, best-of-breed digital commerce solutions using open APIs. This approach enables faster innovation, personalized shopping experiences, and adaptability, helping merchants, marketers, and developers respond swiftly to changing market demands. AI-generated content may be inaccurate In January, Acquia announced the launch of its new Acquia Digital Commerce solution, developed in partnership with commercetools and Lucidworks. Acquia Digital Commerce helps deliver a much improved shopping experience across every channel the customer is using - whether that's a website, a mobile app, an in-store point-of-sale (POS) system, a call center, or otherwise. This is important because it helps increase sales. Acquia Digital Commerce is a "composable commerce" solution, which brings together best-of-breed components within an open architecture to meet a customer's specific needs. To learn more about composable commerce, Acquia sat down with Acquia's co-founder and CTO Dries Buytaert and commercetools CPO Kelly Goetsch. Q: First, what is composable commerce? Why is it a significant technology trend? Kelly: Before the composable movement, customer experience (CX) technology consisted of all-in-one, monolithic suites. If you wanted to reach your customer online, you used the content management system (CMS) that came along with your commerce platform. You had to use the whole commerce suite from top to bottom. There's a big problem with this approach: The notion that one vendor has the best of everything is a pipedream. Now, you can pick and choose solutions from different vendors and snap them together like LEGO bricks. You can choose best-of-breed vendors like commercetools that do one thing really well (in its case,). The goal is to assemble a catalog of APIs that developers can consume to build the best possible solution for their organization. You see this happening, not only in commerce, but also across industries like finance, telecommunications and travel. The API Economy is here, and more developers are focused on building open, interoperable systems. These systems are adaptable to change and can be easily customized based on business requirements. According to one survey, API adoption increased during the pandemic, and nearly three-quarters of developers plan to use even more APIs this year. The success of companies like Twilio and Stripe are evidence of API demand. Dries: Composable is a trend I've had an eye on for a while. In 2013, I wrote a blog post about "The Assembled Web," where you could snap together various parts of the digital experience with little to no coding. This trend has been accelerated by open source and is now a core part of its business at Acquia. Composable isn't a dramatic "rip and replace" event. Solutions can be adopted incrementally into an organization, much like open source. In open source, all it takes is a developer setting it up. There's no long enterprise sales cycle or procurement process. It spreads virally within the organization. There's an element of this easy adoption with composable. Organizations can start small and simple, and grow their footprint over time. Q: What does composable mean for customers or shoppers? Dries: The goal is to deliver the best possible shopping experience. Being able to pick and choose the best technology components for your specific industry or profile of shoppers can make their experience more personal and relevant. Kelly: For example, Apple is rumored to be introducing an augmented reality (AR)/virtual reality (VR) headset in the near future. With composable commerce, a company could be among the first to deliver a shopping app to their customers when these new wearables get released. This type of first-mover advantage can help companies increase both loyalty and revenue. Q: What's in it for merchants and marketers? Dries: The difference is significant. Commerce platforms tend to have complex integrations with many different systems including ERP, POS, CRM, warehousing, payments, product information and more. Because of the complexity and what is at stake, these systems tend to evolve slowly. This is a big contrast with the shopping experience. Marketers and merchants might want to make regular changes and optimizations to the shopping experience. Many of them want to experiment daily. When you decouple your commerce platform from your CMS, they can operate independently, and they can innovate at their own pace. With a monolith, you can't release new things at whim - instead you do it carefully and slowly in planned release cycles. Kelly: In the composable commerce model, the commerce platform is managed entirely by IT, with marketers controlling the frontend. Before, there was a split or hybrid model, which required marketers to submit IT tickets for every change. This process slows down innovation and can limit experimentation. Q: How does composable make developers' lives easier? Kelly: Composable makes the speed of feature implementation much faster. In a monolithic architecture, you had one big codebase, and everyone would check-in code changes there. When you were done making changes, you had to test the entire codebase. With composable architectures, smaller, individual teams can iterate in parallel. The API is the interface. That way, you can test new features easily and in an automated way. Development teams can iterate and release new features to production whenever they want to. They're no longer stuck waiting for a massive quality assurance (QA) cycle to complete. Q: Why is composable the best strategy for future-proofing the business? Kelly: If 2020 taught Acquia anything, it's that change is constant - whether that's political change, pandemic-related change or shifts in consumer tech preferences. Businesses need to be able to pivot quickly. The way you do that is through a composable architecture. Dries: Last year, Acquia saw some customers pivot to digital commerce after never using it all. Even if you already use digital commerce, you still want a lot of flexibility. Curbside pickups became a big thing in 2020, and required some changes to many commerce sites. The big lesson is don't rest on your laurels; you may still need to pivot. Q: How does a CDP help with omnichannel commerce? Dries: Just like a commerce monolith often has limited CMS capabilities, it also has limited user profile management capabilities. So it's very worthwhile to integrate a CDP into your commerce stack. A CDP is built to ingest data from every possible data source. These sources could be POS transactions, CRM or marketing automation platform data, support ticketing systems data, data from custom legacy databases, or otherwise. All of this data is integrated and used to build the ultimate customer profile. With a CDP, you can do smart merging of that data using machine learning to match different identifiers (multiple emails addresses, phone numbers, etc.). From there, the data is cleansed and deduplicated, so you can build more accurate customer profiles for personalization and targeted selling. Kelly: This data helps the retailer better understand the customer, regardless of which channel they're using - from in-store, to online, to any number of emerging devices. Q: One more question for its Drupal readers. How is commercetools different from Drupal Commerce? Dries: Drupal Commerce is used by 60,000 organizations. Most of these are smaller organizations compared to the average commercetools customer. I'd say the average Drupal Commerce customer does around $50,000 to $100,000 in transactions per year. Kelly: I agree that the biggest differences are in the size of the customer. Its typical customers are large retailers that process anywhere from $500 million to $3 billion in transactions per year across many different channels. Dries: You can probably mix and match parts of Drupal Commerce with commercetools. That's the point of a composable architecture - you can use the commerce components that work best for your organization and use case. Co-Founder, Executive Chairman Acquia Dries Buytaert is the original creator and project lead for Drupal and co-founder of Acquia. A noted expert in open source, he holds a PhD in computer science and engineering and has been honored as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Chief Product Officer commercetools

Lucidworks launches Model Context Protocol to reduce AI agent integration timelines by up to 10x. by GlobeNewswire Apr 08, 2026 6:08 pm New MCP capabilities enable organizations to seamlessly connect AI assistants to enterprise knowledge in minutes, saving as much as $150,000 per integration SAN FRANCISCO, April 08, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - Lucidworks, a leader in AI-powered search and discovery, today announced the launch of its Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, designed to help enterprises seamlessly and securely connect AI agents to crucial enterprise data-with little custom integration required. Early results indicate that enterprises can reduce AI integration timelines by up to 10x, save more than $150,000 per integration, and accelerate the rollout of AI-powered applications. "Under extreme pressure, enterprises often struggle to move quickly with AI, but the real challenge is not with the models; it's with the data feeding into models," explained Meychele Reis, Sr. Product Manager at Lucidworks. "Lucidworks' MCP Server provides a single, trusted connection between AI assistants and enterprise knowledge. Now organizations can deploy AI agents that are accurate, secure, and ready for real business use." MCP is a widely adopted standard for connecting widely used AI applications, such as Claude, to companies' proprietary data sources, enabling organizations to securely deploy their own AI agents to serve customer needs. Lucidworks MCP enables e-commerce companies to launch AI assistants that work with the latest product information, including part numbers, compatibility information, contract pricing, technical documents, and more. As a result, customers enjoy a better shopping experience with detailed, accurate answers to their search queries. Removing the Biggest Barrier to Enterprise AI As AI assistants such as Claude become the new interface for work, most organizations rely on custom integrations to connect them to internal systems, a process that is often complex, time-consuming, and difficult to scale. They also introduce risk, as inconsistencies can lead to incomplete, outdated, or unauthorized information being surfaced to employees or customers. Lucidworks MCP server addresses these concerns by eliminating complexity. Companies can now work with a single, standardized integration point that builds a secure connection between AI assistants and enterprise knowledge. With Lucidworks MCP, organizations can: * Connect AI assistants to enterprise data in minutes rather than months * Ensure responses are grounded in relevant, authorized information * Reduce engineering effort and ongoing maintenance * Enable consistent AI experiences across teams and applications Enabling AI That Works in the Real World Lucidworks MCP Server is designed to help enterprises move beyond AI experimentation and into production use cases that deliver measurable outcomes. By connecting AI assistants to the Lucidworks Platform, MCP ensures that every query is processed through existing relevance models, query pipelines, and security controls. This allows organizations to leverage their current search investments while improving the performance of AI-driven experiences. Lucidworks MCP key features include: * Proprietary retrieval quality powered by machine learning ranking, hybrid search, and intelligent content processing * Enterprise security controls, including document-level permissions, role-based access, and field-level security * Self-hosted deployment options for data sovereignty and compliance requirements * API-first architecture to support custom AI applications and integrations Accelerating Time-to-Value Lucidworks MCP helps organizations reduce the time and cost associated with AI integration while improving outcomes. By eliminating the need for custom integrations, teams can shift their focus from infrastructure to innovation, building AI agents that improve productivity, enhance customer experiences, and unlock the full value of enterprise data. About Lucidworks Lucidworks is a leader in AI-powered search and discovery solutions for the world's largest enterprises. By combining advanced machine learning, hybrid search, and generative AI, Lucidworks helps organizations deliver smarter digital experiences and unlock the full value of their data.

Lucidworks, an AI-powered search and product discovery company, has launched AI Ranking Insights, a new explainability feature within its Commerce Studio platform. The tool translates complex product ranking logic into plain-language explanations, helping e-commerce teams understand why products appear in specific search positions. The feature uses a large language model to interpret scoring data, including rules, semantic relevance, boosts, personalisation and AI scoring. It's designed to eliminate the need for data scientists or search engineers to explain rankings to business users. Lucidworks claims the tool reduces investigation time by 50 per cent, engineer hours by 60 per cent, and relevance change rework cycles by 30 per cent. AI Ranking Insights is now available for purchase.