Why PIM is the Foundation of AI Commerce

AI may be the new engine powering digital commerce, but it’s running on a surprisingly delicate fuel: trust. 

Shoppers love the convenience of AI-powered search and chat-based assistance, but they’re not fully sold on its accuracy. In fact, only 45% of consumers trust that AI can provide reliable, accurate responses. And honestly, who can blame them? Most brands are still trying to get their product names consistent across channels, let alone feed clean data into an AI model.

That’s the real plot twist in today’s AI commerce story: the issue isn’t the AI but the data behind it. Without well-structured, complete product information, AI experiences become unpredictable, inconsistent, or even worse — confidently wrong. This is exactly where Product Information Management (PIM) steps in. Far from being a back-office tool, PIM has quietly become the foundation of AI commerce, ensuring brands deliver AI experiences customers can actually trust.

How PIM Supports AI Commerce

Most commerce stacks were never designed for agentic search or AI-generated recommendations. ERPs and MDMs excel at managing operational or generalized business data, but they aren’t built to handle the depth and contextual richness AI systems need to perform. As AI becomes more embedded in eCommerce platforms and customer experience engines, these legacy systems reveal their limits quickly.

For IT leaders and retailers trying to modernize their stack, this creates a fundamental bottleneck. AI can pull signals from customer behavior and intent, but it can’t compensate for missing dimensions of product data. When your ERP only holds base specs and your eCommerce platform holds manually uploaded descriptions, AI is forced to work with a fragmented picture. 

For retailers, this means product discovery tools struggle, onsite search becomes unreliable, and recommendation engines can’t confidently match buyers with what they’re looking for. The end result is the same on all sides: inconsistent search results and hallucinated outputs that end up destroying customer trust and undermining revenue-driving AI initiatives.

A PIM system like Akeneo PIM solves this foundational problem by serving as the single source of truth for rich, structured product content. Think of PIM as the supply chain for product information: it takes raw, unstructured inputs from suppliers, spreadsheets, and internal tools, and transforms them into organized and validated data ready for every channel. Just as a physical supply chain turns materials into finished goods, a PIM converts raw product records into high-quality, AI-ready assets through enrichment, normalization, and governance.

This structured process is essential for AI commerce. Product information needs to be contextualized and prepared for consumption by advanced systems. AI models require detailed taxonomies, consistent attribute sets, and relationships between variants. They also need product story elements like usage information and lifestyle detail. PIM becomes the operational engine, ensuring this information is both accurate and complete before it enters any AI-powered experience.

An API-First Integration Layer Built for AI-Driven Ecosystems

Modern commerce environments demand a level of connectivity that older systems simply can’t support. AI engines, marketplaces, DAM platforms, OMS tools, and eCommerce systems all need access to real-time product data, and they need it through flexible, API-first connections. A PIM system designed with APIs at its core guarantees that product information flows seamlessly across the entire technology ecosystem without brittle custom integrations or expensive IT workarounds.

With an API-first PIM, businesses can easily plug into emerging AI tools, agentic search platforms, and future interfaces that haven’t yet reached the mainstream! This future-proofing is essential as AI evolves rapidly. To thrive, businesses need flexible systems that can easily integrate new technology without replacing the old. PIM makes that possible.

Don’t Forget About Data Governance

In an AI-first commerce landscape, data governance changes from an operational concern to a strategic necessity. AI systems amplify whatever they’re fed, meaning flawed or non-compliant data damages customer trust and increases regulatory risk. Accurate, reliable product data is required to meet strict standards for completeness, accuracy, and compliance before it reaches any customer-facing system.

These governance capabilities include validation rules, workflow approvals, version control, completeness scoring, and audit trails, each of which acts as a safety net preventing low-quality information from entering the data supply chain. IT leaders and retailers alike can be confident that what enters their AI systems has been vetted by both automated checks and human oversight, dramatically reducing the chance of AI confidently delivering wrong or misleading recommendations. 

For IT teams, this means fewer data-related incidents and a significantly lower risk of AI-driven errors cascading across their tech stack. For retailers, it translates into more trustworthy recommendations and fewer moments where AI surfaces outdated or simply incorrect information to shoppers.

This governance layer also builds transparency, which is becoming a core expectation from buyers. As consumers grow more aware that AI guides their product discovery, they want to know that the information they’re seeing is precise and compliant. PIM enables businesses to provide that assurance and meet upcoming regulations that will scrutinize AI decision-making and product data accuracy even more closely.

Building the Foundation for AI-Ready Commerce

AI is rapidly transforming how customers search and evaluate products, but its success depends entirely on the quality and consistency of the data behind it. Legacy systems weren’t built for this new era, and retailers and IT leaders need a foundation that can support the accuracy AI-driven experiences demand. PIM fills that gap by delivering enriched and governed product information that every AI engine, channel, and customer touchpoint can rely on.

By investing in a PIM-driven data strategy, businesses future-proof their entire commerce ecosystem. With the right product data foundation, retailers can deliver more trustworthy experiences, IT teams can scale innovation confidently, and AI systems can perform at their fullest potential. In a world where product information fuels every interaction, PIM becomes the catalyst that unlocks meaningful AI commerce.