By Paul do Forno, Dwayne Doshier, and Gerald Schlechter
“The companies pulling ahead are not by deploying Agentic AI alone. They are the ones making it easier for customers to efficiently complete the transaction for each customer segment with the appropriate B2B commerce channel” – Paul do Forno, Deloitte Digital
Here is a number that should bother every B2B executive.
According to Deloitte Digital’s latest B2B commerce research, suppliers estimate they lose 13% of bids because of poor buying experiences. Not because of price. Not because of product. Because the transaction is harder than it should be.
Buyers meanwhile, say they spend 29% more with suppliers that make purchasing easy.
That spread is one of the most underpriced opportunities in B2B commerce today.
Companies have not ignored the issue. They have invested heavily in digital storefronts, self-service portals, omnichannel capability, and Agentic AI-assisted selling. The number of commerce channels supported by suppliers has grown by nearly 40% in just two years.
The investment is real. The intent is real. But the gap remains because most companies have digitized the buying experience without making the transaction itself easier to execute.
The moment that decides revenue
“In B2B commerce, the quote is often the first real test of whether a company can execute. If the first quote is accurate, aligned to live business rules, and ready to become an order, the deal moves. If it is not, revenue starts leaking before the order is ever placed.” – Gerald Schlechter, enosix
Most B2B transformation is built to improve everything leading up to the transaction.
- The interface gets cleaner. Search gets faster. Quotes get easier to generate.
- The experience looks modern.
- The transaction reaches the systems that actually run the business.
A buyer configures a high-value order. Pricing looks right. Inventory appears available. Terms seem clear. The order is submitted.
Deep inside the enterprise, a different reality takes over.
Pricing conditions fail against ERP contractual terms. Inventory has already been allocated elsewhere. Approval rules trigger manual intervention.
But now, the order stalls.
The buyer who just had a polished digital experience is left waiting for a follow-up email. Many times it never comes and revenue is lost.
That failure rarely shows up in the dashboards companies use to measure digital progress. It does not sit neatly inside adoption metrics or conversion rates. It shows up somewhere quieter and more expensive: delayed or lost revenue, order rework, lost bids, and customers who slowly shift spend to a supplier that made the transaction easier to complete.
Behind the glossy experience is where B2B commerce is breaking.
The issue is not access to ERP data. The issue is that most digital commerce architectures were designed to expose static information, not execute changing business logic in real time. Pricing is approximated. Inventory is snapshotted. Transactions are validated after submission, not at the moment a customer hits submit.
That model worked when B2B buying could absorb a little friction.
Now it cannot.
Agentic AI is not coming. It is already buying.
“B2B Commerce is no longer confined to where you build it. It happens wherever the buyer is. Increasingly, that buyer is an Agentic agent operating inside a system at a speed no human sales process was designed to match.” – Dwayne Doshier, Shopify
The conversation around Agentic AI in B2B usually starts on the supplier side: proposal generation, lead prioritization, chatbots, automation.
That is real. Twenty-four percent of suppliers are already using Agentic AI in sales processes, and 67% plan to.
But the more disruptive number is on the buyer side.
Thirty-eight percent of B2B buyers are already using Agentic AI in purchasing processes. They are using it to search, evaluate, configure, compare pricing, review terms, monitor supplier performance, and initiate transactions.
An Agentic agent does not browse your portal like a human. It does not read the explanatory copy. It does not call the sales rep when something looks off. It queries, validates, transacts, or moves on.
When it hits inconsistent pricing, stale inventory, or an order flow that still requires manual follow-up, it does not wait. It routes to the supplier that can execute.
Agentic AI does not fix the execution gap. It exposes the gap and frequently widens it.
The leaders are pulling away.
High-maturity B2B digital commerce organizations are already separating themselves.
They beat annual sales goals by a margin 110% greater than low-maturity peers. They are nearly four times more likely to have highly automated sales processes. Customers are more than four times as likely to say they are easy to do business with.
That gap is not closing.
It is widening.
And the reason is simple: these companies are not just digitizing the front end. They are aligning front-office experience with deep back-office execution.
Why this has been so hard to solve
The execution gap has persisted for years not because the market lacked good technology, but because solving it requires three capabilities that rarely show up together.
You need to know where the gap lives and what it costs. You need a commerce environment buyers and AI agents actually want to use. And you need every transaction governed by the live business rules inside the system of record at the moment it happens, not cleaned up later.
Until now, those pieces have usually come from different vendors with different priorities, assembled in a vacuum by teams pulled in too many directions at once.
That is what makes this partnership different.
Deloitte Digital brings the evidence and the transformation muscle. The research is clear on what friction costs and what integration unlocks. More important, Deloitte has seen firsthand how hard it is for large B2B organizations to connect commercial ambition to operational reality, and what happens when they finally do.
Shopify brings the commerce layer built for where buying is going. modern B2B buying: fast digital experiences, flexible buyer journeys, self-service purchasing, and the ability to support commerce wherever the buyer chooses to engage. As B2B buying moves across portals, assisted selling, marketplaces, and AI-mediated workflows, the commerce layer needs to be simple for buyers and adaptable for suppliers. Shopify is built for that shift.
enosix closes the silent part of the problem. The structural constraint in B2B commerce has always been the gap between what the buyer sees and what ERP can actually execute. enosix closes it by connecting Shopify directly to live SAP logic at the moment of transaction. Pricing, contract terms, inventory availability, and order validation are governed before the transaction is submitted, not corrected after it fails.
Together, that creates something the market has needed for a long time: a real path from diagnosing the execution gap, to building the experience that drives demand, to making sure the transaction actually completes against the system that runs the business.
None of us could do that alone. Together, we can.
The window is narrower than it looks
Nearly nine in ten B2B suppliers are upgrading ERP right now or soon.
That usually gets framed as an IT burden. It is that. But it is also the single best opportunity most companies will have this decade to close the gap between their digital ambition and their operational reality.
As the infrastructure is being opened, the architecture is being reconsidered: decisions made now will compound for years.
The companies that use this moment to connect front-office commerce to back-office execution will do more than improve customer experience. They will build the foundation that allows AI to act reliably on their behalf and on behalf of their buyers.
The companies that treat ERP modernization as a back-office exercise and commerce as a separate initiative will continue to patch the gap one failed transaction at a time.
B2B buyers have already decided what good looks like. Agentic AI will accelerate the pace at which suppliers are sorted into two camps: those that are easy to do business with, and everyone else.
The next advantage in B2B commerce will not come only from generating demand. It will come from making transactions easy to complete for buyers, businesses, and the AI agents increasingly acting on their behalf.
For leaders already modernizing ERP, commerce, or sales operations, this is the moment to close the execution gap. The decisions made now will determine whether digital commerce becomes another front-end investment or the foundation for reliable, AI-ready B2B growth.
About the Authors
Paul do Forno is Global Commerce Practice Lead at Deloitte Digital, where he advises enterprises on commerce strategy, digital transformation, and the use of AI in revenue-generating operations.
Dwayne Doshier is Partner Growth Architect at Shopify, focused on helping B2B organizations modernize commerce experiences and meet rising buyer expectations across digital and emerging channels.
Gerald Schlechter is Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at enosix, where he helps SAP-driven enterprises execute complex business processes in real time across modern platforms.
About the Research
The research data cited in this article is drawn from Deloitte Digital’s 2025 B2B Commerce study, based on a blind survey of 530 B2B buyers and 530 B2B suppliers at US-based companies with more than $100 million in annual revenue, conducted in August and September 2025.