We Contributed to Brandfuel.ai's “Build for What's Next” Whitepaper — Here's Why

Published: September 22nd, 2026

By Aaron Carpenter, Founder, ACV Consulting

This collaboration makes the operational case for AI-native commerce

 

Last month, Brandfuel.ai published a whitepaper called "Build for What's Next: Commerce Operations and Org Design in the Age of AI Commerce." ACV Consulting was a contributing author, and Aaron Carpenter, ACV's founder and former CMO at The North Face, is quoted directly in the press release.

We don't say that to self-promote. We say it because the reason ACV was asked to contribute is the same reason we think you should read it: this paper addresses the part of the AI conversation that almost nobody is having at the level of specificity that leaders actually need.

Most AI conversations start with: "Which tool should we buy?” This paper starts with the harder question: How do you redesign the org around what AI makes possible?

Aaron put it this way in the whitepaper press release:

“Brandfuel is automating ecommerce ops tasks that have driven teams nuts for decades. One of my global clients can now translate their entire site into multiple languages within hours. But the tooling is only half the story. The teams getting real results are the ones rethinking how their org operates around it, which is exactly what this paper lays out. When the repetitive work disappears, your people can finally focus on driving revenue, traffic, and conversion in real time.”
- Aaron Carpenter, Founder + CEO, ACV Consulting

That's the lens we brought to this collaboration — and it's the lens this paper is written through.

 

Why AI Traffic Changes Everything for Product Content

Here's the number that should get every e-commerce leader's attention: AI-driven traffic to US retail sites grew 393% year over year in the first three months of 2026, according to Adobe. BCG estimates that large language models already influence up to 20% of purchasing decisions.

What that means operationally is that product content — descriptions, materials, use cases, care instructions, sizing, sustainability claims — is no longer just a catalog maintenance task. It's the primary surface through which AI engines represent your brand to shoppers. The depth and accuracy of that content now influence how effectively AI engines can represent and recommend your brand.

Most brands built their content workflows for a world where the product page was the end of the buying journey. That assumption is now a liability.

What the Paper Covers About AI-Native Commerce

This isn't a trends report or a vendor pitch deck. It's a structural playbook covering five concrete imperatives for e-commerce and marketing leaders:

• Getting institutional product knowledge out of people's heads and into systems that can act on it. When your best product knowledge lives in a senior merchant's brain or a scattered collection of vendor emails, AI tools can't do their job. The first step is always systematic capture.

• Using existing digital assets — Word docs, PowerPoints, PDFs, Google Docs — as inputs for AI-driven selling tools. Most brands are sitting on a library of brand, product, and campaign knowledge that has never been made machine-readable. That's a competitive asset going unused.

• Building content operations that generate, score, publish, and continuously improve at scale. Not one-and-done. Not campaign-by-campaign. A system that runs continuously.

• Implementing governance frameworks that keep AI-generated content safe, on-brand, and accurate. This is the piece that separates brands that get real results from those that get AI outputs they can't actually publish.

• Redesigning team structures and roles around what AI makes possible, and what humans should own. This is the part that requires the most leadership courage — and carries the most upside.

The paper includes a side-by-side comparison of traditional versus AI-native commerce content workflows, a structural marketing org redesign example for a $75M omnichannel brand — which will look familiar to anyone who has seen ACV's own 20-to-9 org design framework — and a practical "Where to Start" guide for leaders ready to act.

 

Why ACV Contributed to This Paper

The work ACV does with consumer brands is fundamentally about the intersection of marketing leadership and operational transformation. We don't just advise on strategy — we help brands restructure how their marketing function works, which tools they use, and how their teams are organized around those tools.

Brandfuel is one of the platforms we recommend as part of the AI marketing stack we implement for clients — specifically for product content operations, SEO, and GEO optimization, and catalog scale. Contributing to this paper was a natural extension of the work we were already doing with clients navigating exactly these questions.

The org redesign framework in the paper — pairing one subject matter expert with each AI platform, reducing a 20-person marketing org to 9 without sacrificing output quality — reflects what we are seeing work in practice, not just in theory. For a $75M consumer brand, that structural shift produces an estimated $1.75M in annual savings across team, media, and content operations.

 

Who Should Read This

If you are a VP of E-Commerce, a CMO, or a founder with direct ownership of your brand's commerce function, this paper was written for you. Particularly if you are somewhere in the middle of the AI adoption curve — you've run some pilots, you know the tools exist, but you haven't yet committed to the structural changes that would let you capture the full value of them.

This paper will help you understand what that commitment looks like in practice. It's 30 minutes well spent.

 

Download “Build for What's Next”

Download the "Build for What's Next" whitepaper from Brandfuel.ai.

If you're ready to have a more specific conversation about what this transition looks like for your brand, team, and catalog — that's exactly what ACV's fractional CMO engagements are built for.

Schedule a conversation with ACV

ACV Consulting is a specialist in marketing-driven AI transformation for purpose-led consumer brands. Founded by Aaron Carpenter, former CMO at The North Face. Learn more at acvconsulting.com.