Meet Operator Experience (OX): the next big shift for ecommerce teams
What exactly is Operator Experience (OX)? Luke Hodgson, Co-founder of Commerce Thinking, breaks it down—and reveals why ecommerce teams that go all in on OX will pull ahead of the competition.
For two decades, brands obsessed over Customer Experience. The next decade belongs to Operator Experience: the experience of the people and systems running everything behind the scenes. And right now, we're at an inflection point that makes this shift impossible to ignore.
If the SaaS revolution reshaped the technology brands run on, the AI revolution will reshape the organization itself.
The biggest impact of this new era will not be in marketing or product development. It will be in how easily and profitably people and systems work together.
This is what we call Operator Experience, or OX.
And for brand-side teams, it’s about to become the most important capability to build.
What is OX (and why it matters for commerce)
The term Operator Experience, or OX, may be new to you, but the idea isn’t.
Every brand that has ever scaled successfully has cared (whether consciously or not) about how smooth and efficient its back office is.
The slicker, more automated, and more connected an operation feels, the faster that brand can move.
For years, smart operators have known that stock turn, data accuracy, and operational efficiency have to evolve in step with sales growth.
But what is changing now, as we move through late 2025, is the incentive to take OX seriously.
We have reached a genuine inflection point.
The arrival of AI, and more specifically AI orchestration - where intelligent systems coordinate tasks across tools - has made it possible for brands to automate 30 percent of the tasks they perform today (more on this later). That might sound ambitious, but it is already happening across the industry.
For the first time, it is entirely conceivable that we will see $200–300 million turnover brands run by teams of fewer than twenty people outside of warehouse/logistics.
Those businesses will enjoy operating margins their competitors can’t match, allowing them to reinvest more aggressively in growth (e.g. PPC budget, price-point etc), marketing, and product.
That is why Operator Experience suddenly matters so much.
It is not just a basic requirement anymore; it is a competitive advantage.
The brands that invest in how their teams work, how data flows, how systems connect, and how processes evolve will scale faster, run leaner, and adapt more easily to whatever new technology comes next.
OX has shifted from something that quietly supported growth to something that actively drives it.
Collaboration and friction between teams
Every brand-side team recognizes the common pain points, e.g:
Marketing launches a promo that ecommerce cannot deploy cleanly because assets or translations are missing.
Product data arrives incomplete, so merchandisers spend hours rekeying information.
Creative and operations teams debate naming conventions while launch dates slip.
These are not people-problems. They are process and structure problems.
If you look at the org chart of most retail brands in 2025, they’re almost identical to retail brands of the 90’s. The traditional vertical departmental model is growing outdated, and it becomes counterproductive in the age of AI orchestration.
Let me unpack this: Most issues and inefficiency in retail ops do not sit within teams, they sit between them.
The traditional vertical, departmental model was designed for a slower, more manual era.
It worked when work moved in a straight line from one department to the next.
But today, when campaigns, product updates, and content creation all happen in parallel, that model creates drag.
Every hand-off introduces risk, duplication, or delay.
For brands, these gaps are where the friction is most visible.
Product data errors, slow site updates, late launches: all stem from fragmented systems and disconnected workflows.
Improving Operator Experience reduces and removes that friction because it allows information to move more seamlessly between teams, often without a human needing to move it manually.
The shift from vertical to cross-functional thinking
To fully unlock the benefits of AI and automation, brands need to rethink their structures.
The brands that will win through 2030 are the ones that think horizontally, not vertically. The breakout brands of 2030 are already being built.
They are starting up today, free from legacy systems and old ways of working.They are designing their operations around automation from day one, combining small, agile teams with AI agents that quietly handle operational work in the background.
For them, cross-functional organization will be completely normal.
It means they will scale faster, further, and more profitably.
Established brands actually have a harder job. They have to adapt to the change.
Let’s use an example familiar to anyone in the industry. Bringing a new product to market.
It is an inherently cross-functional process involving product development, merchandising, creative, and ecommerce.
Yet most brands still treat it as a relay race between siloed departments.
The smarter approach is to form cross-functional squads built around end-to-end outcomes, not departments. Each team combines the right people, systems, and increasingly AI agents that handle repetitive, low-value admin.
This horizontal model is the natural home for AI because the workflows are clearly defined, measurable, and shared.
Why OX matters (now and through 2030)
By 2030, around 30 percent of the work brand-side teams perform today will be automated or agent-assisted.
That shift does not reduce the need for people, it increases the value of their creativity and judgement. The less time teams spend rekeying data or fixing errors, the more time they can spend trading, optimising, and storytelling.
Improving Operator Experience compounds over time:
Better data leads to faster go-to-market.
Faster go-to-market frees up creative capacity.
Greater creative capacity drives customer engagement.
For ecommerce leaders, OX is how you future-proof your operation.
It ensures that as AI matures, your team is organised in a way that can truly take advantage of it.
People and processes: where to start
If you are wondering where to begin, start small and practical.
Here are a few examples already transforming ecommerce workflows:
Sample reviews
Record fit sessions, feed the transcript into an AI model that structures feedback and drafts supplier updates in multiple languages.
Fewer errors, fewer sampling rounds, faster launches.
Product data and PDP content
Use AI to draft PDP copy directly from product specifications.
Let humans refine tone and brand voice, and feed those edits back into the system so it learns over time.
Promotions and campaign setup
Automate pre-flight checks for pricing, assets, and translations before launch to eliminate human error and protect margin.
Trading and merchandising
Deploy lightweight AI tools to suggest weekly category refreshes based on performance, sell-through, and stock availability.
Meetings and follow-ups
Record, transcribe, and auto-generate actions from trade or launch meetings.
Push the follow-ups directly into your project management system.
These are not future predictions.
They are live use cases delivering measurable gains in speed, accuracy, and creativity right now.
Where to go from here
The next few years will separate brands that adapt from those that stall.
OX is not just a technology project, it is a mindset.
The challenge for established brands is not finding the perfect AI tool.
It is becoming adaptive enough to use them effectively.
Start by mapping your biggest hand-offs, identifying duplicative work, and creating space for experimentation.
Automate one process, measure the impact, then expand.
And if you want practical examples and step-by-step guides for how to organize for AI, subscribe to the Commerce Thinking newsletter, where we share the real-world use cases and frameworks that will shape the next decade of ecommerce operations.
Author
Luke Hodgson is the founder of Commerce Thinking, a boutique advisory that helps fast-growing brands modernise their tech and operating models.
His team partners with brands such as Liverpool FC, Nobody’s Child, Adanola and many others to build the back-office capabilities needed to scale.
Read more at commercethinking.com
