There's a version of every Salesforce conference that feels like a product catalogue in keynote form, with big themes, bigger promises, and a gap between the stage narrative and the actual code shipping. Connections 2026 in Chicago was not that event. For the first time, the AI story felt less like aspiration and had a whiff of execution to it. The question wasn't whether Salesforce was committed to the agentic future. The question was whether the audience had to energy to go back home and actually do something.

For those of us in commerce, the headline under the headline was this: Storefront Next went GA. And that matters more than most people outside the SFCC ecosystem will appreciate.

Storefront Next: The Foundation Underneath Everything

Salesforce had been telegraphing Storefront Next for months as a next-generation framework built on React Server Components, React Router 7, and TypeScript, with tighter Business Manager integration and managed hosting via MRT. It was always positioned as more than a PWA Kit replacement. It's a platform reset. And at Connections 2026, that reset became real.

Why does anyone need a platform reset right now? What Storefront Next actually represents is a codebase architecture that makes AI tooling work earlier in the project lifecycle. When Salesforce talks about AI-assisted development, they're not talking about a chatbot strapped to your IDE. They're talking about a framework that's tightly coupled enough, standards-based enough, that AI can understand, extend, and generate within it with genuine coherence. SFRA sites can be super fast. They can have CMS and Search plugged in to great effect. But they are not AI-friendly. Storefront Next is. That's not incidental. It's the point.

Our own team has been deep in this since last year: running a PoC, building out a starter, asking hard questions about how you extend cleanly without drifting from upstream. The early read is that the Commerce Apps extension model represents a genuine improvement in how integrations get built. The Page Designer investment, which Salesforce is clearly serious about, couples tightly here too, shifting how content experiences get delivered in ways we're still fully digesting.

At Connections, this was the foundation everything else was built on. The AI-assisted merchant workflows, the agentic campaign management, the Guided Shopping experiences, all of it flows more naturally through a storefront architecture that wasn't designed in 2015. Storefront Next is the plumbing, and the plumbing finally got replaced.

AI in Practice, Not Just in Pitch

What struck most observers at Connections 2026 was not the ambition (that's been consistent for two years), but the specificity. The sessions felt less like vision decks and more like implementation guides. One analyst noted that if Connections 2025 was about AI assistance, 2026 was about AI autonomy:Salesforce leaning hard into the Agentic Enterprise, where agents don't just generate content or summarize data, but take action across the marketing and commerce stack. Sure, I would have thought last year. This year they came with case studies. Maybe it’s trade show slop? But there was energy behind it.

I agree with that framing. Jon Reed at Diginomica covered the Generative Engine Optimization thread, which took up significant floor time, optimising content and products for AI discovery, showing up across the internet, not just brand-owned channels. It was a smart session and Reed covered it thoroughly. Though I'd gently push back on the implication that GEO should be the primary commerce headline of CNX 2026. For the platform builders in the room, the commerce infrastructure story (and specifically the Storefront Next-plus-Agentforce architecture) was the more lasting signal. GEO is a vital question to ask: how will people find us if Google aren’t sending them and they don’t actually need a website to buy stuff. But the agentic commerce platform is the foundational tool that allows a lot of those folks in Chicago to start answering that question. 

The Slack Moment

Let's talk about Slack, because the square footage alone told a story.

Salesforce gave Slack a keynote presence and show floor space at Connections 2026 that made one thing unmistakably clear: this is not a collaboration tool they acquired and manage at arm's length. Slack is being positioned, actively and visibly, as the agentic OS for the enterprise. Core Salesforce apps including Agentforce Sales, IT and HR Service, and Tableau Next now surface directly in Slack conversations. The vision is a single conversational workspace where humans and AI agents collaborate in the same interface, with CRM and all other data embedded and actionable in real time via 3p apps. I’m completely on board with this idea. Humans and Agents need to connect somewhere (for now!). The messaging platform is best place for it to happen. And Slack ought to win here. It helps too that even in Microsoft shops we work with the dev team uses Slack. So this may be a parallel sale to Teams rather than a replacement. The sale will be made in IT and with their endorsement to the rest of the business. Teams will just be the meetings part. 

If you've been watching Slack's positioning carefully, this isn't surprising. Salesforce has been calling it the "agentic enterprise operating system" for months. But there's a difference between a booth at Agentforce World Tour and a show floor centerpiece in Chicago. At Connections, it was at the middle of everything. For enterprise buyers evaluating whether Salesforce is serious about this architecture, that kind of investment in physical presence and keynote time is not accidental. It's a declaration.

For SFCC practitioners, the relevance is direct: the merchant workflow future that our 64labs product team have been sketching out (where an Easter campaign gets planned, built, measured, and adjusted across multiple teams without six FTEs and four weeks of elapsed time) lives in something like this. Slack is the winner.

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The Contentful Question: Wait, or Don't?

Then there's Contentful. Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Contentful on June 1, 2026. The analysis is largely positive: Contentful closes the CMS slot in Headless 360 that had previously been left open, and the integration story for Agentforce deployments becomes considerably cleaner when your content management layer is owned by the same platform.

It may be a bit of a nothing burger for Commerce Cloud. A kneejerk question for any commerce buyer evaluating a new SFCC build right now is: should I wait? If Contentful becomes native to the Salesforce platform, won't the integration be smoother in twelve months than today?

Maybe. But Commerce is not Salesforce’s priority. The deal won’t close until September. The integration into Agentforce beyond commerce will take priority. Contentful already works in Storefront Next if you need it to. The integration question used to be a stronger argument for hesitation than it is now. The development complexity calculus has shifted materially with Storefront Next. The extension model is cleaner. AI-assisted development with a standards-based codebase means implementation velocity is meaningfully faster than it was eighteen months ago. The carrying cost of waiting (in roadmap delay, in continued technical debt on SFRA, in missing the Agentforce capabilities that are already GA) is real.

So the answer isn't wait. The answer is to plan intelligently: choose Contentful if you love it for what it is. But don’t delay Storefront Next or imagine that there isn't still a good reason to pick Contentstack or Amplience or Builder et al. There are. So the best time to be implementing Contentful in SFCC is probably two years from now. I’m not sure the purchase changes much in ecommerce until 2028. 

The Through-Line

What Connections 2026 made clear is that Salesforce has arrived at the point they've been building toward for several years. The AI isn't decorative anymore though some presentations still very much need the disclaimer slide. Storefront Next provides the foundation for AI to actually function in commerce. Slack is the interface layer they're betting on at enterprise scale. And the Contentful acquisition, whatever its timeline, closes the last obvious gap in Salesforce’s “composable monolith” story.

The enthusiasm in Chicago wasn't the performative kind you sometimes sense at these events, the kind where everyone's excited because everyone else is excited. It was the quieter, more durable kind: practitioners who came in skeptical, left with viable case studies and a clearer sense of what the roadmap actually holds. That's the version of a Salesforce conference that goes beyond nabbing cuddly toys for your kids and actually having something to think about on the plane home.

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For years, Salesforce Commerce Cloud has had a cost problem; and it was never just licensing.

The real cost lived in the ecosystem around it: custom templating languages, hard-to-find specialists, slow iteration cycles, and a persistent dependency on external partners for even modest changes. Teams didn’t just pay for SFCC, they paid to operate it.

Storefront Next changes that equation in a fundamental way.

By moving to a modern, standard frontend stack - React, composable architecture, familiar tooling - you eliminate one of the biggest hidden taxes in the system: specialization. No more hunting for niche ISML experts. No more translating between modern frontend thinking and legacy templating constraints. You can hire from the broader market, use proven patterns, and move at the speed your team is actually capable of.

That alone lowers total cost of ownership. But it’s just the starting point.

What really changes is how companies choose to operate.

Two Paths To Tread

Once the barrier of “expensive to change” disappears, companies will likely split into two operational camps.

The first group will optimize for steady state. They want the site to run cleanly, predictably, and with minimal intervention. Their goal is a near-zero backlog, a very small team, and a system that largely takes care of itself. Updates are incremental. Automation handles the routine. Human involvement is reserved for exceptions. 

For these teams, Storefront Next is about cost control. It allows them to finally run SFCC themselves as a stable, low-maintenance platform instead of an ongoing project.

The second group sees the opposite opportunity. If the cost of change drops, why not do more?

More experimentation. More landing pages. More personalization. More campaigns. More integration across systems. The same team, or an even smaller one, can now produce significantly more output because they are no longer constrained by platform friction.

This is where Storefront Next can be more about growth than cost.

And of course in practice, most companies should do both.

Stabilize, Then Expand

This is the pattern we recommend for dealing with the confusing world of AI. Don’t be carried away in the hurly burly of innovation. Go up the learning curve in stages. Iterate and learn over time. Keep moving forward but don’t go faster than your organization (probably still quite slow) can handle.

First, get to a solid steady state. Reduce the noise around support. Eliminate the backlog. Automate the obvious operational work. Bring the cost of “keeping the lights on” as close to zero as possible. This is a business process question as well as a development and marketing one. Do what you do better and quicker and more automatically. Stop doing things that humans require but machines don’t - about 50% of the meetings you do each day? 

Then take that recovered time and reinvest it.

Not into rebuilding what you already have or adding fancy so called AI-native tools - but into extracting more value from the stack you’re already paying for.

That means connecting the pieces of your stack that have historically operated in silos:

CMS feeding landing page generation
Personalization driving dynamic content decisions
Search influencing merchandising and discovery
Campaign tooling tied directly into experience delivery

Individually, these systems are powerful. Connected, they become multipliers. (You already knew all this but there wasn’t time or mental energy to actually achieve the achievable)

And once connected, all these newly exploited existing systems become candidates for automation. Without spending an extra penny on an AI enablement platform. 

Automation Before AI

There’s a misconception that AI transformation starts with buying an AI product.

It doesn’t. It mustn’t.

It starts with getting your stack into a state where it can actually support automation. Clean data flows. Defined workflows. Clear system boundaries. Reliable integrations.

If you automate your current workflows and your current workflows are designed around human frailties then you will just have automated mediocrity. What a waste. Get the most out of what you already have. Organize yourselves to be efficient, and let automation take care of as much of the resulting work burden as “humanly” possible.

Only then does AI have something to work with.

What happens next is not a switch you flip, it’s a gradual process. You automate pieces of the workflow. Then you introduce AI to optimize, generate, or orchestrate within those workflows. Over time, more of what was previously human-gated becomes system-driven.

But none of that works if your frontend is slow, rigid, or dependent on scarce skills.

This is where Storefront Next quietly becomes strategic.

Why SFCC Becomes More Valuable

SFCC has always been flexible. That was never the issue.

The issue was that most teams couldn’t fully use that flexibility. The cost of implementation, the friction of the frontend, and the dependency on specialized skills meant that much of the platform’s capability remained theoretical.

Storefront Next changes that.

When teams can actually build, iterate, and integrate without friction, SFCC’s flexibility turns into a real advantage. It becomes the center of a composable, connected, and increasingly automated commerce stack.

And importantly, it becomes a platform that can evolve.

Not through large, expensive replatforming efforts, but through continuous, incremental improvement.

That’s the shift.

Lower cost of ownership is the entry point. Operational leverage is the outcome. And long-term adaptability is the real payoff.

If you’re already on SFCC, the decision is straightforward. The question isn’t whether Storefront Next is worth it - it’s whether you want to keep paying for constraints that no longer need to exist.

Today Salesforce Commerce Cloud officially rolled out Storefront Next, and if you glanced at the announcement headlines, you’d think this is just another frontend framework release.It’s not.This is Salesforce making a very direct play for net-new logos - specifically the brands that, over the last five years, defaulted to Shopify Plus instead of even considering SFCC. Think digitally mature mid-market and enterprise brands currently sitting on Magento, HCL, Oracle Commerce, or SAP Hybris, who want to modernize but don’t want a three-year re-platforming science project.That’s the real audience.

‍Who This Is Actually For

‍Salesforce isn’t trying to convince existing SFCC customers to rip and replace. (Though if you are on SiteGen still, you absolutely should). They’re trying to remove the biggest historical objection to adopting SFCC in the first place:“It’s too slow, too expensive, and too complex to get live.”Shopify won that argument for five years by making speed to market and consistency their product. Storefront Next is Salesforce’s response. It’s their attempt to say: we can move just as fast, but without ditching the enterprise-grade flexibility when and where you need it. And that matters, because the buyers evaluating platforms today are not the same as they were five years ago. They’re more technical, more impatient, and far less tolerant of long SI-driven timelines.

‍The AI Layer Is Not a Feature. It’s the Point

‍The most important part of this launch isn’t the framework itself. It’s the AI enablement baked into how it’s meant to be built, extended, and maintained.This is where most people will underestimate what’s happening. Storefront Next is being positioned as “AI-ready,” but that undersells it. What Salesforce is really doing is laying the groundwork for how commerce teams will operate over the next 12–24 months:

• Faster component generation
• AI-assisted integration work
• Automated testing and QA workflows
• Smarter merchandising and content operations
• Reduced reliance on large engineering teams for day-to-day changes

But here’s the part that needs to be said clearly: this transition will go slower than most people expect - if you do it right. AI doesn’t magically fix bad architecture or poor implementation decisions. If anything, it amplifies them. What Storefront Next does is give you a clean enough foundation that AI tools can actually be effective and useful to you. Without that, you’re just layering automation on top of technical debt. Automated incoherence is still incoherence.

‍Speed to Build Is Finally Competitive

‍Historically, SFCC implementations have been measured in quarters (or years), not weeks. That changes. With Storefront Next, prebuilt patterns, composable architecture, and modern tooling have the potential in the right hands to dramatically compress a build timeline. You’re no longer starting from scratch, and you’re no longer fighting the platform to make it do standard things or all the cool things you saw in the demo.If you pair that with AI-assisted development workflows, you can realistically stand up a production-ready storefront much faster than legacy SFCC builds. Probably faster than a couple of your release cycles on your current platform. Maybe it changes the math for brands sitting on Oracle, HCL, Magento, or Hybris. The transition path into SFCC is materially easier and more cost-effective than it was even a year ago. What used to look like a heavy, multi-phase transformation is now something you can approach in a far more controlled, incremental way - without giving up the flexibility and warm-blanket enterprisiness SFCC is known for.That combination, speed plus flexibility, simply wasn’t real before.

‍Why the SI You Choose Matters More Than Ever

‍This is where most brands will get it wrong. Storefront Next makes it easier to build. It also makes it easier to build poorly. In fact, because things move faster, bad decisions compound faster too. Overconfident developers who don’t really know composable architecture will get cozy and complacent in the warm embrace of AI tooling.If your SI treats this like a traditional SFCC project, you’ll end up with:

1. Over-engineered components. I hate the word slop but I guess this is the technical term for that.
2. Misaligned data models. The meat of a build is still how everything is integrated. AI never understands that as well as it needs to. If you can’t help it understand, it will guess.
3. AI tools that generate inconsistent or unusable output. Or as Claude might frame the problem - humans who don’t really know where AIs strength and weaknesses are.
4. A codebase that’s technically modern but operationally fragile. “Yay, it's React.” But it performs worse than SiteGen.

On the other hand, if you approach this the right way - with a team that understands both composable architecture and how AI-assisted workflows actually function - you get something very different:

• A clean, extensible frontend
• Predictable development patterns AI can work with
• Faster onboarding for internal teams
• Lower long-term support costs

Where 64labs Fits in This Shift

‍This is exactly where we see our role at 64labs evolving. Not as a traditional system integrator, but as a guide through what is becoming an AI-assisted re-platforming cycle.The technology is only part of the equation. The harder problem - and the more valuable one - is translating real business requirements into code in a way that AI tools can extend, not fight against. That means designing architectures that are structured, consistent, and AI-compatible from day one - sometimes in the face of a business that wants to hang on to the old jumbled workflows and habits that they know. That means helping brands migrate off Oracle, HCL, Magento, and similar platforms in a way that reduces both cost and risk. It means accepting that these migration paths are well worn, not that rocky and should not be costing seven figures ever. It means using AI to accelerate delivery where it outperforms humans (working nights and weekends) without sacrificing long-term maintainability (humans not having to work nights and weekends).

‍Building storefronts that are not just modern, but adaptable to what’s coming next

‍The reality is, SFCC has always been powerful. What’s changed is that it’s now becoming manageable in a way it wasn’t a year ago - both in terms of speed and cost - if it’s implemented correctly.Our role is to act as the sherpa through that transition: helping teams make the right decisions early, avoid the traps that AI will amplify, and ultimately deliver better commerce experiences faster.

‍This Is a Foundation, Not a Finish Line

‍The biggest mistake would be to treat Storefront Next as the end goal.It’s not.It’s the starting point for a different way of building and running commerce experiences - one where AI is embedded into every layer of the workflow, not bolted on afterward.This next 12 months is going to be mad. The stench of oversold bullshit is going to be overwhelming. But some basic things are likely to be consistently true throughout.

1. AI-driven storefront personalization will evolve quickly.
2. Internal commerce teams will more and more on AI copilots
3. Development cycles will compress as far as human capacity will allow them to.
4. The gap will widen between teams that built their current stack out in 2026 for this shift and those that made do with what was fine in 2021.

And the companies that benefit from the madness won’t be the ones who adopted something (anything!) the fastest.They’ll be the ones who adapted to the chaos from a position of foundational strength. Storefront Next is a valid part of that foundation for present and future SFCC customers alike.

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