Wayne Teigen on Vendor Honesty, B2B Complexity, and AI Tools That Actually Work

Nearly Two Decades Learning Where Implementations Actually Break

Teigen has spent 17 years in eCommerce, much of it in South America, where he worked on early Webshop Commerce implementations for companies the size of major department store chains. That experience shaped how he now evaluates technology decisions.

It's never just the technology, it's the people and the processes as well.

- Wayne Teigen

He joined Intershop, one of the longest-standing eCommerce platforms in existence and the company credited with inventing the original online shopping cart, because the B2B side of the business rewarded that kind of thinking. Every manufacturer or distributor selling a similar product still goes to market differently, through different channels, with different pricing structures and customer relationships built over decades.

In B2B, every company is unique.

- Wayne Teigen

What Actually Separates B2B Commerce From B2C

King and Teigen walked through the practical differences that define B2B buying, grouped into two categories: how customers want to buy and how sellers go to market. On the buying side, that means modeling a customer's organization accurately, including approval workflows, spend limits, contract-specific pricing, and punchout integrations with a buyer's own procurement system. On the selling side, it means giving sales reps a clear lane so the online channel does not compete against them, and building a quoting process that brings distributors into the loop instead of working around them.

King pointed out that modeling a customer's account structure sounds simple until you try to build it. A single business can span multiple locations, departments, and roles, from an engineer just browsing for samples to a procurement lead whose only job is to place the order. That complexity, layered with approval workflows and contract terms, is a large part of what makes B2B platforms fundamentally different from off-the-shelf B2C software. For more on how platforms are handling that complexity today, see B2BEA's guide to B2B eCommerce platforms.

Why Analyst Reports and RFPs Only Tell Part of the Story

Teigen was candid about the limits of analyst reports and formal RFPs in software selection.

The right platform is the one that meets your business needs.

- Wayne Teigen

He adds that the answer rarely comes from a quadrant ranking alone. Analyst reports are a reasonable starting point, he said, but they compress a platform down to standardized capabilities and can miss niche vendors that would be a stronger fit for a specific business. RFI and RFP processes carry their own bias, whether the answers come from the software vendor or from a systems integrator that only implements a handful of platforms. Intershop's approach has been to answer RFPs with detailed commentary rather than simple yes or no responses, even when that level of honesty costs them in scoring.

It's a lot better in terms of long-term relationship. It's a lot better in terms of client success to be open and upfront during that initial discovery process.

- Wayne Teigen.

He credited that approach with helping the company maintain what he called a 96 percent renewal rate.

The Case for Starting With Use Cases

King argued that the RFP process itself often benefits the consultant running it more than the company making the decision. His recommendation: skip the standardized checklist and go straight to the hardest, most specific use cases a business actually needs solved, including integration questions that reveal what a platform can and cannot do out of the box.

Rick Watson, a longtime eCommerce consultant, made a similar case in his analysis of Gartner's Digital Commerce Magic Quadrant, advising buyers to watch a vendor's product motion over time rather than compare static feature lists.

Where AI Is Delivering Real Value, Not Just Buzzwords

Intershop has tracked customer AI adoption for close to eight years, well before generative AI made the technology accessible to nearly everyone. Teigen said the company has focused its recent AI investment on two areas: helping buyers discover products and helping the people who run the eCommerce site do their jobs faster.

Product Discovery, From a Photo to a Purchase

One example Teigen described: a buyer standing in front of a broken machine on a job site can photograph a spare part and have the system match it to a catalog listing, even when the part is dirty or damaged from use. That kind of tool addresses a problem specific to B2B buying, where product discovery does not always happen at a desk in front of a browser.

A Copilot for the People Running the Site

The second area is an internal copilot that helps merchants update product content, pull performance data from sources like Google Analytics, and identify underperforming segments, all through plain language requests instead of manual back-office work. Tasks that used to take hours to do now take minutes. Teigen said the tool is built to work alongside outside platforms and CRMs rather than compete with the best-in-class agents companies are already building in those systems. McKinsey's research on how B2B sales teams are rewiring their playbooks with AI points to similar patterns industry-wide, with the biggest gains coming from tools built around a specific, well-understood workflow rather than general-purpose automation.

Separating AI Theater From AI That Works

Asked what he sees as theater versus practical progress, Teigen referenced an old habit of vendors relabeling processes that were already automated as "AI," and pointed to early, overstated claims from the industry's first wave of AI marketing as a cautionary example. His test for any AI tool is simple.

What new and different behavior are you enabling with this tool? Because if not, if there's no new and different behavior, it's not really worth it.

- Wayne Teigen.

King agreed, adding that the real shift AI enables is the ability to design an experience around what a business actually wants, instead of designing around technical or budget limitations.

When you can design an experience the way you want to design the experience, not based off of limitations, it changes everything.

- Justin King.

Gartner's research points to a similar trajectory, forecasting that B2B digital commerce will consolidate around customer-centricity, connectivity, agility, and intelligence by 2030, themes that closely track what Teigen described in practice at Intershop.

What's Next

Teigen and King closed the conversation looking ahead to B2B eCommerce World in Indianapolis, where AI adoption, customer experience, and executive alignment sit at the center of this year's agenda. For B2BEA members working through their own AI roadmap, the association's guide to getting started with AI implementation and its overview of AI-powered search for manufacturers and distributors are useful next steps.

About the Guest

Wayne Teigen is Executive Director of Enterprise Strategy and Solutions at Intershop Communications. For close to 20 years, he has worked with manufacturers and distributors across North and South America as they modernize their commerce technology, rethink digital channels, and bring automation and AI into operations that were not originally built for it. Teigen has learned that technology rarely breaks first. Processes do, then ownership, then trust, and his role is to help teams see those risks early and design systems that hold up under real operational pressure.

About the Host

Justin King is the Global Managing Director and Chief AI Officer of the B2B eCommerce Association. He also hosts the B2B eCommerce Show, where he interviews practitioners and vendors shaping digital commerce for manufacturers and distributors. King has written about B2B eCommerce since 2007 and leads B2BEA's content, community, and AI resources for the industry.