Salesforce's Nitin Mangtani on Agentic Commerce, UCP, and the Future of AI Shopping, SVP & GM, Salesforce Commerce Cloud & Retail Cloud
This week I sat down with Nitin Mangtani, SVP & GM of Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Retail Cloud at Salesforce, to discuss the late April news that Salesforce joined the Universal Commerce Protocol tech council alongside Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Stripe, and what it means for the future of agentic commerce.
3 Big Insights
Mangtani draws a clear distinction between owned and operated commerce, your dot com, your app, your physical store, and he groups all other commerce locations as syndicated commerce, channels you don't own like search, social, and now agentic. He argues brands shouldn't think about 50 different channels. They should think about one umbrella and decide where they want to participate.
On catalog readability for agents, Mangtani pushed back on the growing vendor narrative that existing product catalogs are broken and need to be rebuilt from scratch. His position is A plus B. The core metadata, title, price, size, inventory, fabric, hasn't changed since mail order catalogs. What's new is the ability to semantically augment that data using AI. You're adding to what exists, not replacing it.
Mangtani highlighted Salesforce's acquisition of Cimulate, an AI-powered search and catalog augmentation company founded by MIT and Stanford PhDs, as the vehicle for delivering that next-generation semantic layer to Commerce Cloud customers.
My Take
Salesforce joining UCP is not a casual industry participation moment. This is a company under real competitive pressure in commerce, and aligning publicly with Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Stripe around an open protocol is a strategic signal worth paying attention to. Mangtani soft-pedaled it, describing it as organic growth rather than what I think it actually is: a platform making sure it stays in the room as commerce shifts to agentic channels it didn't build for. The most useful thing this conversation confirmed is that the vendor FUD around catalogs being broken is exactly that. Brands don't need to blow up what they have. They need to augment it. That's a much more manageable problem than the consultants are selling.
The Highlight
The Reality Check: Mangtani closed the conversation talking about a completely new storefront experience, one that works for both humans and agents, with live coding integration and advanced visual merchandising tools.
And just this week, Salesforce made it official with the launch of Storefront Next.
For a platform under pressure to prove it belongs in the next era of commerce, this is their most concrete answer yet.
Not a protocol partnership, not an acquisition. An actual product. Brands already building on it are calling it faster to adopt and better than expected
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Listen to the full conversation here:
