Article
PM-USHA International Conference Series – ज्ञानसेतु (Jñānasetu): The Bridge of KnowledgeARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE FUTURE OF COMMERCE
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming an important force in the transformation of contemporary commerce. Its applications now extend across marketing, retail, e-commerce, customer service, forecasting, decision support, supply chain management, and business operations. This paper examines the role of AI in shaping the future of commerce by synthesising existing academic literature on AI-enabled commercial transformation. The study adopts a conceptual and descriptive approach based on a narrative review of peer-reviewed secondary literature. The review focuses on five interrelated themes: personalisation and consumer engagement, predictive decision-making, intelligent automation, AI-mediated customer experience, and responsible AI governance. The synthesis indicates that AI is shifting commerce from standardised to increasingly personalised interactions, from reactive to predictive decision-making, and from predominantly manual processes towards human-AI collaboration. These developments can improve efficiency, relevance, convenience, innovation, and competitiveness. At the same time, expanded use of consumer data and algorithmic decision-making creates significant concerns related to privacy, transparency, bias, accountability, consumer autonomy, and workforce transformation. The paper argues that technological capability alone is insufficient to create sustainable commercial value. The future of commerce is likely to depend on the ability of organisations to combine AI capabilities with human judgement, consumer trust, ethical governance, and sustainability considerations. A conceptual framework is proposed in which AI-enabled capabilities influence commerce transformation and commercial outcomes, while responsible governance acts as a critical enabling condition. The paper concludes that competitive advantage in an AI-enabled economy will depend not merely on the speed of AI adoption, but on how effectively and responsibly organisations integrate AI into commercial systems and stakeholder relationships.
