Avoiding Greenwashing
How to build impactful, sustainable strategies through product experiences
Learn MoreLearn MoreLearn MoreDiscover how Akeneo empowers brands to build flexible, scalable ecosystems that enhance product data management, streamline operations, and deliver unified commerce experiences across channels in this guest blog from Valtech. Through modular architecture, real-time insights, and tools for product transparency, discover how Akeneo is enabling businesses to adapt, innovate, and thrive in an increasingly dynamic digital world.
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The future of Product Information Management (PIM) is set for an exciting transformation, fueled by technological advancements and shifting market dynamics. In this fast and dynamic digital world, it becomes essential for any platform to anticipate what is coming next, and constant improvement is crucial: adapting to market trends, enhancing customer experience, streamlining operations, supporting omnichannel strategies, facilitating global reach, leveraging data for insight, boosting personalization efforts, maintaining compliance and global awareness, driving innovation… many reasons to improve the PIM as fast as the market growths!
The future of PIM, particularly with Akeneo, is closely tied to the MACH Alliance - Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless principles. This approach allows for greater flexibility, scalability, and integration seamlessly with other systems.
For Akeneo, this means focusing on modular, flexible architectures that can rapidly adapt to changes in the commerce landscape, especially as the shift to unified commerce continues to gain momentum. Akeneo is preparing for the future by offering new functionalities for ever more efficient and personalized product information management.
Let's delve into some of the key trends shaping the future of Akeneo PIM.
Unified commerce is increasingly becoming a top focus for numerous retailers and brands. PIM assumes a crucial role in guaranteeing a uniform customer experience across various points of interaction by enhancing functionalities that integrate online and offline channels and ensuring seamless product information flow across eCommerce platforms, marketplaces, physical stores, and mobile apps. The advancement of Akeneo Activation, coupled with enhanced management of marketplaces/templates and improved mapping flexibility, will be essential in swiftly establishing connections with new channels and seizing business opportunities.
As brands strive to deliver more personalized experiences, Akeneo's roadmap points towards further investments in offering innovative solutions to customers through Akeneo’s App Store.
Akeneo’s app ecosystem allows for creating highly customized product experiences and customer journeys depending on the customer or market, driven by more advanced data segmentation and dynamic content serving. This enables joint customers to leverage product information across marketing, sales, and customer service channels, onboard new data sources, enhance product experiences using AI, and tailor the Akeneo Product Cloud to meet their specific business needs.
Akeneo is also always bringing in new partners who can address emerging use cases and industry-specific needs by integrating with existing tech stacks and helping customers discover new technologies that elevate the product experience.
This program is designed with mutual growth in mind – by driving customer success, pipeline impact, and innovation together with our partners, they will advance through our new partner tiers and unlock greater benefits along the way.
Artificial Intelligence, particularly Generative AI (Gen AI), will be instrumental in the future of Akeneo, particularly when it comes to automating data enrichment and content generation. AI tools can help generate product descriptions, categorize products, and enrich product attributes faster and with fewer errors.
Akeneo’s future developments will likely enhance its machine learning capabilities to reduce manual work in product catalog management, providing tools for smart content suggestions, image recognition, and automated attribute extraction. We can imagine that the AI can extract information from various sources such as PDF (ie, notices/datasheets/leaflets), images, or videos from the Asset Manager and automatically enrich product attributes.
To go even further, AI can support automating distinctive content according to the channel. As it stands, Akeneo can already distinguish between information and channels. AI would, therefore, support automating distinctive content according to the channel.
The ability to serve custom content depending on the channel (eCommerce, marketplace, or social media) is critical for brands managing multi-channel strategies. Akeneo is expected to develop more refined solutions to manage channel-specific product information, ensuring that the right content is delivered to the right channel, including optimizing descriptions, images, and attributes to align with the unique requirements of each platform, such as Amazon, Instagram, or Shopify. AI will make it possible to create personalized product content for different market segments, based on their characteristics and needs (ie: generate an A+ Content description for the Amazon marketplace based on product sheet and assets).
Sustainability is no longer a trend but a critical requirement. In line with increasing environmental regulations, such as France's AGEC law, and increased demand from consumers to provide detailed information on the environmental impact of their products, there is a growing need for product transparency and the traceability of materials. Akeneo’s roadmap will include more robust tools to manage environmental information like carbon footprint data, recyclable materials, and ethical sourcing. The ability to track and showcase the journey of products from raw material to final sale will meet regulatory demands and strengthen consumer trust.
One of the significant initiatives being rolled out across Europe, and soon to be integrated into Akeneo’s platform, is the Digital Product Passport, a key tool for compliance. This concept is part of the EU's Circular Economy Action Plan, and it aims to provide detailed, product-specific information throughout a product’s lifecycle. The Digital Product Passport will contain data on materials, sustainability credentials, repairability, and disposal options, making it easier for consumers and regulators to assess the environmental impact of a product.
Akeneo is currently implementing support for the Digital Product Passport in Europe, a move that will help companies comply with not only AGEC regulations but also upcoming EU-wide sustainability requirements. This will be especially beneficial for industries like electronics and fashion, where lifecycle transparency and circularity are high priorities. It will allow businesses to build stronger relationships with consumers by showcasing the traceability of their products and commitment to reducing environmental impact.
By staying ahead of these regulatory requirements and offering comprehensive tools and features to manage environmental information and traceability, PIM tools, and PXM will need to position themselves for businesses aiming to not only meet compliance obligations but also drive long-term consumer trust through sustainability leadership.
In today’s market, consumers are increasingly seeking more information about the products they purchase. Beyond just price, they want deeper insights into how those products are made, where the materials come from, and what ethical and environmental practices are involved, including not just the environmental impact but also cost transparency, details about the fabrics and material used, and the ethical considerations behind sourcing and manufacturing.
Consumers are looking for a clear breakdown of costs, not just the final price they pay. This might include understanding how pricing reflects factors like material quality, manufacturing costs, and distribution expenses. Transparency around cost helps consumers feel more confident about the value they're receiving, fostering greater trust in the brand.
Customers are also showing greater interest in knowing what materials and fabrics are used in the products they buy. For example, in fashion, shoppers want to know whether garments are made from sustainable or organic materials, whether they are biodegradable, or if they include synthetic, non-recyclable components. Similarly, in electronics or other consumer goods, there is a demand for transparency around the materials used – especially in terms of their environmental impact, durability, and origin.
Ethical considerations behind how products are sourced and manufactured are also top of mind for consumers. Many now expect brands to disclose whether their products are made in fair labor conditions, whether the supply chain ensures responsible sourcing, and whether the company uses eco-friendly manufacturing practices. Issues like the humane treatment of workers, the avoidance of child labor, and adherence to fair trade principles are critical to consumers' purchasing decisions.
Recently I was shopping online and I found an incredible example regarding transparency – Asket which manages to directly give transparency on the product detailed page. First, I thought the price was high, and then thanks to this transparency, I decided to purchase a basic t-shirt because I understood the ethical and sustainable practices I was monetarily supporting; transparency equals conversion. So, It becomes essential to make it easier for brands to maintain and communicate these details at scale, which can be displayed directly on product pages across all sales channels.
By partnering with best-of-breed solutions, Akeneo enables businesses to build flexible and scalable commerce architectures tailored to their specific needs, ensuring that Akeneo technology seamlessly integrates with other essential components of the commerce ecosystem, such as eCommerce platforms, content management systems, and customer relationship management tools.
Akeneo’s roadmap will introduce more microservice-based approaches for individual tasks, like stock optimization, pricing, or case tracking. As data sufficiency becomes a challenge, microservices will help manage specific aspects of operations in a modular, adaptable way.
You might have heard that the PIM only stores cold data and It is not recommended to have dynamic data – also known as hot data – in a PIM solution. Well, it is true. But to be able to build solid product enrichment, prioritizing which product to consider first without looking into many systems, becomes essential to know if I have a low or high stock of this product or if another product is causing problems for my customer service department with numerous returns or questions.
So what can be done in that kind of scenario? It will be key to streamlining operations, possibly implemented through microservices, especially in unified commerce. This will require real-time inventory visibility, allowing PIM to sync with inventory and pricing systems. Akeneo may push more advanced capabilities to manage stock and inventory data efficiently, reducing the likelihood of product shortages or overstock situations. One of the first ideas might be to have BI-like indicators on my product sheets.
In the retail and eCommerce world, ensuring accurate and up-to-date inventory and price information is paramount. As PIMs evolve, Akeneo will prioritize these data points, making it easier to manage real-time product availability and competitive pricing across different platforms. This could involve integrations with microservices or advanced analytics tools that help optimize stock levels and pricing strategies.
To be precise, this doesn’t mean that Akeneo will be the center of truth for all product data information, including dynamic, logistical, and financial data. It just means that a user might be able to visualize this data through microservices and/or connectors.
Akeneo’s strategic direction for PIM and future roadmap emphasizes creating an adaptable, scalable ecosystem that integrates AI, enhances customer interactions, fosters product transparency, and ensures adherence to environmental and regulatory standards. With unified commerce gaining prominence, Akeneo is expected to prioritize modular solutions that deliver real-time insights into product data, inventory, and pricing across multiple channels, enabling brands to deliver cohesive customer experiences. However, it's crucial to remember that solutions alone are insufficient. A robust product strategy, effective data governance, and innovation are essential to differentiate offerings in the market truly.
As Product Information Management evolves, businesses must adapt to emerging trends to stay competitive and meet consumer expectations.
Check out our previous blog on Optimizing your implemented PIM for continuous evolution
Discover the 9 essential components to set yourself up for success with Product Information Management (PIM) in this guide, created with Valtech.
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