Technology & AI

This is the half of the work that has to still be true in three years. Most of it is decisions rather than code: what the data actually is, which systems have to agree with one another, how far a model may reach, and what will be expensive to reverse.

It is also the half that demonstrates well and fails late. The demo works. The second year is where it goes — the migration nobody planned for, the integration that assumed a format the supplier has since changed, the assistant answering confidently about documents nobody prepared.

So the architecture is written down before the code, the people who designed it are the people who build it, and data, retrieval and security are treated as parts of the system rather than as features added at the end. It takes its brief from strategy and product, and it hands the growth work something that can actually be measured.

It is most of what the Custom line sells. On the Solutions line it is quieter and no less structural: the markup a crawler needs, the measurement configured before launch, and the payment, courier and invoicing that make a store an operation rather than a window.