We connect board-level leaders, senior advisors and fractional executives with growth-stage commerce companies. Our events are one expression of that work.

We host expert sessions, in-person meetups, and small, closed dinners across key global markets. These gatherings are designed to support ongoing conversations, not one-off appearances.

Updates and invitations are shared via Luma.

This week’s EVOLVE expert session featured Prakash Gurumoorthy, General Manager for APAC and EMEA at VTEX.

His perspective matters because it is grounded in operational exposure across cycles, not commentary.

Prakash has built and led agency businesses, experienced acquisition and integration firsthand, and now operates inside a global commerce platform spanning Europe and Asia. He works daily with brands, agencies, and system integrators under conditions of real delivery pressure, regulatory constraint, and commercial accountability.

That proximity to operational reality shaped the discussion.

What emerged was not a debate about relevance, but a diagnosis of where leverage is migrating in commerce systems that no longer behave linearly.

For more than two decades, the dominant commerce sequence was broadly linear: brand, agency, platform, consumer.

Each actor had a relatively stable role. Brands owned the customer relationship. Agencies designed, built, and executed. Platforms provided infrastructure. Consumers interacted at the end of the chain.

That sequence no longer holds.

Prakash described this collapse as structural rather than cyclical. Platforms have matured to the point where core capabilities such as checkout, search, personalisation, and orchestration are increasingly standardised. What once differentiated execution has moved into the realm of utilities.

The result is not simply efficiency. It is redistribution.

Execution is no longer scarce. Speed is no longer a differentiator. Reliability is assumed. As infrastructure commoditises, power migrates away from those who execute toward those who define standards, control data flows, and set the rules of participation.

In this environment, agencies no longer sit between brands and platforms by default. Their position must be earned repeatedly.

Brands, in response, are pulling strategic ownership closer to themselves. Not because they distrust partners, but because dependency has become a risk. First-party data governance, architectural decisions, and roadmap control are now treated as existential.

Prakash referred to this posture as composable independence. Think of it like risk management.

From an agency standpoint, orchestration has become the dominant response to this shift. The logic is understandable. As stacks fragment, someone must unify them. As platforms proliferate, someone must coordinate.

Prakash acknowledged the necessity of orchestration. He also made clear its limits.

Orchestration raises expectations faster than it restores leverage.

Agencies are now expected to unify systems of engagement, systems of record, marketplaces, data layers, and channels across increasingly complex environments. In mid-market and enterprise contexts, this often involves coordinating thirty to forty systems, each with its own incentives, data models, and failure modes.

This work is valuable. It is also risky.

What has changed is not the nature of the work, but who absorbs the downside when it fails.

Agencies are increasingly expected to carry delivery risk, compressed timelines, and integration complexity without corresponding changes to margin structure or balance-sheet power. This is not a commercial negotiation problem. It is an incentive mismatch embedded in the system.

Prakash was explicit on this point. Risk has shifted faster than agency business models have adapted.

One of the most concrete signals discussed in the session was time.

Prakash stated plainly that commerce builds exceeding six months increasingly signal dysfunction. Complexity has not disappeared, expectations however have changed.

In multiple recent enterprise cases across Europe and Asia, brands dictated aggressive delivery timelines, retained strategic ownership, and instructed agencies and system integrators to execute rather than design. Strategic decisions were internalised. Execution was externalised.

In these cases, brands carried the majority of the strategic load, while agencies delivered under constraint.

Power followed ownership of the roadmap.

This is an important distinction. Roadmaps determine sequencing, prioritisation, and trade-offs. Whoever controls them controls the system’s direction, regardless of who executes the work.

AI featured prominently in the discussion, but without exaggeration.

Prakash framed AI not as a creativity multiplier, but as an accountability accelerator. Automation in areas such as media buying, demand forecasting, attribution, and optimisation is increasingly embedded directly into platforms.

This removes buffers that agencies historically relied on. It compresses cycles. It exposes inefficiencies.

The consequence is not that agencies become obsolete. It is that they are forced upward, into areas of judgment, system design, and trade-off management.

Some agencies respond by attempting to protect existing revenue models. Others are beginning to cannibalise them.

One example discussed involved replacing analyst teams with AI agents for demand forecasting. Headcount was reduced. Billable hours declined. Stickiness with the brand increased. The trade-off was explicit. Short-term revenue versus long-term relevance.

Not every firm will make that choice.

Another recurring theme was neutrality.

Agencies closely aligned to a single platform are increasingly perceived as constrained rather than specialised. Brands want flexibility. They want the ability to compose and recombine capabilities without locking themselves into another form of dependency.

Neutrality, however, is expensive.

It requires continuous evaluation of tooling, architectural literacy across platforms, and organisational structures that can adapt without collapsing under their own weight. It requires governance.

Prakash described agencies introducing new roles focused on tooling, partnerships, and automation, replacing legacy roles tied to platform-specific execution. This is not rebranding. It is organisational redesign.

The discussion around leverage aligns closely with what is visible in market data.

According to Reuters, technology and data infrastructure now account for a dominant share of global M&A activity, with AI-related software driving a substantial portion of deal volume as buyers prioritise control over data, automation, and platforms rather than service capacity. This reflects a broader shift toward acquiring structural advantage rather than incremental capability.

In consumer-facing sectors, PwC’s Consumer Markets Deal Outlook 2025 shows a divergence between volume and value. Deal volumes remain subdued, while deal values have risen sharply. Fewer transactions, larger bets. This pattern is consistent with buyers seeking control over systems and standards rather than scale alone.

The agency sector mirrors this dynamic. Large holding companies continue to consolidate to secure integrated capability and negotiating power. Private equity has concentrated capital into fewer, more defensible platforms. Smaller agencies face pressure to merge or sell, not because demand has disappeared, but because margin structures no longer support fragmentation.

This is not cyclical consolidation. It is structural.

As infrastructure commoditises, value concentrates around governance, data ownership, and ecosystem control. Intermediaries survive only where they reduce complexity faster than it accumulates.

Toward the end of the session, the conversation became more direct.

Several participants noted that agencies benefited for years from slow platforms, fragmented systems, and opaque metrics. That environment protected margin. It allowed inefficiency to persist. It rewarded scale over accountability.

That protection has ended.

Monthly recurring revenue models tied to headcount are under pressure. Consolidation is accelerating. Value is concentrating in fewer firms able to redesign themselves around accountability rather than billable hours.

The implication is not disappearance. It is selection.

This is not an ecommerce-specific phenomenon.

Similar dynamics are visible across payments, media, logistics, and enterprise software. Wherever infrastructure becomes a utility, power consolidates around standards, data, and ecosystems. Intermediaries remain relevant only where they clarify complexity under constraint.

This is the broader pattern Prakash’s observations sit within.

At EVOLVE, we bring board-level leaders, senior advisors, and fractional operators together to examine these shifts as they happen, before they harden into consensus or are simplified into narratives.

This session did not offer reassurance.
It clarified where leverage is already moving.

For operators making decisions today, that clarity is not optional. It is the only signal that matters.

Prakash, Jean Mies former President of Adyen in Latin America, Vinny O’ Brian former President of Adyen in Latin America, are all members of our private Club.

EVOLVE is not built around speakers, stages or events. It functions as a working environment where senior operators, board members and advisors remain accessible over time.

Conversations like this one do not end with the session.

They continue privately, in smaller settings, and often around live strategic questions.

If you are a CEO navigating transformation, or a senior leader stepping into board or advisory responsibilities, access to people who have operated inside these systems, and understand where incentives, governance and execution fail, is often more valuable than frameworks or reports.

In the episode “Suffering is optional”, Farzin Saber, Global Vice President at IKEA Group, shares for the first time his journey from childhood displacement during the Iranian revolution to global leadership, and the deliberate choice not to let pain define the rest of his life.

A grounded reminder that behind every polished career sits a far more complex human story.

If you’d like to learn more how to partner with us during 2026 please email us at [email protected] or [email protected]

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