Enterprise or Easy? Salesforce Says: "Yes!" Doubleheader featuring Mangtani and Lennart Stevens from Salesforce Talking 'Storefront Next'
EVP & GM Nitin Mangtani and VP Product Management Commerce Lennart Stevens on Storefront Next, the Cimulate acquisition, and the biggest Salesforce Commerce Cloud release in five years.
This week we have a rare doubleheader. We sat down with two Salesforce leaders back to back to help us unpack the company’s big June release, headlined by the launch of its newest platform, Storefront Next.
Nitin Mangtani is the Executive Vice President and General Manager at Salesforce, a few more things in his title than the last time he was on the show (check it out here). Nitin ran Google Shopping for years before founding PredictSpring, a point-of-sale company that Salesforce acquired in 2024. Two years in, he now oversees the full commerce stack: storefront, point of sale, and order management.
Lennart Stevens is the Vice President of Product Management for Agentforce Commerce at Salesforce, making his first appearance on the show. Lennart has spent nearly two decades in commerce, almost all of it on the partner side. He was one of the early implementation partners for Demandware (the platform Salesforce acquired and rebranded as Commerce Cloud), so he’s seen the customer’s side of every platform migration in the book. Salesforce brought him in to carry that customer perspective into the product, and his purview now covers Storefront Next, checkout, and the new commerce applications framework.
Listen/Watch Our Interview:
First up is Nitin, who walks through the full sweep of the June release and makes the case for why, taken together, it's Salesforce's biggest commerce release in five years. Then Lennart takes us deeper into the agentic guts, one of our favorite parts.
The two interviews rhyme in one important way: both leaders insist that agentic commerce on your owned-and-operated channels matters just as much as showing up in ChatGPT and Gemini. As Nitin puts it, skipping your own shopper agent is like the old days of saying "I participate on Google Shopping, but I don't have search on my website." Highlights below.
Highlights
Biggest release in five years: Nitin frames the June release as Salesforce Commerce’s biggest swing since he arrived.
“It’s 2026, let’s combine the two together”: The forced choice between enterprise-grade and easy-to-launch is a false distinction that can be engineered away.
The acquisition cheat code: Rather than spend five years building modern AI search in-house, Salesforce bought Cimulate. It now powers every shopper agent prompt, and it’s available even to non-Commerce Cloud customers.
“This code should be written by Claude prompting and not by you”: Storefront Next ships you to the 90% point out of the box; the last 10% is vibe-coded. Migration utilities plus Claude Code shrink what used to be a capital-T front-end project.
Live in under 30 minutes: Lennart’s demo path: name the storefront, connect a code repo, click go, and you’re previewing a high-performance site in under half an hour.
You need your own Rufus AND to play off-site: Both guests hammer the distinction between agentic commerce on owned-and-operated channels and syndicated commerce via UCP on Gemini, OpenAI, and beyond. One without the other is like being on Google Shopping with no search box on your own site.
Focus is magic: Nitin consolidated 20 initiatives down to 4–5, runs two-week iteration cycles instead of two-year PRDs, and credits that discipline (plus AI-native development) for the release’s scope.
Advisor and confidant: Lennart’s favorite anecdote… a jewelry brand found customers were more comfortable asking an agent “how big should the ring be, how much should it cost?” than asking a friend.
Checkout wisdom from Nitin: Stop offering eight payment options. “Just put Apple Pay on your PDP” four options max, on a good day.
The era of choosing between enterprise and easy looks like it's ending and the agents are coming either way. Enjoy the conversation.
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