CGI, one of the largest independent IT and business consulting services firms in the world, and an Axway systems integration partner, delivered an AI-powered e-commerce reference architecture to a major European retailer.
The Axway Amplify Platform acts as the central orchestration and control layer between AI agents, business APIs, and enterprise systems, allowing the retailer to industrialize AI-driven commerce use cases without exposing core systems directly to large language models (LLMs), ensuring security, observability, and future scalability.
The retailer is pursuing a technological innovation initiative aimed at evolving its digital foundation to better address the challenges of omnichannel operations, scalability, and digital customer experience. It is progressively modernizing its information system, covering integration layers, digital services, logistics, and loyalty mechanisms. In parallel, it is exploring the integration of AI-based capabilities to enrich digital use cases (search, personalization, and customer assistance), while ensuring a controlled approach to security, control, observability, and scalability.
Responding to increasing complexity and rising customer expectations
The retailer faces increasing complexity in managing omnichannel customer journeys, fragmented data sources (catalog, stock, payments, logistics), and rising customer expectations for personalized, fast, and seamless online experiences. Key challenges include improving product discovery, increasing online conversion rates, reducing friction during checkout, and enabling AI-assisted shopping experiences without compromising security, scalability, or control.
This initiative primarily aims to establish the foundations of a scalable reference architecture, capable of industrializing innovative use cases and supporting future deployments at a European scale.
The Amplify Platform provides orchestration and control
Axway Amplify Platform enables seamless integration between e-commerce frontends, backend systems, and external services. The AI Gateway within the Amplify Platform ensures secure, compliant, and scalable AI consumption. It provides AI orchestration and routing, security and compliance, optimization and monitoring, and AI control.
The architecture includes token management, semantic caching, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Semantic caching stores and reuses responses to similar AI queries instead of sending each request to the LLM, reducing redundant calls to the model. The business endpoint layer includes a shopping agent and a payment agent under the Amplify Platform. The application layer includes a catalog API, a stock API, payment authorization, and order creation.
A proof of concept for AI-assisted shopping journeys
CGI deployed a functional proof of concept demonstrating AI-assisted shopping journeys across product search, add to cart, and payment. At each stage, AI responds to shopper actions. In product search, AI performs text search with filters and sorting, category and collection browsing, product detail page consultation, and product comparison. In add to cart, AI selects variants, validates stock and rules, adds to cart, and updates the cart. In payment, AI authenticates, selects delivery, checks for fraud, authorizes payment, and confirms the order.
CGI achieved secure orchestration of AI agents and enterprise systems using the AI Gateway in the Amplify Platform and identified high-impact business use cases across search, conversion, and checkout. The architecture enhances customer experience by reducing friction across the buying journey, improving product relevance, and enabling personalized, AI-assisted interactions.
A staging ground for European-scale deployment
CGI created a scalable and reusable architecture for future European rollouts. The proof of concept is the staging ground for industrialization. The architecture enables future innovation while ensuring control, security, and scalability across Europe.
Amplify Platform helps orchestrate AI and integration at scale