Every commerce company in the world is proud of being “omnichannel.”
Website. App. Store. Marketplace. WhatsApp. Social. Check, check, check.
And every one of them is asking the wrong question.
The question isn’t “how many channels do we have?” It’s “how deeply do we understand the person on the other side?”
The Omnichannel Trap
Omnichannel was the right idea at the wrong resolution. It said: be present everywhere your customer is. Fair enough. But “everywhere” became a cost center, not a strategy. Teams optimized for channel coverage instead of customer understanding.
The result? The same person gets a push notification, an email, a WhatsApp message, and an in-store offer — all for the same product — within 24 hours. That’s not personalization. That’s spam with better infrastructure.
Context Is the Next Frontier
Context means understanding three things simultaneously:
Who is this person? Not their demographic segment. Their actual situation right now.
When are they engaging? Not the timestamp. The moment in their life.
Why are they here? Not the click path. The intent behind it.
At Tata, we experimented with putting luxury product experiences inside Mercedes-Benz vehicles. Not because cars are a “channel.” Because the context was right: high-net-worth individuals, in a moment of leisure, in a space designed for premium experiences.
The channel was irrelevant. The context was everything.
What This Means for AI
AI makes context-driven commerce possible at scale for the first time. Not because AI is smart — but because AI can process the three dimensions of context (who, when, why) across millions of interactions simultaneously.
An AI agent doesn’t think in channels. It thinks in context. It doesn’t ask “which channel should this message go through?” It asks “what does this person need right now, and what’s the most natural way to deliver it?”
That’s a fundamentally different question. And it leads to fundamentally different commerce.
The Shift in Practice
- From channel metrics to context metrics: Stop measuring “app opens” and start measuring “moments understood.”
- From campaign calendars to trigger systems: The best message is the one that arrives because the context demands it, not because marketing scheduled it.
- From segment-based to situation-based: A 35-year-old woman buying a laptop for her first job is not the same as a 35-year-old woman buying a laptop for her child’s school. Same demographic. Entirely different context.
Why This Matters for Croma
Electronics retail is uniquely positioned for this shift. People buy electronics at inflection points in their lives: first jobs, new homes, growing families, career changes. Each purchase carries emotional weight that goes far beyond the spec sheet.
The retailer who understands context — who sees the life moment behind the transaction — wins. Not the one with the most channels.
The future of commerce isn’t channels. It’s context. The right product, the right person, the right moment.
Choose to be wise.