Every trade outlet covering retail's AI moment has landed on the same phrase: the "decision layer." It's the recommendation engines, conversational agents and pricing logic that now sit between a shopper's intent and their purchase. That framing is useful for a boardroom slide. It's useless for an engineering team that has to ship something.
Strip the strategy language away and the decision layer is just a routing problem: which retailer's product data gets pulled into an AI agent's context window. Whoever gets pulled into that context window gets considered. Whoever doesn't, doesn't. That's a plumbing problem, and the plumbing is being standardized right now.
