“The pursuit of Time to Value: Unlocking agility and growth in today’s commerce market” by EY indicates 90% of brands surveyed are taking action to meet consumers’ expectations for seamless and personalized experiences across channels.
The report found:
- 85% of survey respondents indicated they are acting on introducing emerging technologies like AI
- Speed of implementation for brands migrating to Shopify are on average 20% faster compared to competitors
- Shopify users reported 15% incremental revenue due to direct benefits gained from re-platforming
Brands need to embrace technology as both an enabler and accelerator of innovation to remain competitive in a rapidly changing market, according to Vincent Le, partner and TMT sector leader at EY Parthenon Canada.
In an interview, Le said that agility and resilience are essential for businesses looking to adapt to shifting market conditions, such as changing customer preferences, competitive pressures and global trade issues.
“The study intends to cover the important role that technology plays in both driving agility and resilience,” he said. “Agility being the speed to which you’re able to get things done, and resilience being the ability to absorb shocks and respond to them with the right information.”
Le said technology, once seen as a barrier, has become a powerful tool for helping companies respond quickly to change.
“There’s almost been a democratization of technology to the point where brands like Shopify provide the ability and flexibility for businesses to make changes quickly,” he said.
He explained that EY Parthenon refers to this process as “time to value,” or the speed at which companies realize benefits from new technology.
“The value realized is in how you enable and integrate that technology into your business processes,” Le said. “That creates competitive advantage and frees up capacity to drive innovative, customer-focused experiences.”
However, he noted that the biggest barriers to innovation are now internal rather than technological.
“Businesses themselves are often now the inhibitor,” Le said. “If you don’t have the right culture, governance and enablement of people to make decisions, that’s actually being exposed. Brands can no longer use technology as an excuse.”
When asked about the challenges businesses face in adopting new technology, Le said many companies hesitate because of perceived trade-offs.
“There’s this thinking where if I take that leap into implementing something new, I’m going to be sacrificing a bunch of things — customization, cost, time,” he said. “In fact, they just stand still. We’ve debunked that myth.”
He added that successful companies view digital transformation as an ongoing process rather than a one-time migration.
“Most business leaders view the migration itself as the journey, and after that everything just works,” Vincent said. “The ones that successfully transform view migration as the first step. True business transformation starts thereafter.”
Le emphasized that replatforming should be treated as a business initiative rather than a purely technical project.
“It should be a business-owned project where technology sits as an enabler,” he said. “Without involving your commercial leaders, product leaders, marketing folks, you just swap one system for another without truly transforming what makes you competitive.”
He said businesses should focus on outcomes such as faster product launches, seamless payment experiences and personalized marketing.
“Those are the real objectives,” Le said. “It should not be, ‘How quickly can we get to day one?’ That’s just table stakes.”
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