Train Your Team When Not to Use AI with Brandon Urich of SwiftOtter

I have known SwiftOtter for years as the training company that taught a generation of Magento developers, so I sat down with Brandon Urich at Shoptalk Fall in Nashville to hear how it became something bigger. Brandon is the president of SwiftOtter, a full-service digital agency.

The Best Kept Secret in the Agency Space

Brandon said the founder, Joseph, built the training materials developers used to learn the platform, and the agency grew up alongside that business as merchants on Magento asked for help.

“I’ve heard people say SwiftOtter was kind of the best kept secret in the agency space because we weren’t really out there like evangelizing the agency all that much,” he says.

When Adobe changed the Magento world, training changed with it, and SwiftOtter put its energy into agency services. Today it works on Adobe Commerce, Shopify and BigCommerce, with a headless practice on Next.js, and on the growth side SEO that has grown into AEO and GEO, CRO and UX, shopping feeds and email as a Klaviyo partner.

Why Headless Works Now

I remembered PWA as the redheaded stepchild that never took off. Brandon agreed that PWA Studio was ahead of its time and too opinionated, and that only the Fortune 500 did headless well five to ten years ago.

“One of the barriers of entry with Headless in the past has always been just the level of effort to build the custom UIs you need for things because you can’t just drop in an app for this and an app for that,” he says.

AI lowered that cost. His team ships more code faster, and the custom front end that used to price out a mid-size brand is within reach.

Does Headless Level the Field

I asked whether a front end that does not care about the back end makes Magento, Shopify and BigCommerce interchangeable. Partly, he said. Each platform keeps its strengths, and headless decouples the marketing and user experience from orders, customer data and checkout.

“Those platforms tend to have a lower ceiling if you’re not running on a more modern front end tech stack,” he says.

A Partner Who Is Not Monotheistic

A partner that only sells one platform is not offering a choice. Brandon said working across platforms gives SwiftOtter a wider view than a team that lives inside one stack.

“It’s easy to get a little bit siloed if you are inside your company working on your tech stack all the time,” he says.

When Not to Use AI

I asked for his definition of AI slop. He has seen the emails, the one-to-one messages where you wonder whether a person or Claude wrote them. His team is AI enabled, and the training now runs both ways.

“We’re kind of at the point where we’re also training our team how to not use AI. And I think that’s just as important today as how to use AI,” he says.

Code with guardrails and human eyes, yes. Communication with another human, write it yourself.

Hot Take on Guardrails

“Everybody has it now and everybody’s able to produce at some level with it,” he says.

“But being able to build effective guardrails and processes around it are where people are struggling,” he says.

OmniGuide

Going into Black Friday, Brandon is excited about OmniGuide, a guided shopping application SwiftOtter built on a brand’s product data, sales collateral and other sources, embedded in catalog pages, PDPs and search rather than bolted on as a chatbot.

“People are going to a website doing product discovery but then jumping over to like ChatGPT or something to actually do their research. So that shopping experience gets taken off of your website and it’s kind of in this black box,” he says.

OmniGuide asks the questions the best salesperson behind the counter would ask, and he says conversion rates and engagement are up where it runs.

Brandon Urich is the president of SwiftOtter. Find the company at swiftotter.com.