Sip the Kool-Aid, Don't Drown in It: Noah Oken-Berg on AI, Agentic Commerce, and Building Things That Work
Noah Oken-Berg joins me to talk about building tools that work, the opportunity in agentic commerce, and using AI without becoming dependent on it.
Every industry has people who complain about the tools, and people who quietly fix them. Noah Oken-Berg is the second kind.
Noah is CEO and co-founder of Above The Fray, a digital commerce agency that designs, builds, and evolves websites and online stores for B2B manufacturers and their distributors. The company has been at it for about a decade. Noah's own background runs through business development on both the hardware side, where he ran an indirect wireless business, and the software side. As he puts it, he works with his head in the clouds but likes to keep his feet in the dirt, which is why his clients build the machines that shape the physical world: construction, agriculture, and heavy equipment.
I know Noah through AEM, the Association of Equipment Manufacturers, where we both serve on the service member executive committee. If you've used AEM's member tools lately, you've probably used something he built.
From a clickable PDF to real tools
Above The Fray's work with AEM started as a pro bono project. During the PPP era, Noah asked how to put those dollars to their best use, and landed on AEM's Workforce Solutions toolkit, a resource for helping equipment manufacturers recruit, hire, train, and retain talent. At the time it was, in his words, a glorified clickable PDF.
That redesign turned into a working relationship. Above The Fray has since built AEM's sustainability and safety toolkits, relaunched the AEM web store that sells safety manuals, and is rebuilding the AEM member directory, which goes live by the end of the year.
The directory story is a good one. The original version ran on Map Your Show, a conference platform that was never meant to be a directory. It was a square peg in a round hole, and the Map Your Show team was generous enough to help reshape the peg. It worked well enough to prove the idea: people used it, sponsored it, and some found AEM through it and became members. But it never justified the full cost of a purpose-built rebuild. So Above The Fray chose to invest roughly four times what the budget supported, because they believed in it.
Noah's point about how they rebuilt it matters as much as what they built. Nothing starts with a coat of paint. It starts with discovery, requirements, and user stories, then wireframes, and only then visual design. Making something simple out of complexity is complex work.
AI is already in the build
Here's the twist: Above The Fray is trending well under that investment, because AI sped up the work. That's now a pattern across their projects. They still quote the same estimates they always have, but with a new asterisk: on nearly every project they're finishing 10% to 50% faster. On time-and-materials work, that difference goes back to the client to invest elsewhere.
Agentic commerce and the small manufacturer's moment
We spent a good chunk of the conversation on agentic shopping, where AI agents find, compare, and buy on a person's behalf. It's moving so fast that, as Noah said, we'll keep saying it's only two or three weeks old.
My view is that this is the biggest opportunity in e-commerce in a decade, especially for smaller sellers. Marketplaces like Amazon make much of their money from advertising and sponsorships. An agent doesn't care about any of that; it goes straight to what the buyer wants and reads the reviews.
Noah shared a story that makes it concrete. He wanted to find a particular style of handmade earrings from Mexico for his wife. He photographed a pair, asked an LLM where to find them, and it surfaced a small seller in Oaxaca, helped him vet them, and helped him work through the whole purchase in Spanish over WhatsApp, down to tracking a missing stone and coordinating DHL. He said there was no chance he would have found that vendor any other way.
Noah's caution: don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Some B2B buyers are only now moving past fax machines and golf-course handshakes. Agents are another channel, not a replacement. The goal hasn't changed: when people need something, make it easy to get.
We also talked about where this goes in our industry. Printer companies figured out decades ago that ink, not printers, is the business, and they ship it before you run out. Equipment makers can do the same with parts, using telematics data and fast fulfillment to get the right part to a job site before downtime hits.
The real risk: dependency
Noah gets asked whether AI will put agencies out of business. His answer: if your model is billing for crowded meetings, yes. If your job is helping clients use whatever tools are available to be more effective, AI is a gift.
He's also seen the downside of going all in alone: systems connected without safeguards, product data wiped from an ERP, security holes nobody noticed. And there's a cost cliff coming. AI companies are losing money, and they will want it back. If your business depends on one vendor, what happens when the price goes up ten times?
I've lived this. I built tools for my wife's shared kitchen business, Gather to Grow, entirely on one platform, then realized a month in that we were locked in and facing much higher costs. I spent a couple of weeks making it model-agnostic, so now we can switch providers the way you switch gas stations.
Noah's closing advice: learn the AI, but just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. Hire a specialist you trust and spend your time on what you're great at. Or, in his words, sip the Kool-Aid, but don't drown in it.
Tip of the Cap
This episode debuts our new segment, the Tip of the Cap. Noah gave his to the staff and leadership at AEM. Equipment manufacturers are often leaders in machine technology, like telematics, but behind in the back office: sales, marketing, and operations. Over the decade Noah has been a member, AEM has kept pushing members to modernize through Thinking Forward events, conference speakers, and its newsletters, without telling anyone that everything they've done so far should be thrown away.
