Interview: Wolf & Badger CEO George Graham on getting ‘hands-on’ with AI

Are we all product managers now?

While the work on using AI to power the online experience is not uncommon in e-commerce today, Graham’s attitude as CEO of the marketplace is. He is a CEO getting his hands dirty with the tech, which is rare in retail.

“I have personally spent many hundreds of hours over the past three months getting my head around AI and the future of commerce – with agentic commerce in mind,” he explains.

I have personally spent many hundreds of hours over the past three months getting my head around AI and the future of commerce – with agentic commerce in mind

“Claude Code has become my go-to app. I have built a fairly bespoke AI agent ‘chief of staff’ that is connected to my tools via MCPs [model context protocols] or APIs [application programming interfaces], with a bunch of bespoke skills and scripts that I have ended up building into that.”

Graham says the collective memory stack is getting more powerful by the day, and using it has improved his own working practices.

“I feel twice as efficient as I was six months ago. I have taken that time and – in the short term – continued reinvesting it in understanding AI.”

The AI assistant Graham has developed is being made accessible via Stack internally, and the wider team is getting set up on Claude Code themselves with access to their own version.

The CEO acknowledges he isn’t an engineer or coder, but as a teenager, he would make games in Basic (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) and design websites with HTML. After studying business at university, he joined PwC as a strategy consultant. By the age of 23, he was starting Wolf & Badger and “had to figure out how to build a marketplace as there wasn’t really marketplace software out there”.

When development at Wolf & Badger was brought in-house – today, it has a vice-president of technology, around a dozen people in engineering and others in product management and design – Graham continued to play a part in building out features to support brand partners and customers.

“I have always found all that fascinating,” he explains.

“Over the years, I stepped away as we brought the experts in – but, increasingly, I’m coming back to running product and working with our vice-president of tech on some of the AI projects and getting very hands-on myself.”

Graham, who founded Wolf & Badger with his brother Henry in 2010, admits he doesn’t fully understand the finer nuances of coding and doesn’t have the experienced engineer’s eye. But with the new tech available, he suggests “anyone can be a product manager or software developer” now.

“I have been able to create prototypes – I have built things that assess brands coming on the platform and help the sustainability team with vetting,” he says.

The software his internal teams are now using is set up on GitHub, and built on Eversell MSL front-end, Superbase, and other apps. “Everything is hooked up in what I think is reasonably robust for internal use,” he adds.

He urges other leaders in retail and wider business not to be afraid, and to experiment with the tools now available. There’s a lot that can be built on just a small monthly tech subscription outlay, he notes.

The wider tech team at Wolf & Badger initially experimented with solutions such as Microsoft Copilot and then Cursor.

“Only in the past few months have our engineers found the quality is at a point where they can lean on it more to start actually writing code. We’re keeping clear of the vibe coding in key sensitive areas, of course, but we can experiment in lots of spaces.”

The tech exploration work Graham has taken on – and there is much more to come, he says – is to “ready ourselves for agentic commerce and make sure we’re ahead of the pack”.

Since the turn of the year, there have already been some noteworthy developments in agentic commerce that further underline it as a future direction of travel for e-commerce and, therefore, something e-commerce and retail leaders must better grasp an understanding of.

Agentic commerce and UCP

The new year started with JD Sports announcing it is enabling consumers to use AI platforms to search for and purchase products – all in a single click, without leaving the apps.

JD customers in the US can purchase directly through Copilot, and – in due course – this will be followed by the ability to do so via Google Gemini and ChatGPT. JD is leveraging the agentic commerce suite of tech players Commercetools and Stripe.

Jetan Chowk, JD’s chief technology and transformation officer, said the move was about meeting customers “where they are”. It came after OpenAI announced in September that US shoppers could buy from Etsy directly through ChatGPT.

It started with an “instant checkout” to support single-item purchases, but multi-item carts are now on their way to being a reality.

Then, at the January 2026 NRF Big Show in New York, where many from the retail technology community congregate every year, Google launched the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard for agentic commerce that aims to establish a common language for AI agents and systems to operate together across consumer surfaces, businesses and payment providers.

The work Stripe is doing with agentic commerce protocol and standardising the mechanism by which people can shop directly via the [AI] agents is super interesting

This is a fast-moving space, but was co-developed with prominent retail industry players such as Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart, and endorsed by more than 20 others across the ecosystem, including payments companies Adyen, American Express, MasterCard and Visa.

Graham is in close conversations with Stripe and Google, attending their events and regularly tuning into their updates.

“The work Stripe is doing with agentic commerce protocol and standardising the mechanism by which people can shop directly via the agents is super interesting,” he says. “Google and Shopify UCP is a further move towards a standardisation of how this is going to work.”

Graham is confident there will be more consumer discovery conducted on Google’s AI-powered platforms, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other similar spaces.

“We need to ensure we’re supporting the 2,000 brands we’re working with to appear in the right way on those channels and facilitate the tech that can support one- or zero-click checkout, where an agent has the ability to buy on a consumer’s behalf.”

He is confident that a platform such as Wolf & Badger can play a key role in the agentic space. Individual brands are typically going to struggle to really build out the right metadata and set up UCP to be recognised by the human in the loop or an AI agent.

Graham says: “If we can wrap together the best independent brands and collectively go to a shopping agent to ensure those brands appear in the right places, we’re well placed to capture some of that demand and drive it towards the individual brands we work with, rather than the resulting purchases ending up with the bigger homogenised brands in our space.”

He adds that Wolf & Badger’s presence harks back to the pre-digital days of boutique shopping in-store, but with the right technology investment and focus now, it can deliver this in a “scaled way” online and through its showrooms.

“Our editorial and marketing team still make the creative calls, but we’re able to drive it forward with some of these new bits of tech,” he says, adding that as Wolf & Badger extends its technological nous, it can enable its brands to focus on “the difficult part” of commerce – meaning the design and manufacturing of compelling garments and consumer products.

Rapidly evolving space

As for the immediate future at Wolf & Badger, the US expansion is a key focus – as are ventures across Europe and into the Middle East. An expanded brand partnerships function within the business is expected to support the onboarding of new designers from around the world.

But AI continues to be an area of significant exploration, with Graham confident that his experimentation and use of cost-effective tools are improving how the business operates.

“It’s a rapidly evolving space – everything is changing these days,” he says, adding that it’s getting increasingly difficult to understand what will come next due to the acceleration of technological capability.

“You just have to try to stay ahead,” he says. “We’re repositioning ourselves in making sure we are embracing AI in the way I think any forward-thinking growth company should, and recognising the power it can bring to enable us to do much more for our brands and shoppers.”