Trevor Pope is on the strategy and value team at Optimizely, where he has spent more than twelve years helping manufacturers and distributors get more out of their commerce, CMS, experimentation, and personalization tools.

Jason Hein sat down with Trevor to ask a question every B2B vendor has stopped being able to answer with “we’re doing AI”: what does it take to adopt AI in a way your company can still manage six months from now? Trevor’s answer is the AI harness, the layer that connects your applications, permissions, brand guidelines, and audit logs to whichever LLM you choose, so you can change the model without rebuilding everything around it. Jason’s version is that the LLM is the horse, the digital business is the cart, and the harness is what lets you swap horses.

Trevor explains why Optimizely built its own harness instead of adding AI features to existing products, and how it brought in a second LLM provider without changing anything for users, agents, or context. He walks through how a regional wire distributor used agents to run more experiments, how another distributor caught products missing from categories, and how manufacturers are producing more campaign content with small teams. They also get into how a harness differs from an iPaaS, what CIOs actually ask about (audit trails, authentication, and whether their data trains someone else’s model), and why most companies are still pointing AI at internal work before letting customers talk to an agent.

Key idea: the horse will keep changing. The harness is what you build to keep.