Olivela is a luxury e-commerce brand with a social-impact mission, offering products from premium and luxury brands while directing a portion of purchases towards charitable causes. Persistent has supported Olivela for more than 17 years, helping the company evolve its digital commerce experience through multiple platform migrations and product enhancements.
Modernising the Storefront Without Disrupting Critical Journeys
Olivela was undertaking a complete migration to a fully Shopify-based, non-headless storefront. The programme also included WebView-based mobile app enablement, search migration, theme upgrades, feature rebuilds and the introduction of an AI-powered shopping assistant.
Critical journeys had to remain intact across web and mobile, including login and signup, authentication and session management, product discovery and search, checkout and payment-related functionality and mobile app access through WebView.
The migration had to change the commerce platform without breaking the journeys customers already depended on.
Delivering More Within Fixed Budget and Team Capacity
The transformation had to be delivered within a fixed budget by a lean five-person team comprising four developers and one QA specialist. A delay in the mobile app release could have left customers without a fully functional mobile shopping experience for one to two months. Slower delivery of website enhancements would also have delayed new-feature rollout, affecting time-to-market and customer experience.
The team needed to complete the Shopify migration with minimal disruption, resolve WebView, CORS, cookie and authentication issues, manage theme upgrades and merge conflicts, migrate search from Algolia to Psykhe, rebuild Fast Shipping and Engraving features, deliver an AI-powered product discovery assistant and improve testing coverage without expanding the team.
A five-person team was being asked to migrate the storefront, protect mobile access, rebuild features and expand testing at the same time.
Establishing an AI-First Delivery Model
Persistent introduced AI across development, migration, testing and feature delivery from the beginning of the engineering process.
Instead of using AI only to correct issues after development, the team used it to investigate requirements, interpret designs, generate code, identify dependencies and validate potential solutions. Human review remained part of every stage, with developers reviewing AI-generated code, completing unit testing and validating changes before release.
AI-assisted engineering helped investigate and resolve WebView, CORS, cookie and session-management issues. It also supported Shopify theme upgrades, merge-conflict resolution, impact analysis across connected functions, migration from Algolia to Psykhe, rebuilding Fast Shipping and Engraving features, debugging across devices and use cases and generating code from design inputs.
Salesforce’s 2025 Connected Shopper research found that 39% of consumers were already using AI for product discovery, rising to more than half of Gen Z consumers. For Olivela, AI therefore supported both engineering acceleration and a new approach to product discovery.
Extending AI into Product Discovery and Testing
Persistent developed an AI-powered shopping assistant that enabled users to discover products through natural-language interactions.
The assistant was refined to support product search and discovery, brand-aligned responses, prompt evaluation and graceful fallback handling. The team compared responses across Claude and GPT models and created a custom agent capable of executing prompts in bulk across multiple models and scoring outputs for comparison.
McKinsey’s 2026 luxury-commerce research found that 85% of surveyed luxury consumers used a multipurpose AI assistant to support shopping decisions, while 83% reported high or very high satisfaction with AI shopping tools.
AI also became part of Olivela’s testing model. It generated test cases, detected UI regressions and helped verify that existing business functionality remained intact after the storefront upgrade. Developers completed unit testing before handing work to QA, reducing the testing bottleneck within the lean team.
AI was also used to assess the potential impact of code changes across devices, functions and connected customer journeys.
Persistent created a reusable automation repository containing test cases, debugging guidelines and structured instructions for future test generation. Scheduled automation used AWS CodeBuild and EventBridge, with Slack notifications providing failure alerts and execution logs.
Developers reviewed AI-generated code and recommendations before they were committed or deployed and used iterative questioning to test whether proposed solutions would work across different devices, use cases and business scenarios.
The model accelerated delivery while keeping validation and commerce quality under human control.
Business Impact
More Delivery Capacity Without Expanding the Team
- Approximately 40% reduction in development effort through AI-assisted analysis, coding, debugging and validation
- Approximately 27% reduction in testing effort through AI-assisted test generation, regression analysis and automated validation
- Mobile app delivered in two weeks using the existing team, compared with an estimated one to two months of additional development effort without the AI-first approach
- Faster feature delivery, enabling enhancements that typically required several weeks to be delivered significantly faster and allowing more enhancements within the existing budget and team capacity
- Three major releases delivered consecutively: Shopify migration, mobile app release and AI-powered shopping assistant, without significant production issues
- Up to 82.5% AI-assisted test coverage across tracked sprints
- 100% team AI adoption from Sprint 6 onward
- Improved mobile storefront stability and accessibility after WebView, CORS and authentication issues were resolved
Olivela increased delivery capacity while remaining within its fixed budget and lean team structure.
Building a More Flexible Commerce Foundation
Persistent combined AI-assisted engineering, automated testing, reusable delivery assets and human-led validation to modernize Olivela’s commerce foundation.
The AI-first approach accelerated Shopify development, enabled the mobile app and introduced an AI-powered shopping assistant without requiring additional specialist capacity. It also improved testing efficiency, strengthened regression control and reduced the risk associated with a complex platform migration.
For Olivela, the result is a more stable and flexible commerce foundation that supports faster feature delivery while protecting the quality of the digital experience across web and mobile.
Accelerate Commerce Modernisation. Build AI into Delivery and Discovery. Talk with Persistent.
