If there’s one phrase dominating Silicon Valley pitch decks this year, it’s “AI agent.” Startups everywhere are rushing to build autonomous bots that can tackle specific, tactical tasks. But Zack Peng, founder and CEO of San Francisco-based e-commerce operations startup Seel, thinks the industry is thinking too small. He doesn’t want to sell you an AI agent; he wants to replace your entire outsourced agency.

Today, Seel announced the launch of Seel Agencies, a suite of AI-native services designed to run complex, end-to-end e-commerce operations. Instead of offering a SaaS tool that a human team has to carefully prompt, configure, and babysit, Seel is stepping into the massive Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) market to own the outcomes completely.

For e-commerce brands, the backend operations, handling returns, answering angry customer tickets, and liquidating unsold inventory, are notoriously messy. To avoid drowning in logistics, brands historically turn to traditional human-staffed agencies. It’s a lucrative space: the market for outsourced fulfillment sits at a staggering $123 billion, while outsourced customer support adds another $77 billion.

But according to Seel, modern AI tools haven’t actually disrupted this model. Most AI platforms today still require constant human supervision to stitch together fragmented workflows.

“Seel is not a software company that sells tools to help companies deliver services—it is the service,” Peng explained. “We run the messiest parts of commerce ourselves—returns, refunds, resale, support—and therefore have a deep understanding of what it takes to drive outcomes. As AI evolves from chatbots that give answers and agents that perform tasks to agencies that achieve goals, we are building AI-operated agencies that deliver the end service merchants need to win in the age of ecommerce.”

From Tasks to Outcomes

The core differentiator for Seel Agencies is the shift from task completion to strategic goal ownership.

Think of it like hiring a performance marketing firm. You don’t hire them to click buttons in Meta Ads Manager; you hire them to hit a specific Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). Seel is applying that exact same outcome-based accountability to its AI.

The company is currently rolling out specialized agencies targeting high-friction areas of post-purchase operations:

CX Agencies: Tasked with hitting specific ticket resolution volumes and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score requirements.
Performance Marketing Agencies: Tasked with meeting strict ROAS and volume goals.
Resale and Liquidation Agencies: Tasked with optimizing the cash cycle and hitting recovery value targets for returned or excess inventory.

Because these AI agencies carry operational context across different functions, merchants don’t have to rearchitect their entire tech stack. Seel’s system integrates directly into existing ERP, CRM, and WMS platforms, configuring itself around the merchant’s specific policy guidelines and leaning on Seel’s existing proprietary data to hit the ground running.

Dogfooding the Tech

Seel isn’t starting from scratch. The company already commands a massive footprint in the agentic commerce space, powering post-purchase experiences for over 35 million shoppers across thousands of merchants. Their client roster includes heavy-hitters like Reebok, TikTok Shop, Rue La La, Anker, and Champion.

Before rolling the Agency model out to these merchants, Seel spent the last few years quietly “dogfooding” the AI across its own internal operations to process millions of transactions per month. This internal deployment gave the company the massive troves of training data, workflow logic, and edge-case mapping necessary to handle the chaos of real-world retail.

The results from its pilot program, which has been running with enterprise customers for the last six months, suggest the approach is working. According to the company, the AI agencies are already outperforming traditional, human-staffed services, achieving a 12% lift in CSAT compared to legacy external contractors. Furthermore, merchants are seeing faster ticket resolution times, instant refunds, and higher resale recovery rates.

As the e-commerce landscape becomes increasingly competitive and customer acquisition costs continue to rise, brands are desperately looking for ways to trim operational fat without sacrificing the customer experience. If Seel can truly automate the BPO layer of e-commerce with AI that actually holds itself accountable to business metrics, it could fundamentally change how brands scale.

Seel plans to expand its suite of AI agencies into new operational categories throughout the rest of 2026.

Try today at: https://www.seel.com/.