In May, our CEO Arber was invited for a presentation for theSwiss Retail Federation. Eight minutes is a short window to explain why AI agents are about to become the most important infrastructure decision a retailer will make in the next few years.
Here is roughly what he told the room:
Shoppers and retailers want the same thing: a shop-worthy assortment. Shoppers have the easy part: they just have to want it. Retailers have to build it, and that is where things get challenging.
A shopper-oriented assortment means mastering billions of data points from internal sources like search queries and sales data, and external ones like social media trends and competitor pricing.
What most people outside the industry do not realise is that today, category managers are still manually screening competitor websites for products and prices every day. A product gap analysis takes weeks. Preparing it for management takes more weeks. By the time a decision is made, months have passed — which is a big reason why products end up on the shelf long after they first went viral online.
What if AI agents prepared our decisions instead?
The answer, based on what we have already proven with clients
- is a 6 to 12 month faster time to market
- 80% time savings on decision preparation, and
- a margin uplift of at least 2%.
With AI Agents preparing decisions, category managers stop spending their time on analysis and start spending it on the part of their job that actually requires human judgment.
The final point was the one that tends to land hardest
Open models like Gemini and ChatGPT are extraordinary tools, but they are the best first-day interns an enterprise will ever get. What retailers need to compete with Amazon, Temu and Shein is not a general-purpose assistant. It is a purpose-built agent that acts like a head of category management: working only on prepared materials, making specific recommendations, and acting on them.
