I'm excited to continue our deep dive series with Lauren Schiavone, founder of Wonder Consulting. In this third installment, we're moving beyond the basics to explore a concept that's generating significant buzz in the retail media world: agentic AI.

My goal with this short series with Lauren is to provide a comprehensive roadmap for navigating retail's AI revolution - from foundational concepts to advanced applications that will reshape how brands, retailers, and agencies operate. After covering AI literacy in part 1 and practical first steps in part 2, today we're elevating the conversation to the "202 level."

Agentic AI: Moving Beyond Assistants to Autonomous Action

Lauren began our conversation by making a crucial distinction that clarifies much of the confusion in today's AI discourse. While many professionals are still getting comfortable with AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, agentic AI represents a significant evolution in capability and autonomy.

"The difference with an AI agent is they do something, then they decide and they take action," Lauren explained. This contrasts sharply with AI assistants where "the AI assists you on a task, but then you decide what to do with it and you take action."

This distinction fundamentally changes how we think about AI integration in retail operations. As Lauren defines it: "Agentic AI generally refers to AI systems that possess the capacity to make autonomous decisions and take actions to achieve specific goals with limited or no direct human interventions."

Real-World Applications for Retail Media

Lauren walked me through several compelling examples that demonstrate how agentic AI transforms common retail and marketing functions:

Social Media Management

• AI Assistant approach: Helps you generate a LinkedIn post
• AI Agent approach: Given the goal "increase engagement on LinkedIn," it develops content, posts it, responds to comments, reviews data, and adjusts content based on learnings - all autonomously

Media Plan Development

"The possibilities blow my mind here," Lauren noted, explaining:

• AI Assistant approach: Helps you develop a media plan when asked
• AI Agent approach: When tasked to "optimize my media plan for ROI," it develops the plan, monitors performance, reallocates budgets between vehicles, shifts spending between campaigns, potentially creates new creative campaigns, and continuously analyzes data

Retail Inventory Management

• AI Assistant approach: Analyzes your inventory report when provided data
• AI Agent approach: Given the goal "maintain optimal stock levels and prevent lost sales," it monitors inventory in real-time, predicts demand, automatically places restock orders, adjusts pricing dynamically, and continuously refines its approach

Beyond the Hype: Reality Check on Agentic AI

Lauren offered an important reality check that I found particularly valuable. While agentic AI's future capabilities aren't overhyped, she believes there's significant overstatement about what these tools can actually do today.

She also clarified a common misconception: "You can build a custom GPT in ChatGPT for a specific task like generating a proposal... some people would say 'oh that's an agent.' Well, it's not because you still decide to send that proposal to a client and close that deal."

AI Is Not a Strategy - It's an Enabler

Perhaps the most important insight from our conversation was Lauren's emphatic reminder: "Using AI agents is not a strategy. Using AI is an enabler to your strategy."

This perspective resonated strongly with me. Organizations must first focus on their business strategy and identifying how AI can accelerate those objectives.

As Lauren put it: "You have a business strategy. And that should be based on what you think strategically is the right things to do to deliver and grow your business. And AI, whether that's generative AI, AI agents, or someday AGI, or even ASI, artificial superintelligence, those are going to become enablers - an accelerator of your strategy."

The Future of Business Operations

Looking ahead, Lauren painted a fascinating picture of how we'll think about AI in the future: "In the future there could be hundreds of thousands of agents running your business. So we don't actually think we will talk about agents and I don't know that we'll talk a ton about AI because it will just be the way that sort of powers our business."

She emphasises that instead, the conversations will center on business goals:

• For brands: How can agents help deliver better ROI or media efficiencies?
• For retailers: How can agents improve in-stock positions, eliminate lost sales, or enhance profitability and operational efficiency?

In our next newsletter, we'll continue this conversation with Lauren, exploring how these concepts apply specifically to retail media and what brands and retailers should be doing now to prepare for this rapidly evolving landscape.

Stay tuned for part four of our series.

And if you missed our first two conversations, you can find the blog version of them here - Part 1 and Part 2.