In today’s episode, we’re unpacking one of the noisiest buzzwords in tech right now: agentic AI, and what it really means for retail operations today versus the fully autonomous future everyone’s being sold in board decks.

You’ll hear a candid 30-minute conversation between two practitioners who live this every day, one coming from the AI and automation architecture side, the other from retail technology and operations. Together, we cut through the hype and draw a clear line between Autonomous Workflow Orchestration—the intelligent, ML- and LLM-powered workflows retailers actually have in production today, and true agentic ecosystems: goal-driven digital coworkers that can perceive context, reason, plan, act across systems, and coordinate with other agents.

Over the episode, we walk through three big questions:

What’s actually live in production right now in retail?

What’s being oversold under the “agent” label?

And what has to change in your architecture, data, and operating model to move from today’s orchestrated automation to tomorrow’s more autonomous, agent-driven retail?

If you’re a CIO, COO, Head of Digital, or anyone trying to separate signal from noise on “agentic AI,” our goal in this conversation is to give you practical language, a realistic maturity spectrum, and concrete next steps, so you can design today’s automation in a way that truly sets you up for more autonomy later, instead of just adding one more brittle bot to the stack.