Agentic AI: What it is and what it looks like in the retail world

While human employees matter most for retail brand success, AI-powered assistants have become an integral part of data collection and analysis, improved decision-making, and fostering deeper customer relationships necessary for growth and profit. Agentic AI can transform business by offering intelligence, autonomy, and adaptability in every way. 

With how rapidly artificially intelligent technology is transforming these days, it may feel difficult to keep up with all the latest developments. First, understand what agentic AI is, and then you can explore how it functions and what benefits it brings to the retail world.

What is agentic AI?

Unlike traditional AI systems, agentic AI offers more than language models and basic data-driven insights. They operate with a higher degree of autonomy and proactivity, which means they can handle much more than repetitive tasks. Real help instead of productivity or efficiency is the goal and main outcome. That doesn't mean this type of AI cannot handle routine tasks. It aligns more closely with human capabilities of prediction, planning, and strategizing.

The name is simply a fancy way of saying AI agent. They are primarily used in customer service roles, such as call centers and chat bots. For example, 7-Eleven in Thailand currently handles around ¼ million phone calls every day using this type of system.

They are much better at mimicking human interaction than simple generative AI is. This leads to much less frustration on the part of the customer. Many people still prefer the human touch for things like customer service and direct sales processes, more so in the luxury retail sector. As agentic AI improves, this will change because the systems will become virtually indistinguishable.

How does agentic AI work and what can it do?

The Clientbook’s A Insights tool uses agentic AI to provide you with powerful insights into customer activity and store success. Of course, all AI-driven platforms operate based on collected data. 

You gather and store information about shopper demographics, past purchases, marketing responses, customer interactions with sales staff and care specialists, and so much more. Then, the system provides detailed information about who is most likely to buy, which marketing messages to send to whom, and how to reengage people who can maximize your brand's success.

The difference with agentic AI, however, is that the artificial intelligence systems can act on their own based on the information they have access to. While any digital assistant can work with predefined tasks, it usually takes human supervision to make decisions. This new type of AI does not need that. However, it is important to understand that smart programs like Clientbook never take over for the people in charge. You still have 100% control over what happens.

Agentic AI is many applications in the retail industry

This more powerful and specific type of artificial intelligence can change how retailers interact with customers and manage every aspect of operations. Since it can act autonomously when it comes to making decisions and learning from real-time data, it makes sense that efficiency can improve quite a bit. The better this tech becomes, the less reliance a company will need on human agents.

Personalizing shopping and brand interaction experiences for customers

Agentic AI excels at promoting a more personalized experience for anyone who interacts with the retail brand at all. It can analyze customer preferences, browsing patterns, communication, and sales history with ease. The results and suggestions that it provides go beyond summaries or basic recommendations based on individual data sets. Instead, this smart tech actively learns from each interaction and refines the suggestions in real time.

What does this mean for the customer? First of all, it is simply impossible for any individual sales associate to recognize and remember every shopper in a way that can give them personalized service. The AI system instead adjusts product suggestions based on an accumulation of data. These can include past purchases, current behavior—such as where they click on a website—and outside factors like the season.

This level of personalization also extends to marketing campaigns. In the past, people would have to look at the analyzed data and come up with a strategy and specific content on their own. Of course, generative AI helped with this quite a bit. Agentic AI can actually create tailored email messages, SMS campaigns, or social media posts and responses on its own.

Customer service automation with much smarter chat bots will become commonplace. The advanced language models and "thinking" aspect of these digital agents mean that they will be able to resolve issues, answer questions, and give guidance throughout the shopping journey.

Optimizing inventory, pricing, security, and presentation

While agentic AI focuses mostly on agent style actions and tasks, it provides plenty of benefits for general operations too. It can play a critical role in improving inventory management, supply chain issues, and seasonal sales shifts. The more you can forecast upcoming changes and needs, the easier it is to manage every aspect of your business. You can even set things up for automated restocking based on sales data or upcoming holidays.

The smart suggestions go far beyond the basics when you integrate powerful AI. When it learns based on in-store and e-commerce customer activity, it can help you optimize product placement, maximize merchandising power, and even make suggestions about shelving and shop decorations. 

Conclusion

Ultimately, it is completely up to you how you want to use the agentic systems. You can opt for more automation if you need to focus on efficiency and hands-off improvements, or you can keep the final decision responsibilities for yourself and merely use it as an extremely powerful tool for suggestions and analysis.

With the type of AI insights that Clientbook offers, retail brands can leverage the new power of agentic AI to improve every part of their business—while keeping you in control the whole time. The power behind the tech opens up new ways to use collected customer, sales, and marketing data without taking final decision-making out of the hands of the people who truly care about the brand.