Is this your next boss?
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It’s not news that artificial intelligence will have a serious impact on most people’s work lives. What’s coming into view now is how that impact will happen.
AI’s impact shows up fastest where margins are razor-thin and every penny matters. That’s the grocery retail business.
So it was that I went to the Groceryshop conference to understand how AI was going to change things.
In the course of 2025, artificial intelligence and AI agents have gone from being the most exciting and innovative topics with inflated expectations everywhere to becoming a tired subject with many skeptics. At Groceryshop, a lot of people were happy to talk about almost anything else.
But the pressure on grocers to get even the slightest edge in profitability ensures that AI’s potential to improve financial results will pulling it back into the conversation.
The questions are which parts of the business will be most impacted and how will it happen. That’s what’s becoming more clear as time goes on.
The short answer is “ everything, everyone and everywhere.” There’s almost no part of a major retailer that can’t be improved by AI agents.
One slide from a presentation by Publicis Sapient showed the ubiquity of AI agents’ potential:
The breadth of AI agents’ potential impact is.. breathtaking.
Photo credit: Publicis Sapient
How It Changes Your Work
Today managers spend much of their time executing tasks and managing workflows. Publicis Sapient says that kind of work is going away. In the new model, AI agents will execute the workflows and people will manage the agents, overseeing multiple processes that run simultaneously.
For example, pricing decisions that humans make today can be handled by AI agents. The system will constantly evaluate competitors’ prices, shifts in costs, demand patterns, other consumer behavior, other environmental factors like weather and recommend or even set new prices in real time.
The key to making it work is governance. Companies will need clear limits for what each AI agent can implement on its own. For small, low-risk price adjustments, an agent might have pre-approved authority to act autonomously. But for larger, higher-impact changes, the AI will need to present its reasoning to a human who makes the final call. The rules set for AI agents will be the difference between success and failure.
The impact of this change will be in every core retail function.
Why This Won’t Go Away
Imagine you have a store with a competitor right next door. Now imagine that your competitor, over a period of years, has implemented new technology that gives them:
– 5-10% revenue uplift
– 20-30% efficiency gains in planning, allocation and store operations
– 15% fewer markdowns
– 80% fewer stockouts
Your ability to compete would be almost impossible, you’d have to adopt the same technology — or your future would be bleak.
According to Publicis Sapient, that’s what’s at stake. That’s why this technology, despite all its implementation challenges will remain so compelling.
Why It’s So Hard
The wrong technology set up “might decide to stop selling milk because the margin is too low,” said Sudip Mazumder, Publicis Sapient’s North America Retail Lead.
If the governance of the AI isn’t right, it can make an obviously a bad decision on its own. The setup matters; if governance and parameters aren’t designed correctly, no technology will ever work as intended.
And of course it takes people. As Mazumder told me, “Technology is not the hard part. People are.” Getting employees to buy in to a massive shift in how they work — and what they do all day — will take leadership and time.
If autonomous AI agents can handle complex decision-making now done by humans, the layers of coordinators and analysts who manage those functions will shrink dramatically. Senior leaders who can’t adapt may follow. Retail organizations will flatten and decision-making will accelerate beyond a human tempo.
It’s a new division of labor between humans and machines. The survivors will be people who are comfortable supervising the AI agents.
The Bottom Line
Agentic AI is a re-architecting of how companies think, decide and act. It’s a cultural reinvention.
It’s a lot of change and it will take a long time to get all of this right. But it’s coming and the future will belong to the AI agents and the people who will know how to build them, guide them and govern them.
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