As retailers accelerate AI adoption, agentic AI is emerging as a powerful lever for efficiency and profitability—provided it is deployed with the right data foundations and human oversight.

There’s tremendous excitement around leveraging agentic AI for real-world use cases to help brands reduce waste, optimize stock levels, and improve profitability. With clean data, even small data science teams can spend more time on strategic decision making and delegate the operational side to AI.

There’s a lot of momentum around AI-driven automation across planning, supply chain, customer support, and more. While AI agents offer incredible potential for rapid, autonomous decision-making that drives long-term growth, the biggest risk is poor decision-making based on incomplete or unstructured data. Prematurely replacing skilled teams with automated systems can backfire. The industry should proceed thoughtfully and focus on building strong digital infrastructure and clear, contextual communication layers – starting with structured data pipelines and a semantic layer tailored to retail.

Henrique Moyses

VP of Data Science, Crisp

Columbus Consulting delivers solutions that drive true value and have been transforming the retail, grocery and CPG industries for over two decades. We are a retail consulting company of industry experts. Our approach is simple, if you do it, we do it. We are more than consultants; we are experienced practitioners who actually sat in our clients’ seats. We understand the challenges, know what questions to ask and deliver the right solutions. Columbus offers a unique, consumer-centric approach with an end-to-end perspective that bridges functional & organization silos from strategy to execution. Our specialties include: unified commerce, merchandising & category management, planning & inventory management, sourcing & supply chain, data & analytics, accounting, finance & operations, people & organization and information technology. Let us know how we can help you. To learn more, visit COLUMBUSCONSULTING.COM.