Collaborative AI agents are key to retail supply chains

In a recent meeting with a large retailer, my contact shared that each buyer on her team receives over 100 emails daily referencing data on a variety of topics, from out-of-stock issues and inaccurate pricing to recommendations for driving e-commerce. On the supplier side, the situation is similar: delivering Monday morning reporting to retailers, preparing for line reviews, monitoring out-of-stocks, and pushing new promotions. Emails and Excel are still the primary drivers of the $5 trillion retail industry , in the U.S. alone. The opportunity for error in complex retail supply chains is immense. If demand forecasting and inventory management across thousands of store locations are inaccurate, the cost is tremendous. The combined cost of overstock and out-of-stocks are $1.77 trillion globally, just in 2023. These “if only” moments are coordination failures, and the root cause lies with siloed data and manual processes. Tariff uncertainties, climate change, and geopolitical instability are driving additional waste and operational inefficiencies that strain an industry already operating on razor-thin margins. The disconnect between retailers and suppliers is unsustainable and presents the most challenging operational issue across highly complex retail supply chains. COLLABORATIVE AI AGENTS Improved collaboration between retailers, suppliers, and AI technology can overcome disconnects. Those gaps can be between product design , procurement, marketing and promotional planning, and product distribution. AI is often described as something a single company should leverage, but verticalized AI agents that specialize in retail can streamline manual tasks and facilitate collaboration across multiple companies so humans can spend time on what drives the business: being strategic. Collaboration is at the core of a successful retail strategy. Agentic AI will change the way retailers and suppliers communicate and collaborate by surfacing alerts and making autonomous decisions that give retail the optimization boost it needs. It will not completely hand over management to agents, but it will enable humans to focus on higher level collaboration and informed decision making. Currently, retailers, suppliers, and distributors each hold only a slice of the truth, thanks to complex workflows, fragmented data, and cross-company processes that lack connectivity, transparency, and context. AI agents can automate, negotiate, coordinate, and problem solve across organizational boundaries. They turn coordination into a competitive advantage. Companies that master agentic AI orchestration will (finally) gain complete visibility and optimization. AI agents will become specialized “AI teammates” that coordinate across organizations to achieve shared goals and resolve problems independently and proactively. These autonomous agents can share insights (without exposing sensitive raw data), adapt to changing conditions in real time, and offer a path forward for retailers and their consumer packaged goods (CPG) partners to achieve immediate and long-term operational goals. Notably, an agentic AI network requires more than technology itself. Many organizations focus on the latest agent-to-agent and multi-agent tools and frameworks, such as A2A, Microsoft AutoGen, or CrewAI. These tools support autonomous actions and support cooperation between AI agents, but they do not solve the more complex problem of building trust and standard AI operating procedures across companies. Beyond the...

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