How Agentic AI Will Transform Retail Forever With David Dorf Of AWS | 5 Insightful Minutes

Foreigning us now for five insightful minutes is David Dorff.

David is the head of Retail industry solutions at AWS.

David, welcome back to Omnitalk.

And let's get started with this.

Gen AI was the big topic for the last two years, and now 2025 seems to be the year of the agent, or agentic AI as some might call it.

How do you define, quote, unquote, agents?

Ah, yes, good question.

So genai is about creating content, while agents are really about taking action.

They both use foundation models underneath, but there's really three key things for agents.

Number one, they're autonomous, so they have a role and they require minimal human oversight.

Number two, there's reasoning involved, so they actually do this thing called chain of thought where they break down problems into smaller steps.

And number three is they typically have some sort of tools or access to data in tools to be able to take action to do something.

So those three things are really what set agents apart.

And for example, you can use generative AI to just create an image, but an agent, you could say, I need a specific image that is relaxing and I want it posted to a website.

And it can do all of that.

Right.

It's taking multiple steps and it's doing action.

So there are lots of different genai use cases out there, but agentic genai is really where things are starting to explode.

So, David, are retailers actually using these agents already today?

And if so, how are they using them?

Yeah, it's not quite as prevalent right now because it is pretty new, but for sure.

So a great example is Amazon uses agents to do a lot of Java upgrades.

Sounds like a boring task, but we have like 30,000 Java applications that need to be upgraded from an older version to a newer version.

And we have agents that go through and do that and saved us about $260 million last year.

Wow.

And in addition to just doing those upgrades, they'll also build unit tests and they'll do documentation and things like that.

And we've got some other retailers doing some cool stuff like Tapestry, the luxury retailer.

They actually have an agent that helps find data and answer questions.

It will take your textual question, figure out what database it needs to answer that, convert it to SQL, do the SQL query, and come back with it with an English answer.

So it's kind of like an analyst, but it gives the business a chance to be able to get this information without necessarily having to create all sorts of weird SQL queries.

And then we have a tire retailer who's giving recommendations for tires.

So You.

You, for example, can say what make and model you have and what you use your car for.

And it goes and hits several different resources to figure out what the best tire recommendation might be.

And it kind of gives you the reasoning behind why it recommends one tire over another, which I think is pretty unique.

Wow.

And I don't know about you, but I had no idea the agents were already being deployed to the degree which David was saying.

I thought this was just kind of the new buzzword idea for 2025, but.

So with that said, David, I'm curious.

How do you see agents changing retail even more over the next, like, five years?

Let's say, what are the big things that are still going to change on this front?

This is where things can get a little bit crazy.

One type of agent is a computer use agent.

So those were announced by Anthropic and OpenAI.

And basically it has control of your browser and so it takes a picture of the browser screen so it knows where things are and it can navigate with the mouse and keyboard.

And the.

The demonstration that OpenAI gave was using Instacart to do your grocery shopping.

There was even a New York Times article where the author bought eggs using a computer agent, just saying, go find me eggs.

So if you think about that for a minute, how does that really upend the retail industry with shopping?

If people are using agents to do the shopping for them now, they're not going to do it for, like, fashion, but for replenishable items, grocery, that sort of thing.

I can see that happening today.

The user interface is made for humans and it's cluttered.

And maybe we need to optimize that for agents just like we did for mobile.

We have mobile optimized sites now.

Maybe we'll have agent optimized sites that make it easier for agents to buy things on people's behalf.

And then you have to start to think about what are some of the other things that could happen?

What happens with advertising?

There's no use in advertising to an agent.

Should I be personalizing?

Maybe that doesn't make sense.

How do I affect a person when they're using an agent?

Through things like promotions.

An agent doesn't care about a promotion.

So how do I get that information to a person?

What about loyalty?

That kind of gets thrown up if I can't really affect behavior.

And maybe something like even search.

We have a whole industry around search engine optimization.

What if it's agents that are out there doing the shopping for us?

How is search engine optimization going to change and how do we influence things differently?

I think we're on the cusp of some really interesting changes to the retail industry that agents could bring us and we need to start thinking strategically about what are the ramifications here and how can we prepare.

Well, David, you just blown both of our minds here.

Unfortunately we have to get you out of here on this.

But we will be thinking of many more questions.

Where do people start?

There's a lot that's changing.

What do you recommend that retailers do now if they're wanting to explore taking advantage of gentic AI or just to kind of tackle some of the things that are going to be happening in the future?

Yeah, yeah.

So number one is basic blocking and tackling.

Right.

So don't get too caught up in gen hype.

There's a lot of it out there.

Number two, there's a lot of basic gen AI use cases that you can get a real good return on investment in things like creating product descriptions, definitely being able to do things like shopping assistants like Rufus.

Those are some low hanging fruit that retailers should look at.

And then we can start to get into the agentic areas where you've got processes that can be automated and you can really start to, I don't, I don't want to say replace people because we're not ready to do that yet, but really enhance the things that people are doing to be more efficient.

Great stuff, David.

Thank you.