Agentic Commerce At NRF & The Real AI Takeaways Microsoft Thinks Retailers Need Now

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We are your co hosts today for this interview.

I'm Anne Mazinga.

And I'm Chris Walton.

And we just landed back from NRF this past week.

And NRF is a lot of things, but most importantly, it's really a who's who of technology.

It's where retail teams go to start conversations and see demos of tech that will shape the future of their commerce experiences.

So to help Chris and myself recap some of the tech that took us by storm at this year's show, we're bringing on an expert who has evaluated tech from from the brand side at Walmart, the social commerce side at Pinterest, and who is now global retail and Consumer goods Product Marketing Director, Commerce, Cloud and AI at Microsoft, Amy Venner.

Amy, that is one of the longest titles, but fully encapsulates everything that you do at Microsoft.

Welcome to the show.

We're so excited to have you.

Thank you, Anne.

I'm excited to be here.

Yeah, Amy, it's great to have you.

Like we were chatting beforehand, I'm excited for this interview.

Curious to pick your brain on what you thought of NRF and all the exciting tech that was on display.

So let's give the audience a little background.

Anne made the joke about the long title, but what do you oversee in your role at Microsoft?

Yeah, at Microsoft, it's interesting.

It's kind of like a combination of all the different types of roles I've had in my past in the sense that we work alongside a lot of teams, but what I love the most is sitting between the customers, the retailers and brands and what we're doing from a product perspective.

So in product marketing, being able to be able to talk about what is Microsoft doing, but more importantly, how does what the brands and retailers are facing as real problems in their business present opportunities for them when leveraging technology.

So we do go to market, we do outbound, inbound product marketing.

There's a variety of roles my team and I play, but one of them is to go to NRF every year.

So that's been both exciting and lots of energy to get ready for and get, get past.

So, yeah, we're on the other side of it.

Amy, I'm curious, like, is one of the most common questions you ask retailers, what problem do you want to solve?

Is that like, how often do you ask that?

Is that the question you ask the most often?

I'm curious, like, I hear that all the time.

You know, that was one of the themes at nrf, I have to say, is to just take a step back and think, you know, what is it that a retailer is trying to do?

When I was at Walmart in sort of this spot of the retailer, I was working in marketing, and a lot of the times we were trying to understand how do we get the right thing in front of someone at the right moment.

And that's a common problem.

But from Microsoft's perspective, we've got a lot of solutions.

So how do we frame the right package of solutions to go in front of someone with the right set of needs?

The other side of it too, which I think oftentimes gets over missed.

I'm curious what you think about this before we get into the meat of the interview here too.

There's also the what?

There's not only there's the what problem are you trying to solve, but the other side of it is what opportunity are you trying to benefit from?

Right.

And that's sometimes what I think is left out of the lexicon in our industry.

Do you agree with that?

Yeah, I love looking at it through the lens of opportunity and I'm learning to say and more, how do we as technology providers stop talking about all of our solutions first and start with what are you trying to solve?

It could be the opportunity, but it could also be how to take friction out of a process.

And so one of the themes I love this year versus last year is we're talking more about actual problems that have real solutions to meet them and then the return on that investment, or what we're saying is return on intelligence and being able to talk more about the impact AI is having and less about the hype behind, oh, this is a new technology.

This is something that's so great and, you know, get away from that trap.

Yeah, that was a Big theme too, Amy, at the Microsoft Partner Day that I was a part of on Saturday, just, you know, reminding all of the, there's all this great technology available out there, but maybe it's just starting with the, like Chris said, what's the problem that you're trying to solve or what's the opportunity you have in front of you and starting there and then kind of backing into, here's how we can help you, you know, as a partner.

But let's use that kind of as this bridge into discussing some of those themes.

Amy, you were in the Microsoft booth with all the Microsoft partners.

What was like really top of mind, what were some of those first questions or responses rather that after Microsoft was asking, you know, what can we help you with?

What opportunities do you have?

What were retailers and brands telling you?

Yeah, so I would love to start by just saying when people came up to the Microsoft booth, it was so fun to have real conversations.

And what I mean is it wasn't just tell me about what Microsoft's doing broadly, it was like, hey, you know, I'm trying to get my catalog in a place that is more rich so that I can take advantage of a conversational experience, an AI assistant, personalized shopping agent, whatever you want to call this interactive conversational, you know, agentic experience.

And we could walk them over and say, all right, check out this catalog enrichment agent and talk a little bit about some of our partners that offer enrichment or data, the ability to really create stronger data foundations.

And so there were richer conversations than in previous years where it was still, again to our theme, it was still a little bit high level and too broad to get into the depth of conversation around taking action, like being really practical.

So if I'm hearing you right, I mean, are you, were you hearing from brands and retailers that they're still trying to really get foundational data in organized and, and, and maybe even using AI to help in that process.

Talk a little bit more about that and kind of where retail retailers are at right now as they're kind of preparing for their brand to show up in an agentic commerce situation.

Some of the fun things we talked about in our booth and on stage was around some things like, you know, personalized shopping.

So if you have to get the right product in front of someone at the right time, retailers have traditionally used, you know, various forms of personalized software.

But right now with agentic commerce and with some of the solutions out there, there's the opportunity to really take that conversation, whether it's audio or text, and Bring back solutions that match or products, I should say, sorry, products that match the needs.

And so I think retailers are coming to us saying, hey, oftentimes people don't even know what they want.

And we in a traditional search bar don't give an easy way outside of, you know, boys suit, graduation.

Right.

It's like, well, I want something more nuanced because actually my son is really skinny and tall and he's gonna be, you know, in the band.

So he needs movement and like a nuanced conversation so I could get these tailored solutions back to me.

So part of.

Part of the conversation was that, and I think the other part was just looking at, okay, you're now in a place with your marketing where the workflow has traditionally been.

You do this, this, this, and this.

And then three weeks later, your campaign goes live.

How do we.

And actually, Coca Cola was on stage with Adobe and Microsoft.

I think it was day one.

Yeah, it's kind of a blur day one Sunday.

And they talked a little bit about how they're shortening that process and making it more effective and that helps their returns because they're actually doing the creative brief in a way that's faster, and they're doing it in a way that helps them get to all the agencies they work with across languages.

Agentic AI is really reinventing both the existing structures of what you're trying to do and give new opportunities.

Got it.

So I'd sum up.

So.

So basically what you hit on is you said there's basically the agentic use cases for operations, the agentic use cases for commerce, essentially.

I'm curious, did the idea of connected stores come out, come about at all?

Was that a theme that you heard from.

From the.

From.

From your vantage point at NRF2?

Yeah, definitely.

Connected stores and digital twins and getting smarter about what's happening inside the store so you can optimize where you're traditionally been really data poor and service rich.

And so that's been an area that's been a focus that one fits a bit in store and store operations, but also in marketing, depending on how you're using that information.

I'm curious what you guys have heard about the connected store experience and how that plays into the agentic, you know, pieces.

Yeah, I mean, connected stores were certainly one of the.

I would say one of the key themes that we heard from the 20 interviews that we did with retailers and brands, a lot of retailers investing in.

How do we kind of build on top of the.

Some of the solutions that we've already invested in, in store.

And how do we kind of leverage or tap AI, who is now allowing us to consolidate the data that's coming through much more quickly so that we can take action on it and then like couldn't make the connection between other, other data sources in the store, other tools that we're using in the store, so that the store, I think for the first time is really, really truly connected and communicating one another and then outputting tasks that are going to have finally have, you know, a real return on investment.

And that will continue in the years ahead as the store continues to breathe and live and kind of speak to have all the technology speaking to one another.

But Chris, what would you add on there?

Yeah, I mean, I like, I like how Amy summed it up because I think, and I like how this, this conversation is unfurling too, because at the end of the day, like you use agentic commerce for operations, which is really how do you solve a problem?

That's how I think about that.

And you can use it for commerce, which is how do I capitalize on an opportunity that may be sitting out there?

Right.

And so for me, connected store actually falls into both of those buckets potentially.

But it's almost a sub layer to the conversation or the greater question you need to ask, which is what problems do you want to solve?

And you know, is it at the store level or is it an opportunity that you want to capture at the store level by talking to your customer in a different way, giving your employees different information as they're working, keeping your shelves in stock in more full on a regular basis, getting your supply chain working.

So, so yeah, so I, that's how I, my mind conceptualizes.

It conceptualizes this is it.

And I love, I love how, I love how Amy described that.

Yeah, that's, that's fun.

I, it, it makes me think about all the different language in retail that we use.

The language changes slightly, but you know, the problem set underneath it is the same sets of problems.

I was a philosophy major back in the day a long time ago, and I love thinking about, you know, making these connections and technology has been one of those things.

We kind of started talking about this at the beginning is there's been so much focus on transformation and you know, the new.

But I like to kind of ground in more of what hasn't changed and how does technology improve that.

So if you start with what hasn't changed, which is I want to drive high margin items that create bigger basket size and are easier to buy, the conversion Rate improves.

I want to have a stronger return on investment.

I want to increase the loyalty of my customer base.

All these constants in the retail industry and even the word connected store.

I mean it's like Unified Commerce or Agentic Commerce or these new names with these new tools.

But the tools by themselves don't matter if we don't have the ability to apply them and then see what is the impact of this tool and measure the outcome.

Again, becoming stronger as a business because of the tech.

You know, you have, Microsoft has this massive booth, right?

You have all of these partners that are in there.

Did you notice like, did you have a, before you went in, did you have like an assumption of who was going to be the most busy in that booth?

Like what topics were those that you kind of anticipated being very popular?

And then looking back now after the last several days at nrf, what were the ones that actually had the most traffic?

Like what, what were the technologies or the focus of the companies that were, that were really seeing a significant amount of traffic?

Kind of based on the conversation that we've had thus far.

Ooh, good question.

I like that one.

I actually asked just before this, when are we going to get the data about, you know, of where people were?

Because I have an answer and an assumption, but I actually still want the data.

So I don't have the data.

It's not a data backed answer, but my observations from being there versus what I thought going into it.

You know, I thought there was going to be sort of this.

Let's start with marketing.

Let's start talking about agentic commerce.

And that was there.

There's a lot, as we, as we all saw at the show, a lot of solutions and retailers looking for solutions around selling, you know, through this natural language, new method of LLMs and however you want to describe, you know, the conversational commerce experience.

And that was busy.

I think what was most interesting to me and as a former merchant, I actually sat on the merchandising side@walmart.com early days was the merchandising conversations going on that section of the booth.

Okay.

You know, we had Stevo Partners Solutions, which was one of the partners.

We had conversations with real, with retailers that had real problems that they're trying to solve around their assortment and how they can use data from conversations to broaden their awareness of what maybe they aren't caring that they should be.

And it even developed into product development conversations.

How can we use agentic AI to go upstream and not only develop new or understand new trends but then get our product development process a little more tuned in and accelerated.

So that's the area that I kind of saw deeper dwell times where the conversations may have been a little richer.

And at the same time we got a new section called the theater where we had 30 minute conversations, 25 minute conversations throughout all three days.

And that section was kind of fun to see back to back people talking about with partners, with customers, you know, what's working for them right now and why.

So there was learning, you know, at all levels, right?

Yeah, it's interesting.

So you're, you're, you're seeing that, you know, agentic commerce marketing portion getting, still getting a lot of traffic, understandably trying to create personalized outreach to consumers.

But then I, I think that it's really interesting that the merchandising part of it is starting to get so much more value from what's also happening, you know, with agentic commerce and that search function.

We did talk to a couple of retailers too who are, who are seeing exactly what you're talking about.

Like they're using those search queries to understand should we make a pant that's in this color or should we start looking at different size runs and things.

And you know, even I think last year we probably didn't have the data to, or didn't have the capacity to analyze that data as much as we can now and to actually make decisions on that.

It sounds like.

Is that kind of consistent with, with some of what you were hearing Amy in the booth?

Exactly.

Yeah.

And it feels like a million years ago.

But the holiday shopping period, you know, Adobe reported, I think it was like an 8 times increase in AI traffic going to retailers websites.

The base is still pretty small, but 8 time increase is pretty great.

It's much bigger than a lot of things we're seeing.

There's growth there.

And I just think about my own behaviors as a consumer and I think about how we were remodeling the bathroom for my kids who are down the hall.

Small bathroom, but it used to be sharks on the shower curtain and they're a little outgrown.

They're in their preteen years.

So we were like, let's do something with Bigfoot but not so obvious.

And so we had this whole conversation on copilot about getting a print that had Bigfoot but was also nature and maybe subtle.

That was a fun shopping experience where even my kids were getting involved in like, well mom, I don't want to be like a baby and not a baby.

And so all those signals can be used by the merchants.

And I think we're just in really early days for how they'll find value in that data.

But it's new and it's rich.

This is really interesting to me too, because I've often had the debate with myself, you know, to Amy, like, you know, what's going to come first, you know, agentic applications for the operations and finding the efficiencies, or agentic for the commercial side, you know, which is what you just described with the Sasquatch or Bigfoot shower design process.

And who knows?

We don't really know.

So that gets me to my next question, which is, you know, you saw a lot of tech platforms, you know, this past week.

Were there any that you think deserve particular attention, particularly when we bring it back to the top of the show to you again, around who is solving a problem or helping retailers capture an unmet opportunity at this point in time?

Estee Lauder was talking a little bit about the data they have as rich and deep.

Being a company that's been around for a long time with a lot of brands and that holds value that if not used, is really just sitting there.

So I do think the way that they're using technology, they've got some research and development folks that have been using and creating consumer iq, which brings out some of their data in a way that allows them to quickly understand, okay, how is a consumer using this?

What does this mean for the packaging on the box?

What does this mean checking legal information?

What does it mean for claims that are made and that we can actually improve based on the latest and greatest signal from the consumer on what's important?

Do they care about.

It happens to be more about the colors under their eyes or it happens to be more about the fine lines.

All of those past learnings they have in data are being extracted and used by their marketing team.

I do think that's a great example.

And another one might be around.

Ralph Lauren was on stage actually on day two with Shelley Branston at Microsoft.

And that was a fun conversation where they were using personalized shopping agent to really ground the conversation with customers in what's going to look good for them given what they're going to do.

That, you know, pairing of outfits based on the context of the conversation is bringing new levels of engagement with new customers, folks that maybe they haven't had in the past.

So that's like a concierge, almost like bought on the site.

Oh, interesting.

Actually it's the Rolph Lauren app.

And then Ask Rolf is a feature in there and it's, it's where it allows consumers and shoppers to interact with it as if you're working in a physical store.

That was fun to see the banter between David Lauren and Shelley Branston around.

Really the customer need being front and center and how maybe, you know, maybe they're on to something, getting in so early to capture this new shopper and what methods they like to use to shop that are new.

Amy, I'd love to get kind of, as we close, some kind of parting wisdom from you.

You've shared a lot with us about, you know, things that retailers and brands from Estee Lauder to Ralph Lauren are focusing on as they're really trying to figure out this new connected store and agentic commerce platforms that are ahead of us here in 2026.

But as retailers and brands who are listening are really trying to prioritize how to go forward now, post nrf, what would you, what would you tell them to really focus on right now as they head back into the office in the coming days?

I'd start with just reminding them to prioritize based on what, what function in their business is willing to lean in.

Because a lot of it is a cultural mind shift around adopting new tools.

That's a good point.

And so being able to adopt, start your next, your first steps with teams that are open to embrace that mindset shift.

Right.

And then, you know, from there I would encourage a clear what are the sort of key workflows or use cases that connect with their team, but also what connects with other teams?

So if you're marketing, you might have a workflow that needs to connect with stores actually to anticipate demand based on campaigns that are coming.

Is there a key workflow that is in a use case that you want to test?

And so having the right mindset, getting the right set of use cases and workflows, and then I would say be really clear about what you're trying to achieve.

Are you trying to be more efficient?

Are you trying to increase revenue or speed of adoption?

Because then when you start putting these things in play, you have a practical playbook that you can rinse and repeat based on the learnings.

And I think just, you know, kind of like earlier we were talking about just the constant business problem you're trying to solve for is first, and then from there you can apply the technology to do those things.

Yeah, I love the comment about culture, Amy.

I think that's so important.

Yes.

You have a huge list of partners that You've seen demos that you've been to over the course of the last few days at nrf.

But who are the ones that are going to, you know, help you culturally move the the group or the retailer or your peers forward?

Where can you see the quickest wins, it sounds like, with those teams, and then continue to kind of prioritize from there.

I do have one question, though, Amy.

You know, given your background at Walmart and Pinterest and how you've interacted with Microsoft before you were there, how do you recommend and where do you recommend that our listeners bring Microsoft in?

Like, where can you support them as they're trying to prioritize this and get that return on intelligence that Microsoft is really trying to focus on this year?

Yeah, thank you for asking that.

I came to Microsoft because when I was as a customer partner, there was sort of an it to it more technical cio and that's still rich and real.

I'm excited about the next phase, which is becoming more pronounced, which is the business, the lines of business.

Folks who are going to start and have started leaning in and say, help me understand how I can get my teams to do more of this as opposed to having to go through a centralized CIO CTO team.

The power in doing it together like that becomes that you're getting those business metrics quicker because that's your focus area.

So I would encourage folks sitting in merchandising, folks sitting in the store operations area, folks who are sitting in supply chain.

What did I leave out?

Did I say marketing?

Marketing.

So the two M's I would definitely say go to our website for Microsoft.

That's aka Ms. Ms. 4 Retail.

That's Ms. For F O R retail.

We have great customer stories.

The ones I've mentioned are on there and others.

We have partners that help in the process.

We have some different videos and demos that are available and we organize it all through the lens of that line of business.

We're excited to have more conversations.

If people are seeing success or having questions, reach out to me on LinkedIn because we would love to build stories.

We're trying to be stronger in the storytelling and less about product soup.

So if there are opportunities, we want to partner and and tell those stories.

All right, well, you heard it here first.

You can tap industry expert Amy Benner on LinkedIn or head over to Microsoft for some examples of how other retailers and brands have had success and how you can as well.

That wraps us up for today.

Amy, thank you so much for giving us your time today.

Thanks to all of you who love listened along.

And on behalf of all of us here at Omnitalk, be careful out there.