ReposiTrak, Inc.TRAK

Analyst asks ReposiTrak executive for thoughts on agentic commerce in food retail.

“Great. Thanks, Randy. John, congrats on the quarter. Two questions from me. I want to start with the second one, and I'm thinking about the first one. Randy, agenda commerce is a hot topic this quarter. It was discussed often in the mega cap tech calls, including Amazon, Meta platforms, among others. Randy, I consider you an expert on artificial intelligence, given your background and experience, and would appreciate your thoughts on agentic commerce and what it may or may not mean, in particular, for the food retail category.”

Executive states agentic commerce offers limited benefit for the people-intensive grocery business.

“Oh, nice question. Thank you, Tom. Look, there is a limitation, as I mentioned, in terms of food for AI, agentic commerce, or any of those ideas to actually provide very significant benefit. The advantage that retail grocers have defensively is their business is actually people intensive. It requires products to get ordered. Can that be done automatically? It already is today. No major advances coming from AI. What else do they do? They take inbound trucks of products and put them into a distribution center. Any opportunity for AI in that? Very limited. It's a people and truck business. They move product through a DC to the end of the DC. Any opportunities for automation? Yes. How did that work out for Kroger that just spent, I don't know, $1 billion to $2 billion to do that, and it didn't work?”

Executive views agentic commerce as not significantly impactful for the grocery industry.

“The grocery business is already highly competitive, very, very effective in terms of efficiencies, but you're at a stall point with regard to what AI ultimately can do. In other words, in this particular industry, agentic commerce is an interesting thing to talk about, but it's not really going to be significantly impactful. We believe, and we've been doing AI for a long, long time, that we're close to that point where providing more insights as to what's wrong is not the issue. The question is, how do you get this stuff fixed? The answer, we believe, is what we're doing, as we mentioned, with an organization that has people that can get to stores and actually fix the issues. Someday, probably offline, I'll tell you more about how we see this whole problem, if you will, of artificial intelligence. (Multiple speakers).”