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Say goodbye to high failure rates by transforming how new products are launched and evaluated
New products are the lifeblood of the retail industry. They bring excitement to the in-store and online experience and offer compelling promotional opportunities that contribute to category growth. New products also suffer from notoriously high failure rates which creates a headwind to growth.
Resolving this new product paradox has been an industry focus for decades due to the understanding that improving new item success rates can have a multiplier effect on a retailers’ overall performance. This real-world business challenge makes the new product launch and evaluation process an ideal use case for agentic AI in retail.
To explore this issue, the Category Management Association hosted a recent “Improve New Product Success with Agentic AI” webinar with top experts from SymphonyAI. Speakers included Withiel Cole, head of data science, and Jason Mathew, head of insights and personalization product management. The pair shared how retailers can improve the new product introduction and evaluation process to achieve higher success rates, the role of agentic AI and the impact it can have.
How agentic AI is different and why it matters
Cole and Mathew shared how agentic AI can streamline workflows, reduce the “black box” effect of predictive AI models by increasing confidence in recommendations, and accelerate the speed and accuracy of decision-making in the fast-paced world of product launches. Agentic AI represents an evolution beyond earlier versions of AI systems, utilizing predictive and generative capabilities in concert with advanced data insights and new autonomous capabilities. For example, traditional business intelligence tools focused retrospectively on segmentations and historical performance analyses. Over time, predictive capabilities emerged, offering foresight into the potential impacts of strategic decisions such as promotions or pricing changes. The next leap was the development of generative AI tools that enable a more interactive experience, allowing users to pose complex questions and receive insightful answers without deep technical expertise. And now agentic AI is creating a new source of disruption with huge potential.
New ways of working and winning with agentic AI
Agentic AI seamlessly marries retail intelligence, predictive analytics, and generative capabilities to present a unified, compelling workflow, which is a powerful benefit in the process-driven world of retail. One of its strengths lies in demystifying what’s known as the “black box” of predictive AI.
While traditional models may generate accurate predictions, they often lack transparency and fail to provide an intuitive understanding of the rationale used to achieve recommendations. Agentic AI addresses this by linking recommendations with comprehensive explanations, thus building trust and increasing adoption among users and enabling quicker decision-making, according to Cole and Mathew.
The role of autonomous agents in retail
AI agents are expected to revolutionize the evaluation and execution of strategies, especially concerning new product launches. Historically, extensive studies of new product launches have shown disturbingly high failure rates for new CPG products, with some studies showing 80% of new items fail within the first year. Agentic AI offers an advanced approach to improving this situation because it can sift through massive data volumes, assessing sales, promotional data, on-shelf availability and other factors that impact performance. These agents not only provide critical insights into trial and repeat rates but also facilitate real-time decision-making on whether to promote, redistribute, or even delist products.
By using a hybrid approach that combines the efficiency of automated or partially automated workflows with the adaptability of AI agents, organizations can create intelligent processes. An example workflow involves using AI to determine high-performing products, analyzing lookalike product performance, benchmarking against past launches, and executing decisions based on real-time data analysis. This means retailers can react faster to market changes, reducing time-to-decision from days to minutes.
Simplifying complexity with advanced tools
The success of agentic AI lies in the quality and consistency of the underlying data. Integrated platforms, such as SymphonyAI’s CINDE Connected Retail platform, that unify disparate data sets across sales, promotions, assortment, and supply chain are essential to this process. CINDE Connected Retail exemplifies how AI agents can use unified data to deliver cross-functional recommendations, thus supporting new product launches.
Visualization and interpretation tools also play a crucial role. Agentic AI should not just produce raw data outputs but render them in intuitive formats in a user-friendly interface. By integrating sophisticated visualization, agentic AI can present information and narratives in a compelling format that guide users toward informed decision-making.
No more “black box”
One of the issues that has hindered adoption of AI has been the “black box” nature of some models, where users have limited visibility into how decisions are made. To counteract this, developers incorporate user interfaces that allow end-users to interact directly with the AI models, ask questions, and receive understandable explanations. This demystification process builds confidence and fosters a human AI partnership that is crucial for innovation and efficiency to elevate the new product launch and evaluation processes.
What success looks like with agentic AI in retail
Agentic AI promises – and delivers – significant improvements in speed and precision of evaluations, often reducing processes that traditionally took days down to mere minutes. For example, Cole and Mathew described a situation involving analyzing 43 new product launches that was completed in about five minutes using agentic AI, compared to traditional methods taking as long as four to eight days. This acceleration not only aids rapid course corrections in strategies but also ensures that business operations are aligned proactively with market demands.
Additionally, the proactive elements of agentic AI can optimize revenue growth by identifying immediate actionable insights, allowing businesses to capitalize on opportunities faster than competitors. The approach emphasizes an ideal “human in the loop” situation, where automated processes handle repetitive, mundane and potentially error prone tasks, thereby freeing human resources to make more strategic decisions.
It was clear from perspective shared by Cole and Mathew that agentic AI holds transformative potential for streamlining new product introductions and evaluations. By effectively integrating different AI capabilities and offering transparent, actionable insights, agentic AI equips businesses to navigate the complexities of modern retail landscapes with agility and precision in ways that weren’t previously possible.
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Agentic AI for retail FAQs
Agentic AI and the use of autonomous agents is the newest front in the fast-changing world of AI. With predictive and generative AI retailers can query data to forecast trends, make data-driven decisions, and create plans and strategies, while agentic AI builds on those capabilities and opens a new frontier of autonomy. An autonomous AI agent is an AI software program that performs tasks independently, makes decisions, and solves problems to achieve specific goals.
Agentic AI offers tremendous benefits for retailers because it can simplify complex and mundane tasks related to data analysis and insights discovery resulting in speed to action and improved outcomes. Increased simplicity means users at all levels of an organization can query data directly without relying on a team of analysts or data scientists.
Top uses case for agentic AI can be found in areas of merchandising, marketing, supply chain and operations. Agentic AI is a powerful way to accelerate the analysis of planogram performance, optimize assortments, improve pricing compliance, perform competitive analysis and launch and evaluate new products.
Agentic AI will become a powerful source of competitive advantage for retailers who embrace the technology and use it to improve the speed and accuracy of decision-making and overall productivity.
