Agentic Shopping, Retail Data, & AI's Future | Ananda Chakravarty, VP Research @ IDC Retail Insights

In this episode of Retailgenic, Scot Wingo welcomes Ananda Chakravarty, VP of Research at IDC’s Retail Insights Group. Ananda shares his decades of retail and technology experience spanning Monster, Staples, Oracle, Diebold Nixdorf, and Forrester to help break down:

• The real definition of Agentic AI
• How retailers must prepare their data and sites for AI agents
• Why product discovery is ripe for AI-driven transformation
• The massive implications for pricing, loyalty, personalization, and retail media
• How agent-to-agent commerce may soon reshape buying behavior entirely

This is a must-listen for anyone thinking about the future of retail, commerce, and AI.

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Highlights:
00:02:15 Ananda explains his IDC report on agentic AI & product discovery
00:05:00 His career journey: engineering to business to retail tech
00:10:45 Early e-commerce work at Monster, Staples, Talbots
00:26:00 Deep dive into agentic AI orchestration & multi-agent workflows
00:36:00 What retailers should do today to prep for AI agents
00:41:00 How pricing, loyalty, and personalization will change
00:44:00 Agents negotiating with agents (agent-to-agent commerce)
00:48:00 The rapid acceleration of agentic traffic vs human traffic
00:49:00 Where to follow Ananda's work