From AI assistant to AI colleague: Retail’s next CX leap

Prefer listening? I transformed this article into a podcast using Google’s NotebookLM. It’s surprisingly accurate and even expands on some of the ideas. Give it a listen!

A quiet revolution you can watch in real time

Since ChatGPT launched, we framed AI as a helpful assistant—a tool that wrote a paragraph faster or tagged a photo more accurately. Today, at SEV’s “AI in Practice” conference in Athens, we proved that perspective far too modest. Together with Stavroula Kakkava, MBA, OMCP from Intersport, we delivered a live demo of the Pobuca Experience Cloud that showed AI acting as a true colleague:

Listening to every customer touch‑point, taking initiatives, and proposing full campaigns before any human could open a spreadsheet!

In 2024 only about 14 % of EU companies used AI, but the figure was already 4 in 10 for large firms—retail first in line. McKinsey estimates generative AI could add roughly €250–390 billion a year to retail and lift margins by 2 %. Our demo proved that promise is no longer theory; the AI colleague is already on the job!

Listening at scale: turning “dark data” into bright metrics

Traditional CX programs rely on surveys that reach <7 % of shoppers, leaving calls, chats, e‑mails, reviews, and social posts in the dark. Our demo starts with Pobuca’s “big ear”: an AI engine that ingests all that unstructured data and auto‑labels every interaction for sentiment, topic, and outcome.

Within seconds the platform surfaces:

• Real‑time Customer Sentiment across channels
• Topic heat‑maps (product availability, delivery, returns, loyalty perks)
• Predictive CSAT & NPS scores before you send a single survey

For Intersport this means marketers and store teams share one live dashboard instead of arguing over siloed reports.

Coaching the frontline, not just measuring it

Data without action is vanity. In our demo, the next screen highlighted low‑resolution rates and long handle times, broken down by issue type and individual agent. The platform then suggested micro‑lessons tailored to those gaps. Managers could instantly see which agents consistently excelled and which needed extra support on, pinpointing exactly where training will have the greatest impact.

This is AI as performance coach: objective, continuous, and impossible to ignore.

By acting on these insights, Intersport translated dashboards into real-world gains: resolving the pain points flagged by customers lifted overall CSAT by 4 percentage points, while the targeted coaching program trimmed the Customer Effort Score from 4.0 to 3.2—a level that ranks as best‑in‑class for retail and e‑commerce.

The leap to agentic AI: meet Zemark

Here’s where the story gets 2025‑level interesting. The big innovation this year is AI taking initiatives, not just orders. Then we showed Zemark, Pobuca’s agentic AI (think zero‑marketing‑effort virtual colleague).

Live on stage, I phoned Intersport’s call center, complained that a promoted running shoe was out of stock in size  45, and hung up slightly disappointed. Seconds later, Zemark popped a notification to Stavroula:

“I’ve detected a pattern of stock‑out frustrations on this SKU. Shall I trigger a ‘Notify‑Me’ campaign offering free delivery the moment sizes land?”

One click and the workflow launches—audience watching, no code written.

That’s AI moving from copilot to project owner: spotting a revenue leak, designing a remedy, and asking for approval, not instructions.

None of this requires a data‑science army; it does require clean data, clear KPIs, and HR support to embed new digital coworkers. The table below outlines the key requirements:

Preparing the organization for its first digital colleague

Technology is the easy half. The harder half is people: redefining roles, incentives, and governance when an algorithm starts proposing campaigns at 3 a.m.

• Leadership question: Who signs off initiatives launched by an AI agent?
• Data question: Is every frontline system feeding a unified customer graph?
• HR question: How do we reward humans who collaborate with AI instead of competing with it?

Retailers that answer these now will ride the agentic wave; laggards will be patching silos while early movers compound insights.

From live demo to next steps — your CX playbook is ready

If you were at the demo today you saw an AI colleague spot a revenue leak, design a fix, and ask for approval in under a minute. If you couldn’t attend, the full‑length demo and a “AI‑to‑colleague” readiness checklist are now available to newsletter subscribers: leave your contact info here.

The lesson is clear: AI’s promise for retail is no longer a horizon story; after today’s demonstration it is proven practice—already boosting Intersport’s loyalty metrics and within reach of any B2C brand willing to align data, KPIs, and culture around digital co‑workers.