Cahoot: How AI Will End the Traditional Webstore
Manish Chowdhary and Jeremy argue that AI agents will replace traditional websites by automating vendor ordering, inventory management, and customer service. Instead of visiting a store, shoppers will interact with AI agents that come to them.
Hello listeners. Welcome to the Kahoot podcast with Maneesh and Jer. Good morning, Maneesh.
Good morning, Jeremy.
Today we're going to talk about this is, you know, AI is rocking the world right now. You know, you can't get into a conversation without it coming up. So today we're going to talk about AI agents, the next revolutionary part of artificial intelligence, also called agentic AI. It's different from what we're used to, you know, the chatgpts and the, and the clouds of the world, which is generative AI where you can use a prompt in order to get a response, you can get a plan, but it can't actually execute that plan. These AI agents, which is the next level of AI, are specialized. They're intended to actually take action, take the next. They'll come up with the answer and then they'll do the next thing. So you know, we're going to talk about this in the context of order inventory management systems in the future. So first of all, let's bring listeners up to speed now. What are order and inventory management systems? Let's just start there.
Well, order and inventory management systems have existed for a long time. It's generally the system of record or the back office system. You can call it the brand or the retailers erp, Enterprise Resource planning. It has your master product catalog, it has the master data for all your customers, all the transactions like orders, returns, payments, ability to analyze the data from all your different channels. So it is basically the central repository of all your critical business data.
Now I'm going to segue over to the AI side. I wanted to give the listeners a little bit of a background on your.
Experience with that ability to build an agent that works on your proprietary data. When you think about OpenAI and others, these are just, they're crawling the web, crawling public domain data. You know, I don't want an AI agent, you know, crawling my order history that I placed on Amazon for example. That's proprietary data. So the context of what we're talking about today is very specialized applications to conduct a certain workflow end to end or enhance human productivity. So an Agent Force or Salesforce.com has launched a platform that enables business users or semi technical users to build an agent and deploy it. Obviously it is built on their technology. So you have to put all your data, connect them all to salesforce.com so that is the pre, requirement, prerequisite. But if you are using that, it is one of the better systems that allows you to create something using your proprietary data and serve a specific function. An example, a website chat AI agent for a resort company and this resort called Cloud Cloud Dream Resorts. They allow users to book their ski trips and accommodation and they get obviously very busy during their peak season, which is about now. So obviously humans are not immediately available to service those customers and that can lead to customer frustration. So how can small business that can scale very rapidly leveraging complementing humans with AI agents. And if the agents can perform a great job, then the small business does not need to hire many more seasonal workers, which is quite expensive, hard to hire and also train them very rapidly because customer experience can be compromised not just by having a human if the human is not fully trained.
So customer service, AI for customer service has been around probably the longest so far. It's the low hanging fruit. It's a thing that seems the most obvious. But these specialized AI agents, they really have the ability to help you ask questions that you didn't even know you had. Do you have any examples of how that might apply in the order and inventory management platform?
When you think about customer service, most customer service sucks. I tried calling ATT trying to find out. I even stopped by at&t store because I'm in the market looking for the new iPhone 16. But it's really hard to get any accurate information that satisfies me. So this is AI agents are very well qualified to query your transaction data, wherever that resides, combined with your location data, combined with, you know, many other things. And it can be very patient. It can be very empathetic. You can like for example, I cannot call AT&T before whatever time 8am or 10am Their stores do not open till 10am I'm not available after that time. So these are the frustrations that consumers have. If you think about a contact center, they have hours that is highly limiting. Why restrict your customers from obtaining service during so called business hours? I think even beyond the data, just making imagine customer service anytime, any day, anywhere, anyhow, secure and patient. That can be very empowering.
What are you excited about in terms of these AI agents and the future of technology and how it can solve the merchant side frustrations?
A couple of good examples. You know all merchants, brands and retailers have to place vendor orders. They have to place replenishment orders. And most businesses operate lean. And there is vendor lead times. There are other there could be freight market conditions. Meaning for example a container. When can you book the most next available container on a ship at a cost effective price that is controlled by the freight market, spot freight. And your vendor has their own lead Time. And if you're, say, procuring items from China, the Chinese New Year is coming up. So if you look at all these different things, it is a highly complex task and even the most sophisticated humans have trouble executing it. And if you miss the deadline, either you will be late and then you have to expedite the freight and start shipping it via ocean, you might have to do air freight that has a direct correlation into your cost, or, you know, your vendor may not be able to complete the job on time, whereas these agents can be working in the background, you know, hey, looking at your inventory levels, looking at the vendor lead time and placing these orders proactively. And not just that, you know, there's no harm in the agent asking for a discount. You know, it's a simple ask. And the agents can even go as far as negotiating on your behalf and doing that all behind the scenes while you're focused on running your business.
It's just amazing. The future is bright. Give me something futuristic. Give me something to look forward to. Like, what is something that's like a little bit out there, a little bit crazy, but should be doable 100% in.
My head, I am crystal clear on what the future looks like. This might sound radical, but believe me, write it down and talk to me within the next five years and I can guarantee you, I'm willing to put a wager on it, that this will come true. This whole concept of websites, like when you think about Shopify and E commerce platform and why every store needs to build a website and design a website and the user will come to the website and perform a certain transaction, you know what I propose, and I believe the website will come to you rather than you going to the website. I have a certain preferred interface. So it will be a interface that we design as humans and that is the interface I want to shop on, not on your interface. So you will have a data feed, which is available today. This is actually not futuristic. You will have a data feed, a store, let's say acme.com will have a data feed and my agent is going to simply pull your data and perform the transaction. Because think of it as a Google data feed. I have your product catalog, I have your pricing, and all I'm going to do is place an order and I don't have to go visit your website. So all the expensive design work, the branding work and everything else, yes, occasionally I might be tempted to go look at your fancy website and your web pages and all that. But 8 out of 10 times I just want a job to be done. I know that I need to order refill for my razor blades. I don't need to go browse your website, go through 10 category pages and then put the item in the shopping cart and then log in and then do blah blah blah. You know, my agent already has my payment information and your website will come.
To me and your futuristic shopping agent has all of your receipts all in one place across the entire web.
And mark my words, this is going to be radical. And this is something that has the potential to disrupt the Shopify's of the world. Because if you think about it, you don't need a fancy website and all those functions are being performed on the client side as opposed to the server. Every 10, 15, 20 years you have a paradigm shift. And I think there will be a paradigm shift in the world of E commerce. I don't need Shopify for that. I don't need to pay 2.5% transaction fee. That's the future.
Amazing. Well, thanks for your time Manish listeners, please share your comments and feedback. If you can find some AI agentic AI resources and list them in the comments so that we can all sort of crowd share some sources so we can use these things, that'd be very helpful. And until next time, keep learning and stay curious.
