AI in Broadline Retail

Rakuten France, the French e-commerce marketplace subsidiary of Rakuten Group, runs 80+ Custom Agents inside Notion that automate more than 58,000 workflows company-wide and cut backlog health issues by 50% on the product team. AI Lead Sidney Golstein built a meta-agent called the Rakuten Agent Builder so any employee can spin up a new agent in 10–20 minutes from a plain-language description, with shared SOPs, an Agent Registry, an Agent Logs database, and a separate Delicious Improver agent closing the loop by reviewing logs and proposing updates.

Walmart deployed AI-powered tools across its 1.5 million US store associates in June 2025, including real-time translation in 44 languages for multilingual conversations, and an AI task-management tool reducing shift-planning time from 90 to 30 minutes.

JD.com has deployed more than 70,000 AI digital human sellers in live commerce, with the cost of digital-human streaming falling to one-tenth that of real human hosts and 2025 GMV reaching tens of billions of yuan, fundamentally changing the cost structure of live-stream selling operations across thousands of seller accounts on the platform.

JD.com has activated its JoyAI product line for the 2025 11.11 shopping festival, including Jingxiaozhi 5.0 customer service AI, JoyMarketing outbound AI, and Digital Human 4.0 for live commerce. The deployment delivers quantifiable results: 28% reduction in human handoff rate, 37% lift in pre-sale conversion, 31% efficiency gain, 98% complex question accuracy, and 30% conversion lift from digital human anchors. JD also offers the tools to small and medium merchants at up to 70% discount, lowering the barrier to enterprise-grade AI for the festival surge.

Capri Group, an Italian fashion company owning Alcott and Gutteridge brands, deployed two AI agents for customer care handling order tracking, returns, and address changes. The system autonomously handles ~50% of customer enquiries, allowing the human team to focus on complex cases. Two engineers were hired from Deloitte's Digital Academy to build the platform.

Lacoste deployed a production Conversational AI Agent for its e-commerce customer service operations using Google's Gemini Enterprise for CX. The project took four months end-to-end: two months of design, two months of development and testing. The agent is integrated with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, and Manhattan Associates, live in production on lacoste.com US.

Shopify Agentic Commerce: Agentic Storefronts enabling millions of merchants to sell across ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Google Search AI Mode via Shopify Admin. Universal Commerce Protocol with Google, 15x AI-driven order growth in 2025.

Shopify Winter Edition 2026 (The Renaissance Edition) introduced agentic commerce capabilities, allowing AI agents (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot) to read store inventory, pricing, and logic via structured data APIs using Shopify Magic Sidekick.