AWS on Future-proofing the Holiday Season with Agentic AI

The holiday season is make or break time, as the last two months of the year account for around 19 percent of annual sales for retailers (even more for some fashion retailers), according to the NRF. But this season is expected to be like none other, as 2025 marks the first year with agentic AI rewriting the retail playbook, from marketing to customer support.

In this podcast for Retail Rx, Ian Fredericks, chief executive officer of Hilco Global Capital Solutions and executive director of Hilco Global’s retail and consumer platform, chats with David Dorf, global head of retail solutions at Amazon Web Services (AWS). They explore the many ways Agentic AI is being used to help retailers seize this next chapter, and whether retailers should have a chief AI officer.

“When we talk about agentic AI, it’s really based on the word agency, so we’re giving the autonomous ability to go out and act on our behalf,” said Dorf, explaining that there’s a “litmus test” he uses to see if it’s really an agent. One, can it reason? Two, does it have access to tools — like a weather site — that can help it make a decision? And three, is it autonomous?

Answer engines with AI summaries are another growth area. “Around 75 percent of people have said that they have used an answer engine to start their shopping journey before,” said Dorf. “We’re going to see more of that. Walmart said about 20 percent of their referral traffic is coming from these answer engines; people asking it a generic question and ending up at the Walmart site. So this pretty impactful.”