Ep. 18 - Applied vs Generative: Structuring True AI Workflows

The retail industry wastes millions of human hours building dashboards no one reads. Data science veteran Ravi Sharma joins the show to explain how agentic workflows are replacing stagnant reporting. Most organizations misunderstand artificial intelligence, treating it as a weekend project rather than a complex integration of machine learning and domain knowledge. Ravi breaks down why generative models are simply the user interface, while causal models do the heavy analytical lifting. He details the financial drain of executive turnover on system continuity and why forward-looking planograms dictate accurate assortment signals. For CPG leaders exhausted by manual reporting tasks, this conversation provides a blueprint to automate analytics without exposing proprietary data. Please subscribe and share this episode with an operator who needs to abandon static spreadsheets. What specific retail metric consumes the most manual effort for your team to track? 0:00 Introduction and Guest Background 2:10 Defining Agentic Data Science 12:12 Autonomous Forecasting in Supply Chain 15:48 Predictive Category Management and Assortment 23:23 The Monday Morning Dashboard Madness 27:42 How Executive Turnover Stalls Tech Adoption https://www.smurfitwestrock.com/ https://www.sellcord.co/