About the event
AI, Agents & the Future of Retail: What Does It Mean for Suppliers?
AI is moving extraordinarily quickly. But the challenge for businesses is not simply understanding the latest technology. It is knowing where AI can create real value, how to navigate an evolving risk environment, and how to build the capability to deploy it responsibly at scale.
Join Caroline O’Brien, GM Data & AI at Coles Group, for a perspective shaped by three very different chapters of the AI story.
Caroline began her career in research at MIT, working at the frontier of what AI could do. She then became Chief Data Officer at Afiniti, a global enterprise AI company, where the challenge shifted from invention to deployment — applying AI at scale across industries including telecommunications, media, banking and insurance, while navigating rapidly changing expectations around data, privacy, governance and trust.
Today, she leads Data & AI at Coles, in a sector where the next wave of AI could have some of its most profound effects.
Retail offers enormous potential for AI. Agentic commerce may reshape how customers discover and buy products. AI and automation are changing how retailers plan, range, price, promote and move goods through complex supply chains. Advances in personalisation, content, data and retail media are also creating new ways for retailers and suppliers to engage customers.
But retail is also an extraordinarily interconnected system.
A decision made in one part of the business can flow quickly through customers, stores, inventory, suppliers, supply chains and financial outcomes. As AI moves from analysing and recommending towards acting with greater autonomy, the potential value increases — but so does the consequence of getting it wrong.
Drawing on her experience across research, enterprise AI and retail, Caroline will explore how the challenge of leading AI has evolved: from making the technology work, to scaling it, to trusting it — and increasingly, deciding where we are prepared to let it act.
And importantly for suppliers: what happens when AI increasingly influences how retailers understand customers, make decisions and operate their businesses?
From data and insights to retail media, content, customer engagement and the way brands connect with shoppers, the next era of AI has the potential to reshape the retailer–supplier relationship.
The question is no longer simply what AI can do.
It is what we should allow it to do, where it creates genuine value, and how businesses prepare for a world in which AI increasingly participates in decisions and actions.