Partner with us

Get your ticket

Call to action
Your text goes here. Insert your content, thoughts, or information in this space.
Button

Back to speakers

Rajlakshmi
Shankaran
Chief Merchandising Officer
Retail Scale
Rajlakshmi (Raj) Shankaran is the Founder and Chief Merchandising Officer of Retail S.C.A.L.E., and one of the few retail operators who has sat at the table where agentic commerce decisions are actually made. With nearly two decades scaling $1B+ omnichannel P&Ls at Fortune 1 Walmart and PE-backed Circana, Raj brings a perspective missing from most AI product conversations: what it actually takes to win a retail shopper, and why the most sophisticated AI products keep losing at the point of sale. At Walmart, her category bets consistently moved the needle at scale — from introducing Chromebooks to mass retail and reaching $112M in 18 months, to building the digital wireless business that drove $550M in activation sales and accounted for more than 20% of Walmart's enterprise eCommerce profitability. At Circana, she steered retail and brand-centric product strategy across a $500M+ global portfolio through the complex post-merger integration of IRI and NPD.
Button
11 June 2025 10:00 - 10:30
Don’t lose the sale: A CPO’s guide to winning with agentic AI in retail
Every AI company can demo intelligence. Very few can convert it into revenue. As agentic AI accelerates into retail, most product teams are optimising for capability not for the realities of how buying decisions are actually made. The result is a growing gap between what works in controlled environments and what succeeds at the point of sale. For Chief Product Officers, this is a product strategy problem. Winning in retail requires more than powerful models it demands products designed around decision journeys, commercial constraints, and the complex dynamics of trust, timing, and integration within the buying process. Drawing on experience scaling billion-dollar omnichannel P&Ls at Walmart and leading global product portfolios at Circana, this session unpacks why standardised approaches to agentic AI continue to fall short and what CPOs must do differently. Attendees will leave with a clear framework for building AI products that don’t just perform in demos, but win in-market: aligning product, sales, and retail partners from day one, designing for real purchase environments, and creating solutions that survive beyond the pilot to drive sustained revenue.