How Northeast Grocery Gets Technical With Agentic AI
Agentic AI has evolved from an industry buzzword to a real, executable technology that retailers and brands need to be ready for. It's a shift that Northeast Grocery has been actively working on for the last few years, according to EVP and CIO Scott Kessler, who spoke to attendees during GroceryTech, an event hosted by CGT sister brand Progressive Grocer.
For Northeast Grocery, which operates the Market 32, Price Chopper and Tops Markets banners across six states, agentic AI is something the company has already started adopting into its workflows, Kessler said. For instance, he said the company uses it for reviewing invoices and accounts payable. AI agents have access to the email inbox that receives invoices, and the tech can assess the emails received as well as attachments.
Kessler said Northeast Grocery's merchants have also been able to speed up their analysis abilities in the last two years because of agentic AI. It's something he said is going to evolve the merchant role to include defining and governing AI agents, and performing even deeper analyses using AI-driven capabilities. In short, merchants will be managing their people as well as their AI.
This evolution is meaningful, Kessler said, because between agentic AI and computer vision, merchant analyses will be based on what's actually happening in the store, as opposed to the historical data that grocers currently use.
"At the end of the day, they'll be doing work that's more valuable to the organization, and agents will be acting on their behalf," said Kessler.
But getting to the point at which agentic AI shifts from a buzzword to an actionable tech tool is something that companies are still working through.
"It's really a mind shift," Kessler noted. "You're going from modeling … to actually executing."
It should come as no surprise what Kessler identified as one of the keys to that shift.
"Agentic AI enables human judgment at machine speed," he said. "That requires data."
However, it will take more than just data to successfully make this shift, Kessler said. Transparency also has to be part of the process.
"You don't want to automate a broken process," he said.
To avoid that, companies have to be transparent with associates about what exactly will be driven by AI and the logic behind the decisions to build agentic tools into processes. That kind of transparency is what will build the trust that then becomes the foundation for the shift to agentic AI, Kessler said. And a retailer's ability to build that trust is going to guide how quickly they can roll out agentic AI in a meaningful way.
At Northeast Grocery, Kessler said he's focused on training and educating the company's workforce on agentic AI tools over the last two years as a way to build trust.
"Training is going to be really, really important, and it has to be multi-faceted," he said.
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In Kessler's eyes, the next stage of truly utilizing agentic AI will come in the form of task management. He said it's an important part of that trust-building process because agentic AI can give associates confidence that they're working on the most important tasks, rather than just moving down a static list of things to do.
"You're going from making decisions in your roles and organizations to shaping decisions," Kessler pointed out.
Agentic AI, when it's built into retail operations with transparency and trust, should let associates focus on the most important aspect of their jobs — the shoppers in the aisles, Kessler said. Helping those shoppers and connecting with them is something technology will never be able to do.
"A human can do genuine human interaction better than a system, better than an agent," he said.
It's that transparent, human-focused approach to agentic AI that Northeast Grocery sees as the path forward.
"It's not about the technology, it really isn't," Kessler said. "It's about decisions and understanding if those are the right decisions to make."
A version of this article first appeared on the site of CGT sister brand Progressive Grocer.
