The days of AI pilot projects are rapidly fading. Across industries like retail and manufacturing, Snowflake reports that leading companies are moving agentic AI from the lab into daily operations, making it a foundational element of their business.
In retail, 58% of companies are already deploying AI, driven by consumers who increasingly shop via conversational agents rather than brand websites. Manufacturing firms are leveraging AI-powered agents as dynamic knowledge bases to combat the loss of institutional knowledge, a critical need as skilled trade positions face significant shortages.
This marks a fundamental shift, moving beyond traditional search-based e-commerce to what’s being termed agentic commerce. As Shanthi Rajagopalan of Microsoft noted, consumers are now turning to conversational interfaces for product discovery and purchases, demanding that retailers translate natural language interactions into usable data insights.
The Shift From Search to Agents
For retailers, this means optimizing for what’s called Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), replacing keyword-focused SEO. The goal is to ensure products are discoverable by AI shopping agents, viewing the brand through the agent’s perspective. This focus on agentic AI in retail requires brands to prepare their semantic space.
In manufacturing, the transformation involves embedding AI into systems, moving away from static spreadsheets. AI serves as a vital succession plan for an aging workforce. Leaders are focusing on specific AI use cases to enhance efficiency and intelligence.
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Agentic Operations Take Hold
Traditional quality analysis in manufacturing, which often examines defects in isolation, is being replaced by more sophisticated methods. For instance, Snowflake's Manufacturing Field CTO, Tripp Smith, demonstrated a Graph Neural Network (GNN) solution that models the entire manufacturing process as an interconnected network. This approach drastically reduces root-cause analysis time from days to minutes and allows for predictive defect risk assessment.
Companies like WolfSpeed have deployed Snowflake Intelligence agents, transforming week-long tasks into instant investigations. United Rentals is using a Business Intelligence Agent to allow branch managers to query operational data in natural language, removing manual analysis bottlenecks.
Proof Across Sectors
The impact of agentic AI is evident across various sectors. Financial services firms are using agent swarms to accelerate portfolio management and risk analytics. In healthcare, agentic prior authorization is cutting down lengthy medical chart reviews. Warner Music Group is using Cortex Code to empower analysts to build dashboards independently, and public sector agencies are surfacing critical operational data previously buried in KPIs.
Successful adoption hinges on identifying quantifiable outcomes, generating revenue, reducing costs, or improving productivity, before technology selection. Data readiness, including unified namespaces and governed semantic layers, is a prerequisite, not an afterthought. Focusing on specific, high-value workflows and measuring AI against business results are key differentiators for organizations achieving significant earnings-level impact within months.
