One Size Fits None: What Retail Reveals About AI | Deep Geeks ep06

Point AI at everything you own and it will find everything, including the outdated draft policy buried in SharePoint and the “final-final” table nobody ever removed. Dr. Serena Huang sits down with Veronika Durgin, VP of Data at Exemplar Luxury Group, who has spent two decades building the data foundations behind retail personalization. They unpack what actually powers those uncannily good recommendations, why a chatbot isn’t an agent, how AI surfaces the tacit knowledge teams never wrote down, and why the right first move for a new AI leader is old-fashioned prioritization instead of boiling the ocean. Plus Veronika’s dream for where retail goes next, and why the human part of shopping should stay human. *Timestamps* (0:00) Intro (0:48) Meet Veronika (1:27) How every vendor already knows what you want (3:09) The machine learning we forgot about (4:19) Why recommendations got so much better (5:17) No free lunch: your data as barter (6:47) Shopping assistants vs. actual agents (9:38) Why everything with GenAI gets called an agent (11:09) What AI should and shouldn't take off our plates (12:13) The one thing Veronika won't outsource (13:33) Drawing the solution by hand first (15:13) AI exposes every imperfection in your platform (18:56) Advice for the new AI leader: don't boil the ocean (20:51) Cutting through the AI theater (25:11) What data quality really means in retail (28:00) Using AI as your QA assistant (29:40) Personalization and the emotional side of shopping (31:26) Where retail is headed *Links* Connect with Serena: https://www.linkedin.com/in/serenahhuangphd/ Connect with Veronika: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vdurgin/