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“AI agents help brands plan and execute faster. Represent uses returns data to understand a product drop’s profitability in days—not weeks.”
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tl;dr – what you’ll get:
- See where agents fit in your team, and where your people still matter. You’ll get a practical picture of how ecommerce teams are being restructured. Some work moves to automations, workflows and agents. Other work still needs human judgement, and that’s where your team’s time and talent should go.
- Get a rollout model you can actually copy. Hear how brands spread agents across the business by appointing an internal go-to expert who trains everyone else. You’ll also hear how they get buy-in for a change that is as much a shift in mindset as a line in the budget.
- Hear how agents work in day-to-day operations. For example, Represent has embedded agents into its returns process and other teams have built DEMA into their weekly planning. Learn how they keep humans in charge and set a regular rhythm, so agents support the team’s priorities instead of working against them.
Agents Without the Hype: Where AI Fits in Your Ecommerce Team with Henrik Hoffman, Co-founder & CMO, DEMA.
You keep hearing that you need to “use AI agents.” What you rarely hear is where they go in your team, which work they should take on, and how they make your people better at their jobs instead of just busier. Henrik joins Paul and James to answer those questions, using real retailer examples.
Also in this episode:
- Why the edge has moved from how you do things to how fast you get to an answer and act on it
- How to avoid choice paralysis and AI slop when you can suddenly do almost anything
- How this shift is changing DEMA’s product roadmap
Key topics:
- Why server-side tracking has become essential, but isn’t a complete solution.
- How privacy changes, cookie consent and Shopify checkout updates affect attribution.
- Where Google Analytics fits alongside platform analytics and other reporting tools.
- Why richer behavioural and event-level data matters for analysis and AI.
- Common tracking gaps, including consent misconfiguration and lost links between sessions and orders.
- How to audit your setup by checking first-page tracking and consent behaviour.
- How to think about tracking budgets and the potential value of more reliable data.
- Who should own tracking and how ecommerce, marketing, CRM, and analytics teams should work together.
- Why first-party identifiers like email are increasingly important as customer journeys move across devices and apps.
Show notes
Ecommerce teams are moving beyond using AI for reports and summaries. In this podcast, DEMA’s co-founder and CMO, Henrik Hoffman, explains how brands are putting AI agents into everyday operations, from campaign planning and merchandising to trend analysis and returns forecasting.
Henrik describes DEMA’s approach: give teams and agents a shared view of commercial data, along with a managed space where agents can be guided by common instructions and business priorities. That structure matters. Without it, separate team and their agents can optimise for conflicting goals, creating more noise instead of better decisions.
Our conversation explores how brands can adopt AI without having to redesign every process from scratch. One practical starting point is to automate repetitive work, such as maintaining merchandising spreadsheets, and use the time saved to focus on higher-value decisions.
Henrik shares examples of agents investigating changes in product performance, looking across signals such as site traffic, advertising, product pages, stock and customers. A case study involving Represent shows how real-time returns data can help a brand estimate the profitability of a product drop sooner, rather than waiting weeks for returns to arrive.
Throughout the episode, we return to a central challenge: successful AI adoption depends not just on what agents can do, but on whether people, processes and agents are working toward the same business goals. The result is a grounded discussion of how ecommerce teams can begin using AI to save time, improve analysis and respond more quickly when priorities change.
⭐ Key chapters:
- [00:30] Why faster ecommerce decisions are becoming the edge
- [03:15] Turning reporting into action, not just slides
- [07:05] Avoiding AI slop and organisational rabbit holes
- [09:05] Agents as colleagues and the risk of misalignment
- [12:45] Bubble Room using separate agents for brand and performance
- [19:40] Applying AI to current processes first
- [23:25] Why teams want out of manual, repetitive work
- [26:10] Starting with small wins and saving 15 minutes a day
- [30:30] Competitor monitoring for peak trading periods
- [31:35] Represent and real-time returns modelling
- [35:20] Using historical data to validate models and assumptions
- [37:20] Black Friday planning lessons from Baby Shop Group
- [40:30] DEMA’s roadmap: measurement, agents, and business alignment
- [46:30] Using agents to model impact before changing targets
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