How Newell Brands is winning the AI-powered digital shelf with Content Agent

Originally featured on The Agile Brand Podcast with Greg Kihlström, Season 8

TLDR Newell Brands partnered with CommerceIQ to deploy an AI-powered Content Agent that automates product detail page compliance and optimization across their entire catalog. The result: a 40x improvement in time savings and 100% PIM compliance. The solution shifted Newell's team from manually managing a fraction of their catalog to executing consistently across all of it, freeing them to focus on content quality and conversion rather than day-to-day compliance work.

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When you're managing more than 50 iconic brands like Sharpie, Rubbermaid, Graco, Coleman, Yankee Candle, and dozens more across thousands of SKUs and hundreds of retailers, manual e-commerce execution isn't just inefficient. It forces you to leave opportunity on the table.

That's the reality Tambi Younes, Vice President of E-Commerce at Newell Brands, faced when he and his team set out to transform how the company manages its digital shelf. In a recent episode of The Agile Brand Podcast with host Greg Kihlström, Tambi shared the story of how Newell partnered with CommerceIQ to deploy an AI-powered content agent, and the results have been transformative.

The Breaking point: Manual workflows at enterprise scale

Before automation, even a single product content update could consume 30 minutes or more, pulling team members across PIM systems, retailer PDPs, brand stakeholders, and internal review workflows. Multiply that across thousands of SKUs, and the math simply doesn't work.

"The expectation is that it happens in real time or near real time," Tambi explained. "Otherwise, we lose the opportunity with our consumers in the moment."

The result was a challenge in prioritization: teams inevitably focused on the top 20% of the catalog, leaving the remaining 80% of SKUs underserved and under-optimized.

Becoming a "full catalog agency"

CommerceIQ's Content Agent changed that equation entirely. Built collaboratively with Newell's team, including a forward-deployed engineer working on-site at Newell's Hoboken offices, the agent automates the end-to-end PDP compliance and optimization workflow.

The agent continuously scans product pages, identifies content gaps and compliance issues, surfaces prioritized recommendations, and enables teams to approve and syndicate updates directly to retailers. What once took 30+ minutes per SKU now takes under a minute.

The outcome? Newell achieved 100% PIM compliance across its catalog and a 40x improvement in time savings, enabling the team to deliver consistent execution across the entire portfolio, not just the priority tier.

"That additional 80% of the assortment is a huge number of items," Tambi noted. "There's always the potential that if you're treating them all with the same level of care and attention, those items can start to have the same type of impact on sales as your top 20%."

Speed to value: Deployed in under 80 days

Perhaps equally impressive is how fast this was built. The solution went live in under 80 days, remarkable for an enterprise of Newell's scale and complexity. Tambi credits three factors: a tightly scoped initial use case, CommerceIQ's pre-built retail infrastructure, and a co-development model that embedded the solution directly into Newell's existing workflows from day one.

"It was built together," he said. "That allowed us to move really quickly, and it wasn't a disruption to the business at all."

From compliance to conversion

Compliance is the floor, not the ceiling. What the Content Agent ultimately freed Newell's teams to do is focus on content quality, ensuring that when a consumer lands on a product page, the experience is compelling enough to convert.

"Up-to-date, relevant content impacts not only how our brands show up, but also conversion," Tambi explained. "Being able to answer consumer questions and show up with high-quality content does impact conversion."

With the operational burden lifted, Newell's e-commerce team can now focus on the strategic work that matters most: understanding what great content looks like in an AI-driven retail environment and building that capability upstream.

What's next: Autonomous orchestration

Looking ahead, Tambi sees the Content Agent as just the beginning. The real vision is stitching individual AI agents together into an end-to-end autonomous loop, where a data analysis agent flags an underperforming item, a content agent enriches the PDP informed by consumer sentiment, and the update syndicates to retail automatically.

"Why can't we link those solutions together into a more end-to-end loop?" he asked. "That's ultimately where we're headed."

For brands managing complex, multi-category portfolios across the digital shelf, Newell's journey is a clear signal: AI-powered execution is available now, and the brands investing in it today are building advantages that will be difficult to close.

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To hear the full conversation with Tambi Younes, listen to Season 8 of The Agile Brand Podcast with Greg Kihlström at gregkilstrom.com. To learn how CommerceIQ's Content Agent can help your brand achieve full catalog coverage, request a demo.