Chain Store Age | Q&A: Tambi Younes, VP of e-commerce, Newell Brands

A multi-brand direct-to-consumer retailer is leveraging an emerging artificial intelligence model to effectively manage its large, diverse assortment.

Tambi Younes, VP of e-commerce, Newell Brands, recently explained to Chain Store Age how and why the company leverages agentic AI technology from CommerceIQ to streamline product information management and digital content management across all its SKUs and brands, which include Yankee Candle and Rubbermaid.

What e-commerce issues was Newell having?

The main issue we were having was scale. Newell has 50-plus brands across many categories, which leads to a lot of SKUs and a lot of requirements for content. We were not able to touch our full assortment or get to an element of quality for a lot of what we were doing from a compliance standpoint and making sure that we were hitting the requirements of our partner retailers.

We focused on the top 20% of our SKUs and worked hard to get those done, but we weren’t covering our full assortment or getting to a level of quality assurance that we were looking for.

Why did Newell decide to seek an agentic AI solution?

Newell has made a strong push as an organization to prioritize how we can automate and become more efficient through the use of AI. We have applied that thinking across all of our processes to make sure that we are being as efficient as we possibly can.

The we started to home in on the processes that are more repetitive and time-consuming and that are blocking us from growth. Our number one target as an organization is to grow, which takes a lot of manual effort.

This is ripe for agentic automation from a process and workflow perspective, but also within the individual elements of creating and syndicating. It started from a total company push to incorporate AI into our day-to-day operations. And product information management and content management were identified as top use cases for agentic AI.

Why did you implement agentic AI technology from CommerceIQ?

CommerceIQ is sitting in the at the center point between what we build and the scorecarding that we do, and they have partnerships for updating content and also syndicate it. The company also has strong partnerships with the retailers that we're working with as well.

The CommerceIQ approach to AI is very forward-thinking. It has been a great partner over the years, but that approach that they took to building with us is definitely something that gave us more confidence that we could improve our product information and content management.

What benefits has Newell received from deploying Commerce IQ agentic AI technology?

The biggest internal benefits are the efficiency scale. We are receiving a roughly 40x time savings in terms of efficiency in inputting SKUs into the PIM, from a few 80 to 100 SKUs in a day.

This gets us way past only managing our top 20% of SKUs and provides the opportunity to touch our full assortment and making sure that we're managing compliance but also taking a step forward into optimization. We know through studies we have done that there is a tangible increase to conversion when your content is best in class.

Are there any future agentic AI plans you can discuss?

We want to continue to roll out CommerceIQ across all our brands and all of our key retail partners as well. Newell has built a lot of individual agentic AI use cases and applied agentic solutions to them. Now the thought process is how do you start to stitch these things together so that we are managing end-to-end workflows, with humans in the loop but driving more autonomy within the process.

This means identifying areas like an end-to-end content supply chain, from when content is created all the way down to when it's indicated. How do we drive more automation through that process to make sure that it's efficient and scalable.

We need to identify the right use cases, focusing our efforts as an organization against those that will drive the most value, but really looking at large, complex processes and how we can make them more efficient and drive more value for us as a company.