Talkdesk Introduces AI Agents for Retail As Part of Vertical PlayTalkdesk Introduces AI Agents for Retail As Part of Vertical Play

Talkdesk shows off its retail chops at NRF 2025.

The retail industry's largest show, NRF, was held at the Javits Center in New York from January 12-24, 2025. The event is an excellent way for tech vendors to show off their latest and greatest innovations to help retailers transform.

There, CX provider Talkdesk announced its AI Agents for Retail, an agentic artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can execute tasks involving reasoning, planning, and interacting with people. The tool integrates with existing systems and performs functions like managing orders, verifying customer identities, and providing customer support without requiring additional development.

Talkdesk says its AI Agents for Retail can carry natural conversations and process multiple topics within a single interaction. Unlike human agents, they operate 24/7 and provide a personalized experience by analyzing the customer’s behavior and responses. The intelligent agents use sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) capabilities and large language models (LLM).

The rise of agentic AI has been game-changing for AI agents: Previous generations of AI agents could handle simple tasks or be used to help agents interact with customers, but agentic AI agents can now complete moderately complex tasks because they are designed to learn as they go. Highly complicated tasks will still need to defer to a human agent, and AI agents will play a supportive role in those cases.

In addition to AI Agents for Retail, Talkdesk is leveraging agentic AI to provide shoppers with more detailed and personalized information about store locations and services; its new Service Directories tool utilizes a visual map interface and geolocation data to make recommendations. Retailers can use these directories to guide customers to the most relevant services based on location. AI Agents for Retail and Service Directories are now available as part of the Talkdesk Retail Experience Cloud, a customer service platform that helps retailers build brand loyalty by enhancing online and in-store experiences.

These announcements are part of Talkdesk’s broader efforts to increase the industry-specific capabilities within its AI platform, Talkdesk Ascend AI. Industry specializations are critical for Talkdesk's ability to compete. Many of the CCaaS providers are much bigger and/or have more prominent brands than Talkdesk. The industry specialization started several years ago when Kathie Johnson was CMO. She came to Talkdesk after a stint at Salesforce, which used industry specialization to disrupt many of the bigger CRM vendors at the time, such as SAP.

Over the past year, Talkdesk has introduced AI tools for different industries, including retail, banking, and healthcare. These include Autopilot for automated customer self-service, Talkdesk Navigator for managing voice and digital interactions, and Interaction Analytics for analyzing contact center data and customer behavior.

At its recent analyst event, current CMO Neville Letzerich was emphatic about the company’s commitment to infusing the Talkdesk platform with industry-specific capabilities. Subsequently, I spoke with CEO Tiago Paiva, who reiterated the importance of vertical expertise. Looking ahead to 2025, I expect to see more industry-specific AI features from Talkdesk. HIMMS is coming up in a little over a month, and it will not be surprising if the company will have a similar announcement for healthcare.

The retail industry’s interest in AI is massive. At NRF, I spoke with representatives from many well-known brands, and they’re all looking to harness its power. A few are considering it to cut costs, but the majority want to use AI to offer faster and more personalized customer service. Customers have seemingly unlimited choices of where to spend their money, creating significant competitive pressure. I’m expecting retail to be one of the fastest adopters of AI agents, which should be good news for the CCaaS industry. After all, all of us shop.