October 16, 2025

- 44:48

Retail Intelligence in Action

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Beyond the hype: How AI fuels speed, insight, and story-doing

📍New York, US

Retail Intelligence in Action returns with a conversation that gets past buzzwords and into real practice. Host Ron Thurston sits with Djalal Lougouev, President of Ometria, and Pri Shumate, former CMO of the Miami Dolphins and alum of Nike and Airbnb, to explore how AI becomes a catalyst for speed, sharper insight, and what they call story doing. The focus is not on more dashboards or bigger decks, it is on momentum, creative confidence, and choices that move the numbers.

Pri shares how a high velocity environment across the Dolphins, F1 Miami, and the Miami Open pushed her team to use AI as a validator. The tool did not conjure brand new audiences from thin air, it quickly sized segments, stress tested hunches, and surfaced reasons to attend that informed product marketing. The result was better product market fit, stronger premium positioning, and less discounting. From a McLaren themed grandstand to luxury messaging that showed networking value, experiments moved faster because decisions had fresh signal behind them.

Djalal adds the builder’s view from Ometria. When customer data becomes conversational, a marketer can ask what new customers from SMS bought last Black Friday, what they bought next, and whether a color or cue mattered, and get answers in minutes rather than waiting weeks for static reports. He argues for small cross functional pirate teams that test, learn, and scale, while leadership clears blockers that slow the jump from insight to action. Agencies still matter for the disruptive idea, yet the manual research and iteration around that idea compresses as AI accelerates the work.

Both guests land on the same truth. AI is a speed engine and a sense check, creativity remains the differentiator. The strongest brands will pair human insight with AI’s velocity, align strategy, brand, performance, and partnerships around shared data, and coach multi generational teams to be curious and hands on with the tools. Storytelling becomes story doing when leaders reward testing, invite collaboration, and measure lifts that come from relevance rather than promotions.

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