123 in retail is what walks out the door when an experienced merchant or planner moves on. The judgment, the heuristics and the hard-won understanding of how a particular brand’s customer behaves lives in people’s heads and in spreadsheets and then it vanishes. Agentic systems change that equation. Every decision made within the system becomes part of a continuously learning, compounding institutional intelligence. The data is yours, the flywheel is yours – and every season it accelerates. At Intelo, we use the model context protocol (MCP) and agent-to-agent (A2A) protocol to eliminate the manual ‘human glue’ between siloed retail systems. Internally, our merchandising agents use them to share tasks and live data instantly, replacing days of spreadsheet stitching. Externally, they act as a universal translator, connecting Intelo’s agents to existing enterprise systems – including legacy databases and the Microsoft stack – without complex custom IT work. The result is a secure, continuous network that frees merchants to focus on running the business. That institutional capability is further strengthened by Intelo’s close partnership with Microsoft. Every Intelo agent runs natively on Microsoft Azure and is engineered to meet Microsoft’s security and compliance standards. For enterprise retailers already standardised on Microsoft, that matters: Intelo is available to purchase through Azure Marketplace against existing consumption commitments, and accessible directly within Microsoft Teams – meaning the path to deployment is shorter, the security review is familiar and there is no new infrastructure to evaluate. As for where this is heading – the question I hear most often is whether we are moving towards fully autonomous merchandising. My answer is no. Merchandising is a blend of art and science – and AI will not replace the creative dimension. Instead, it will provide a PhD-level assistant that delivers more powerful analytics while freeing merchants to focus on the humanistic, curatorial judgement that no algorithm can replicate. The goal is a model where agents earn increasing trust through transparency, consistency and measurable outcomes, and where the boundaries of autonomous action expand in proportion to that trust. What the best merchants bring is exactly what retailers need more of, not less. Agentic AI does not diminish that. It finally gives it room to breathe. RETAIL & CONSUMER GOODS Most merchants already run their day on the Microsoft stack, which makes Copilot the natural user interface for the modern workforce. The future of merchandising is agentic – where Intelo’s agents work alongside Microsoft’s tools, moving AI from analysis to action. By taking on the heavy lift, they ensure merchants spend less time in data and more time actually running the business.” Kimberly McKinley Director, Retail Industry Strategist, Microsoft MICROSOFT PERSPECTIVE By leveraging Intelo.ai’s agentic framework, Balenciaga aims to shift from traditional, reactive planning to a proactive agentic merchandising model
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