S2E11: The AI Use Case Treadmill Is Real

In this episode, Saurabh opens with a story about an that will feel familiar to many retail leaders — a senior executive who is exhausted. Not from the meeting, but from the AI use case treadmill. Two years. Dozens of pilots. A growing backlog. And a P&L that barely moved!

That conversation became the lens for this episode's central argument: retailers are asking the wrong question about AI.

The AI Use Case Problem

Most organizations approach AI the same way they've approached every tech wave — identify a pain point in an existing process and ask "can AI help here?" It feels logical, but it has a fundamental flaw: it assumes the underlying process is worth optimizing. When you bolt AI onto a workflow designed for manual execution, you make a flawed thing slightly better. The ROI fragments. Nothing feels transformational.

The Better Question

Instead of "how can AI help with this process?" — ask: If I were designing this function from scratch today, knowing that AI can plan, reason, act, and learn autonomously — what would I actually build?

That single reframe changes EVERYTHING.

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