Pandora: How Much Freedom Should a Shopping Agent Have? (AI Summit LDN)

Riccardo Arnaldi, Agentic AI Product Manager at Pandora, shares what it actually looks like to build and scale a brand-facing LLM shopping agent live with millions of customers. He explains why too much autonomy is a liability, how a deterministic routing layer keeps the AI from going off-script, and why traditional QA teams had to rebuild their processes from scratch. He also breaks down a real customer interaction that exposed the gap between automation and appropriate human sensitivity, changing how the team handles frustrated users.

Key Takeaways

• Which metrics Pandora uses to measure success of Gemma, their customer-facing AI agent

• What breaks when traditional QA processes meet agentic products, and how testing an agent differs from testing software

• How a brand's voice gets engineered into an AI agent, including exact words it's allowed to use and the persona it borrows

• What a frustrated customer's outburst revealed about the line between automation and human sensitivity

Guest Bio:

Riccardo Arnaldi is a product manager with 6+ years' experience building and iterating on digital products through data, experimentation, and AI. Currently, he owns end-to-end development and strategy of LLM-based shopping and customer support agents at Pandora. Previously, he drove X60M+ DKK in incremental revenue by scaling Pandora's website and CRM personalisation programme from the ground up across 7+ markets. An Italian based in Copenhagen, Riccardo is a sports lover and guitar strummer, and is always on the lookout for the next great travel destination (with hype-worthy local foods).

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About this Show:

The Brave Technologist is here to shed light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging tech. To make it digestible, less scary, and more approachable for all!

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Produced by: Sam Laliberte