Tim Shea, Founder and CEO of Latticework Insights, joined Shelley Kohan on The Robin Report’s Retail Unwrapped podcast to talk about why most data strategies fail for reasons that have nothing to do with the technology.

Tim walked through the SMART-C framework he uses with every retail and DTC client: Speed, Margins, Attribution, Retention, and Culture — in that order, because most companies skip straight to a dashboard without agreeing on what any of it means. He pointed to a stat that surprises most retail leaders the first time they hear it: roughly 80% of e-commerce customers never make a second purchase, which means the 20% who do are effectively subsidizing everyone else’s acquisition cost. That’s why Tim reframes ROAS as “return on analytics spend” — the same rigor brands apply to marketing budgets should apply to the data investment meant to inform them.

The conversation also covered how agentic commerce is already changing retail before most brands have noticed: AI agents are starting to fill shopping carts on a customer’s behalf, well before that customer ever reaches a retailer’s own site — and most brands currently have no lever to influence which products get chosen. Tim’s take: the technology keeps changing, but the underlying problem — data scattered across 10 to 30 disconnected platforms, with no shared source of truth — is the same one that’s slowed every previous wave of retail tech. Solve that first, he argues, before trying to bolt an AI strategy on top of it. As he put it, “domain expertise is the new oil” — not just the data itself.

The two also touched on Tim’s AgenticX event series (formerly Agentic LA), which has now run in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, bringing retail, fintech, and AI leaders together to cut through the hype in person.

Watch on YouTube →

Read the full article on The Robin Report →

If your team can’t yet agree on what “good” looks like in your own dashboards, get in touch — that alignment problem is exactly where Latticework starts.