Industry 6.0 in retail and consumer goods: the end of the traditional category manager

Latin American retail is probably the sector where Industry 6.0 in retail will produce the greatest dispersion of results over the next five years: those that adopt agents in pricing, assortment, and customer service will expand gross margins by 2-4 points; those that do not will lose share to digitally native competitors. In this article I unpack which commercial processes are being agentified first, why the traditional category manager is on the way out, what experiments I have seen working in supermarket chains and department stores across the region, and how the new agentic commercial team is built. I speak from what I have been seeing in retailer boards with revenues between USD 200 million and 8 billion.