In the NFL, the difference between a champion and a “maybe next year” team often comes down to just a few plays. As a Buffalo native, I know this all too painfully well. You can have the superstar quarterback, the $100M roster, and the best highlights on the news. However, when execution fails for thirteen seconds, the season is over.
The Super Bowl is the ultimate spectacle of winning, but the win itself is only the final output of a much larger engine. While the world watches the quarterback under the lights, the victory actually began on a rainy Tuesday in a windowless room. It started with a scout who noticed a subtle tick in the opponent’s left tackle. That is a “hidden genius” moment. It is the kind of insight that gives a team an edge before the ball is even snapped.
For the last two years, the CPG & Retail industry has been chasing its own version of the superstar quarterback in AI. We’ve seen the GenAI demos, the $7 million Super Bowl ads, and the loud proclamations of the next big thing. Yet as we move deeper into this year, the gap between leaders and laggards is no longer defined by who has the biggest AI budget. It’s defined by who can actually execute. While 91% of retailers are now using or actively assessing AI, very few have moved the needle on their P&L.
This is the story of why AI wins are built long before game day through execution, not hype, and by trusting the hidden geniuses already inside your organization.
The “Spaghetti Monster” in the Back Office
Most executives I talk to are not skeptical about whether AI works. They are skeptical about whether their company can actually use it. They have realized that no amount of strategy or planning can compensate for an operating environment where systems don’t talk to each other, and work is done through constant manual intervention.
If your Category Manager has to perform digital gymnastics just to update a pricing model, that’s an execution problem. When commercial teams are forced to jump between legacy platforms, spreadsheets, and disconnected CRM systems, they’re effectively playing with lead boots on. You are asking your hidden geniuses to win a championship while fighting their own tech stack.
The organizations pulling ahead have stopped treating AI as a surface-level enhancement layered on top of existing complexity. Instead, they are using it as the “architect of execution”, redefining how value is created across the business.
Agentic AI: The End of “Digital Gymnastics”
We are moving past the era of the chatbot. A chatbot is just a tool. Agentic AI is a capability multiplier. Rather than responding to prompts, these systems are designed to act, connecting directly to core platforms such as ERP, CRM, and supply chain systems to handle the heavy lifting of data synthesis and decision execution.
At Globant, we approach this through a Modular Blueprint designed to scale across complex enterprises. It’s not a packaged product to buy off a shelf, but an approach that empowers the people closest to the work by removing the manual grind that slows them down.
The foundation of this model is what we call Zone 1: domain-specific agents. These agents don’t chat; they operate. Their entire purpose is to monitor, synthesize, and act across siloed systems in real time, identifying risks and opportunities so teams can execute faster and with more confidence. They are the scouts in the windowless room, spotting the details early so the team can act decisively on the field.
Stop Searching for AI Geniuses, Start Empowering AI Architects
The market is currently flooded with AI specialists who have never spent a single hour in a retail store or a CPG distribution center. They can write prompts, but they don’t understand why a 2% shift in inventory accuracy can determine whether a quarter is profitable or painful.
The biggest mistake I see leadership making is looking externally for the “genius” to lead their AI transition. Your best AI architects are already in your building. They are the category managers who have built crazy Excel macros to fix a broken forecasting. They are the logistics leads who have hacked together a Slack communication system because the ERP is too slow.
These are your hidden geniuses. They possess the context that no Silicon Valley hire can replicate. The problem is that we are still treating them like tech users rather than the Product Owners of their own workflows. When you give these teams agentic AI, you’re not adding another tool. You are removing the manual grind that consumes 80% of their day. You are allowing the person who knows the problem best to finally spend their time solving it.
The Zone 1 Unlock: Building the Muscle of Execution
In most organizations today, AI is treated as a conversational layer. You ask it a question, and it gives you a summary. That is not execution. That is just a faster way to read.
Execution begins when insight turns into action. Leading organizations are deploying agents that don’t just predict a stockout, but automatically trigger replenishment across multiple vendor platforms. Others rely on logistics agents that continuously reroute shipments based on weather and real-time capacity constraints. This is where the Modular Blueprint becomes your competitive advantage: it doesn’t replace teams, it gives them the muscle to act instantly.
The brilliance of this design is that it ends the digital gymnastics I mentioned earlier. These agents reach into your existing siloed systems to do the heavy lifting. They log into Salesforce, pull the latest customer intent data, and cross-reference it with your SAP inventory levels. The agent becomes the bridge.
In 2026, nearly 40% of enterprise applications are projected to be powered by these types of autonomous agents. So, while most organizations are still trying to clean data for dashboards, the leading ones are already executing decisions in the background. Because they understand that AI is not a project to be completed. It is a new way to operate.
The Play Call That Changes the Game
Skip your first leadership meeting and go to the floor instead. Sit with the person juggling multiple screens, browser tabs, and a sprawling spreadsheet just to get one complex order out the door. That’s your starting line, and your first Zone 1, agentic opportunity. Don’t ask what they want from AI. Ask them what part of their job makes them feel like a data entry clerk. Then, give them the Modular Blueprint to automate it. When you empower the person who knows the problem best, you stop being a tenant in someone else’s tech stack to start building your brand’s castle.
Spectacle is temporary, but a brand is a legacy. Don’t be the team that leads for fifty-nine minutes only to lose because of a thirteen-second failure in execution. The organizations that pull ahead won’t be the ones with the flashiest pilots, but the ones willing to fix how work actually gets done and trust their hidden geniuses to do it. The game is already underway. It’s time to execute.
For teams serious about winning the execution game, not just running pilots, see how Globant’s Retail Studio helps retail and CPG leaders build end-to-end visibility, automation, and AI-powered decisioning into the backbone of the business: https://www.globant.com/studio/retail
