That’s Mandeep Bhatia, SVP of Global Digital Product and Omnichannel Innovation at Tapestry, the house behind Coach and Kate Spade.
It’s a great line. It’s also the kind of line that’s very easy to say on a stage and very hard to back up.
So in January I was in New York for NRF, recording for AWS. If you’re not in retail, NRF is the industry’s Big Week: the National Retail Federation’s annual show at the Javits Center, 40,000 people, every major retailer and every vendor on earth, and roughly nine hundred conversations about the same three topics. This year those topics were AI, AI and AI.
I got Mandeep in a room, read his own line back to him, and asked him to show his working.
And he did. New episode is finally live.
We talked about agentic commerce for twenty-six minutes. Not the buzzword version. The what-are-you-actually-doing-on-a-Tuesday version.
First, a confession.
This was recorded in January and I’m posting it in August.
Rewatching it was a genuinely strange experience. There are questions I’d ask completely differently now. There are follow-ups I can see myself not taking. Eight months ago I was still finding the shape of these conversations, and it shows in places.
I said as much to a friend recently, who is currently posting a video series she filmed last year and having the exact same quiet crisis about it. Genuinely the most reassuring conversation I’ve had in a while. Turns out a lot of us are sitting on good work from twelve months ago, negotiating with ourselves about whether it’s still allowed to be published.
So I’ve decided that’s the good bit, not the embarrassing bit. 2026 has moved at an absolutely insane pace, and having a tape of how I was thinking in January is a gift. You don’t often get to measure your own growth that precisely. So here it is, slightly awkward edges and all.
The conversation itself holds up completely, because Mandeep is excellent.
Six reasons to watch.
→ The receipts on that opening line. Augmented product data lifting discoverability, lifting conversion. The result: single-digit percentage gains in both conversion and incremental traffic. Not a moonshot. Just money that was sitting on the floor because a bag was described in the wrong words.
→ The best agentic AI story in the episode is about a playlist. Tapestry built a small internal app with AWS. Store associates send feedback, AI clusters it into themes, an agent routes them upstairs. The first real signal it surfaced was that the music in the stores was bad, so they changed it. A later theme was customers asking for an extra zipper, and that went into the product design. Two people built the thing. No eight figure budget. The most honest picture of agentic AI in retail I’ve seen is a playlist and a zipper.
→ The Pillow Tabby is a “puffy bag.” That’s what customers type. Coach calls it something else entirely. Tapestry’s team went through the product data and translated it out of merchant speak into consumer speak, which sounds like admin and is quietly one of the highest-leverage things a retailer can do right now. Get it wrong and you’re invisible to the model, no matter how good the bag is.
→ Defend, extend, append. The readiness framework he runs on, and he’s quick to say he didn’t invent it. Defend means if everyone else is discoverable and you aren’t, you’re losing ground. Extend means take a journey you already do well and stretch it into the new surface. Append means build something that didn’t exist. Three words, and it’ll organise your entire roadmap conversation.
→ The agent-to-agent hype gets a refreshingly unbothered take. Agents buying from agents won’t be huge any time soon, in his view. Build for it regardless, because when a customer is ready to buy there should be nothing standing in front of them. Most will still come to site or store. Some won’t. Don’t make those ones work for it.
→ “Think about new ways of doing the work, not your org chart.” My favourite thing he said, and there’s a story attached. A marketing ops lead at Coach got excited about the technology, saw customer insights sitting in a database, and built herself an agent to surface them. Not asking permission. Just going. That’s not a technology story, it’s a permission story, and permission is the actual constraint in most buildings.
My read, eight months on: everything in this episode is the plumbing, and the plumbing is going commodity fast. Every competent competitor will have clean schema and translated product data inside eighteen months. The only input in that pipeline nobody can copy, optimise or buy is whether anyone wants the thing. The Tabby didn’t sell because the metadata was clean.
Which is why my favourite moment is the one Mandeep almost throws away at the end. Everyone asks what’s going to change, he says. Almost nobody asks what isn’t.
His answer to that is the whole episode.
Twenty-six minutes. Go watch.
Brooke x
MOODY is Australia’s answer to the serendipity Americans take for granted. The room where founders, operators, corporates and creatives are in the same group chat, and it turns out they needed each other. These are the girls who get it and we are in a MOOD.
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