“Wonderful aims to bridge the gap between what AI can do and how retailers use it”

AI applications in retail don’t have to be limited to chatbots. There are plenty of opportunities to improve the customer experience—and even to take human interaction to the next level, says Tom Pluym of Wonderful.

Ready for “agentic commerce”?

Very often, AI applications in retail start with customer service. A retailer that receives hundreds of thousands or even millions of customer inquiries each year about orders, deliveries, or returns can benefit from an AI agent that can handle the majority of those inquiries autonomously. This isn’t just a matter of cost control—retail is, as we know, an industry with razor-thin margins—but also of providing a higher level of service with shorter response times. “This puts customers at ease, as they don’t have to send follow-up emails, make phone calls, or go to stores with their questions,” says Tom Pluym, director of AI specialist Wonderful in Belgium and Luxembourg.

But the promises of AI go much further. An important new battleground for retailers is agentic commerce: “More and more people are using ChatGPT as a search engine. Just like with Google, as a retailer you have to make sure you appear in the search results. Just as you needed a website for e-commerce, for agentic commerce you need agents that ChatGPT can interact with. You don’t just want to provide information; you want to ensure a customer can place an order immediately. ChatGPT contacts my agent, who can complete the transaction. As a retailer, you have to be ready for that.”

“Like Windows, but for AI”

A second avenue is that of enhanced human interaction. “In the age of AI, human contact is once again becoming a premium experience. Retailers can use this to differentiate themselves and potentially justify a premium price. What we’re doing here is called agentic augmentation. Human interaction, supported by an AI agent, who—for example—immediately opens the catalog, looks up product specifications, compares options… The customer experience improves, and at the same time, conversations become shorter because the agents handle a lot of the research that would otherwise be done by humans.”

These examples illustrate the strengths of Wonderful, founded in early 2025 as an applied AI specialistand now active in more than 35 countries. “Our mission: to help large companies across sectors structure AI capabilities into useful applications. What AI can do is growing exponentially, but what companies do with it is growing much more slowly. We want to bridge that gap. Using ChatGPT or Claude as your personal assistant, where you’re in control, is one thing; it’s something else entirely when you let an AI communicate with your customers or suppliers without supervision. Just as Microsoft’s Windows is the operating system for software applications, we want to be the operating system for AI. That is our mission.”

Keep AI Under Your Own Control

Wonderful has built an applied AI platform that makes it possible to bring all models and building blocks together in a single robust environment and then use them to build applications. “We can accomplish in a few days or weeks what would otherwise take companies months or years.” The company achieves this with local teams. “We believe that companies need help making the transition to becoming an ‘AI-native’ company. We’re not a consulting firm; we want our customers to be able to build AI themselves. As a company, you need to have control over that yourself.”

That approach has proven successful so far: Wonderful now has more than 150 companies live on its platform, each with at least one use case. One of its larger clients is Mercado Libre, essentially the Amazon of Latin America. “They’re a tech company themselves, but they do turn to us for a number of applications. That says something about the quality of our technology. We now have 850 colleagues worldwide and have raised nearly one billion dollars in funding over the past two years.”

Tom Pluym and Eline van Es will share more about how Wonderful helps retailers with concrete AI applications at the pre-event “AI in Retail” during RetailDetail Night on November 19 in Brussels. Carrefour, Taglayer, and “ethical hacker” Inti De Ceukelaire will also take the stage that afternoon for a fascinating and timely program. You can order tickets via the button below.