This article was based on the interview with Newell VP of E-commerce Tambi Younes on expanding the operational limits of ecommerce capabilities by Greg Kihlström, Agentic AI keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
For any leader managing a large consumer brand’s digital shelf, the operational reality can feel like a high-stakes game of whack-a-mole played on a global scale. You have thousands of SKUs, dozens of retail partners with ever-changing algorithms, and a finite number of people on your team. The natural, and entirely logical, response has always been to apply the 80/20 rule. We pour our resources into the top 20% of products—the heroes, the bestsellers—and do our best to keep the rest of the catalog from catching fire. It’s a pragmatic approach born of necessity, but it’s also a strategy that, by definition, leaves 80% of your portfolio under-optimized. This isn’t a failure of strategy; it’s a failure of bandwidth.
The conversation around AI and automation in marketing often veers into the theoretical or the futuristic. However, the most immediate and impactful applications are often far more practical. They are the ones that solve the deeply unglamorous, high-volume, and soul-crushingly manual tasks that consume our teams’ days. This is precisely the challenge Newell Brands—the CPG giant behind household names like Sharpie, Rubbermaid, and Graco—decided to tackle. By shifting their mindset from resource constraint to automated capability, they are moving toward what could be called “full catalog agency,” a state where every product receives the attention it needs to perform. Their journey offers a clear and actionable blueprint for any enterprise looking to escape the tyranny of the 80/20 rule and unlock the latent potential across their entire product portfolio.
The Breaking Point of Manual Scale
The core problem isn’t new, but its scale has reached an inflection point. The complexity of the modern digital shelf, with its countless touchpoints and real-time demands, has simply outpaced human capacity. For a company like Newell, this isn’t a minor headache; it’s a fundamental operational bottleneck that directly impacts revenue and growth. Tambi Younes and his team lived this reality every day. The process of ensuring content compliance and optimization was a constant, resource-intensive drain.
“You can imagine for us that equates to managing thousands of SKUs across a large swath of retailers. With constantly changing algorithms that do anything but stay stagnant… that demand and that expectation, especially within the e-commerce side, is difficult and really, I’d say impossible to cover through manual workflows.”
Younes’s use of the word “impossible” isn’t hyperbole; it’s a candid assessment of the operational state for most large CPGs. A single content update could take over 30 minutes, involving a “swivel chair” tour through the PIM, the retailer’s portal, and internal brand teams. When you multiply that by thousands of products and a continuous stream of updates, the math becomes grim. It forces a defensive posture. Teams spend their time fixing errors and ensuring basic compliance on a fraction of the catalog, leaving little to no time for the strategic work of optimizing content for conversion across the board. This is the breaking point where the cost of manual labor isn’t just the hours spent, but the massive opportunity cost of what isn’t getting done.
The Strategic Shift to Full Catalog Agency
The solution wasn’t to hire more people to perform the same manual tasks. The strategic leap was to reframe the problem entirely. Instead of asking, “How can we manage our top SKUs better?” the question became, “How can we effectively manage our entire catalog?” This led to the concept of full catalog agency, leveraging automation to provide consistent execution and unlock growth across the entire business, not just the top performers. It’s a move from firefighting to proactive portfolio management.
“The big shift for us… was it was really a constraint around how much we could actually get done. And if we looked at automation and how AI could help us… that 80% additional assortment, that’s a huge amount of items. And so, there’s always that potential, right, that if you’re treating them all with that same level of care and attention, then those items that are in the 80%, there’s no reason why you can’t see some of those start to pop up.”
This is the crux of the opportunity. The “long tail” of a product catalog isn’t just dead weight; it’s a reservoir of untapped potential. An underperforming product may not be a bad product; it may simply be a product with a missing description, a non-compliant image, or poor search term optimization that has gone unnoticed because it wasn’t a “priority.” By using an AI-powered content agent from CommerceIQ to automate the auditing and fixing of these issues at scale, Newell is essentially giving every product a chance to succeed. This automated system continuously scans product pages, identifies gaps against their PIM or retailer best practices, and recommends fixes—transforming a 30-minute manual slog into a sub-one-minute review and approval process.
The Human Element of Rapid Implementation
One of the most remarkable aspects of Newell’s initiative was its speed. Deploying an enterprise-grade solution in under 80 days is an achievement that will make many marketing and IT leaders quietly nod in appreciation. This wasn’t achieved by cutting corners, but by fundamentally changing the implementation model from a traditional SaaS handoff to a collaborative, co-build process. This approach is a critical lesson for any leader looking to drive rapid technological change.
“The big unlock for me was the forward deploy engineer… they sat with us. We met with them frequently in person. And so, it was built together… deploying that concept in terms of what we traditionally look at SaaS as… versus this process being building together and really making it custom based off of what we need was such a big unlock for me.”
This detail is more profound than it might seem. Instead of a vendor building in a silo and then handing over a 95% complete product for configuration, the process was iterative and deeply human. An engineer from CommerceIQ worked on-site with Newell’s team, building the agent around their specific workflows, not forcing them into a rigid, pre-defined process. This not only accelerated the timeline but also dramatically reduced the friction of change management. The tool was built with the team, not for them. The result is a system tailored to their reality, which fosters immediate adoption and value. It’s a powerful reminder that the success of AI and automation is as much about human-centric process design as it is about the sophistication of the algorithms.
Redefining ROI: From Efficiency to Strategic Capacity
The quantitative results are impressive—a 40x improvement in time saved is a metric that speaks for itself. But the true ROI of an initiative like this extends far beyond pure efficiency. It’s about what that reclaimed time allows your team to do. When you liberate skilled professionals from the drudgery of manual compliance, you create the capacity for higher-level strategic work. This is the ultimate promise of automation: not to replace humans, but to elevate them.
“Freeing up the teams to be able to do that due diligence and help inform the teams and refine our process further upstream. It’s kind of our next step, but you can’t do that if you’re bogged down with just that compliance effort in the day-to-day.”
This is the pivot from reactive to proactive. Instead of just fixing today’s content, the team can analyze performance data to inform how content should be created in the first place. They can focus on the nuance of brand voice, the quality of creative, and the strategic narrative that actually drives conversion. They move from being data mechanics to brand architects. For marketing leaders, this is the end goal: building a team that spends its time on work that creates unique value and competitive advantage, while intelligent systems handle the scale and speed of execution. This shift in focus is how you build a more resilient, more strategic, and ultimately more impactful marketing organization.
The challenges of managing a massive e-commerce presence are not going to diminish. If anything, the complexity will only increase as new channels emerge and consumer expectations rise. The old model of manual prioritization, while once necessary, is no longer a viable long-term strategy. It cedes too much ground and leaves too much opportunity unrealized. Newell’s experience demonstrates that a new model is not only possible but practical and rapidly achievable.
The path forward lies in strategically applying AI and automation to create “full catalog agency,” treating every product as an opportunity waiting to be unlocked. This isn’t about a futuristic, hands-off approach. As Younes’s story shows, it’s about a thoughtful, human-centric collaboration with technology to augment our capabilities. It’s about freeing our best people from the constraints of manual labor to focus on the strategic challenges that only they can solve. For marketing leaders, the question is no longer if we should embrace this shift, but how quickly we can build the systems and partnerships to make it a reality.
