Everything Begins With Data in Intelligent Retail with Sameer Nagpal of JK Tech
Sameer Nagpal is President and CEO of JK Tech, a New York based company focused on data, agentic AI platforms and customer experience. I sat down with him on day three of Shoptalk Fall in Nashville, his first Shoptalk, and I told him the Vegas show is ten times bigger.
Five Pillars of Intelligent Retail
Sameer breaks intelligent retail into customer intelligence, commercial intelligence for promotions and pricing, intelligent supply chain, enterprise experience and customer experience. All five start in the same place.
“Everything begins with data. How effectively and how efficiently you can capture the data from the customer side,” he says.
That data is structured, in databases and data lakes, and unstructured, in reviews and returns. JK Tech’s Ontologos builds one ontology across both to remove duplicates and noise.
A Knowledge Graph With a Soul
I asked about hallucinations and the guardrails around them. JK Tech’s second platform is JIVA, which he explained is Sanskrit for soul. It pulls metadata from data lakes, CRMs and ERPs into a knowledge graph without moving the data.
“When you run the LLM against the knowledge graph, which has the context of the enterprise that you are working with, that reduces an hallucination to an extent,” he says.
The same approach lowers token cost, because the LLM only hits the part of the graph that matters for the task.
Start Where the ROI Is
Sameer told me about a retailer friend who had invested a few million dollars in agentic AI without seeing the return. He simplifies it to three goals, more revenue, better customer experience and lower cost, and JK Tech starts with demand forecasting and dynamic pricing.
On the customer experience side, Orbiee is the JK Tech conversational commerce platform. It carries a shopper’s online journey into the store and is live with a luxury watch retailer in Zurich.
The ROI of AI
His hot take came from the CIOs he met at the show.
“How much ROI is the organization getting after investing $10 million or $25 million for that matter?” he says.
Adoption has slowed into careful discussions, and Sameer thinks it picks up again once companies can show that return to their leadership.
Find JK Tech at jktech.com, and learn more about our at-event interviews at talk-commerce.com/events.