Vertical Agentic Commerce: Grocery Innovation from Delectable AI: Joseph Lee, CEO and Co-founder Shares Details...
Joseph Lee breaks down how agentic commerce could reshape grocery, from discovery to data ownership, and why regional grocers may finally have a way to compete with the 800lb gorillas in grocery.
Joseph Lee is the Co-Founder and CEO of Delectable AI, a vertical agentic commerce platform built specifically for grocery. He brings nearly three decades of experience in enterprise commerce, having held leadership roles at companies like ATG (acquired by Oracle), Hybris (acquired by SAP), VTEX (IPO), and Mirakl.
Joseph has spent his career at the center of e-commerce infrastructure, and is now applying that experience to one of the most complex and competitive categories in retail: grocery.
Listen/Watch Our Interview:
In this episode, we go deep into what agentic commerce actually looks like in a real-world vertical, and why grocery may be one of the most important battlegrounds.
We walk through the shift from “tools that help you shop” to systems that shop for you, and how that fundamentally changes everything from discovery to monetization.
We also unpack the tension between grocers and platforms like Instacart, the rise of retail media networks, and why owning your data, and your customer relationship, may matter more than ever in an AI-driven world.
Highlights
Regional grocers are losing both data and margin to platforms like Instacart
Agentic commerce shifts grocery from manual planning → “do it for me” automation
Delectable combines food intelligence + shopper intelligence + real-time inventory
AI closes the gap between inspiration (TikTok/recipes) → instant cart creation
Vertical AI beats horizontal models with better accuracy, speed, and cost efficiency
Grocery e-commerce hasn’t saved time, until now
Retail media networks are massive, but broken by middlemen and inefficiency
Agentic advertising creates unlimited, contextual ad inventory
The future of grocery is about owning discovery, not renting it
If you want to understand where agentic commerce gets real, beyond theory and into infrastructure, this is one to pay attention to.
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