The Category Manager's New Job Description: Takeaways from Progressive Grocer's Webinar on RGM, AI, and Storytelling

Progressive Grocer's recent webinar, "The Future of Category Management: RGM, AI and the Art of the Story,"  featured Denise Edwards, SVP of Category Management and Commercial Strategy at Advantage Solutions, walking a packed audience of category managers and insights teams through where AI really adds value in retail — and where it still can't touch human judgment. It's a worthwhile 48 minutes ands on a conclusion that's becoming impossible to ignore: the job isn't disappearing, it's relocating. Away from producing analysis, and toward deciding what to do with it.

Edwards built her talk around three shifts, and each one maps almost perfectly onto the problem 11Ants was created to solve.

Pillar one: data gathering isn't a department anymore, it's everyone's job

Edwards' first point is that category management no longer has a monopoly on data. Retailers have built out their own loyalty programs, retail media networks, and insights orgs; AI tools are gathering and structuring information on their own. The result is that most of the traditional "who has the data" advantage has evaporated — and Edwards was clear that category management and RGM teams are frequently mining the exact same data in parallel, just through different lenses, without ever comparing notes.

That's a data-silo problem before it's an AI problem, and it's the one 11Ants was purpose-built around. Ant gives every function — category, RGM, marketing, store ops, executive leadership — a single front door into the same loyalty, transaction, budget, and inventory data, rather than each team running its own partial analysis and hoping it lines up. When the differentiator is no longer who has the data but who can connect it, that's a platform problem, and it's exactly the gap 11Ants closes.

Pillar two: AI makes the analysis faster — but only for people who know how to use it

The most sobering stat in the session: 75% of CPG and retail leaders call AI a top strategic priority, but only 16% can quantify a return on it. Everyone's "doing AI." Almost nobody can prove it's working. Edwards' read is that the tool itself isn't what creates value — knowing how to use it well is, and the gap between average users and power users is enormous.

This is the point 11Ants has been arguing for a while, including in CEO Tom Fuyala's own op-ed for Progressive Grocer on moving retail analytics from reactive to proactive. Ant isn't a general-purpose chatbot bolted onto a dashboard — it's a retail-native analyst covering 40+ built-in behavior and performance modules, trained to answer the specific questions category and RGM teams actually ask, in plain English, without a data team in the loop. Customers report jobs that used to take up to three days now taking fifteen minutes. That's not a productivity nice-to-have; it's the difference between the 16% who can point to ROI and the 84% who can't.

Pillar three: storytelling is the whole game — and it's the part AI can't do for you

Edwards' strongest point is also the one every AI vendor conveniently leaves out of their pitch: data that's completely accurate can still fail completely, because it doesn't measure what actually matters to the person deciding. A dashboard with forty correct tiles loses to one sentence that tells a buyer exactly what to fix and what it's worth. As she put it plainly: "Don't just admire the dashboard, act on it."

That's not an argument against AI in category management — it's an argument for using AI to buy back the time and clarity that storytelling requires. Every hour Ant saves pulling and reconciling data is an hour a category manager gets back to figure out why a number moved, decide what's worth escalating, and build the argument that gets a buyer or a CFO to actually act. Ant's job is to compress pillars one and two down to minutes. What a category manager does with the fifteen minutes they get back — that's pillar three, and it's still entirely human.

What does this mean in practice?

None of this is an argument that AI replaces category management - It's an argument that the teams who win from here are the ones who stop treating data gathering and analysis as the job, and start treating them as the price of entry — freeing up the actual skill that's always mattered: knowing which insight is worth a room's attention, and telling it well enough that someone acts on it. Edwards' talk is a genuinely useful diagnosis of where the industry is headed. Ant is the tool built to get you there faster.

If you want to see what fifteen-minute category and RGM analysis actually looks like, request a demo with the 11Ants team.