The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström® · 2026-09-11 · 24 min
Hilary Smith, CMO at Linnworks, argues that most ecommerce brands believe their operations are already automated - and that the manual work quietly grows as they scale. She and Greg Kihlström get into where it hides and what it costs. AI's most consequential move in retail is happening in the back office, not the front end. After years of chatbots and personalization, the investment is shifting into inventory, fulfillment, and order management - where being wrong is expensive and visible. Peak season is a volume-and-velocity problem, not a basket-size problem. Smith on which parts of the traditional peak playbook break first when order throughput climbs, and how a tech freeze changes what a brand can realistically fix in-season. A stockout is a brand moment. Operational failures are where customers decide what a company is actually like - which puts a CMO on the hook for outcomes they don't directly own. About Hilary Smith Hilary Smith is Chief Marketing Officer at Linnworks. She brings 12+ years of experience driving growth through data-informed strategy across supply chain, ecommerce and FinTech.
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