Inside a nondescript Venice loft, a man wielding a microphone and a black concert t-shirt addresses a packed auditorium. The theme: how retailers are using technology, specifically data science and AI agents, to build the next generation of successful brands. The stories are about real use cases – beyond the media hysteria – how founders are using data and AI agents to outsmart their competition.
The man speaking is Tim Shea, founder and CEO of Latticework Insights, a data science agency that provides data leadership to help retail brands become what he calls “elite retail brands.” A 25-year veteran of LA’s sprawling retail technology landscape, Shea watched the conversation around agentic AI start to spin out of control. His conviction: people make companies work, technology enables them. Tired of hearing that Silicon Valley’s AI companies were about to devour LA’s rich ecosystem of creativity and commerce, Shea launched the Agentic LA event series to bring retail founders and executives together and change the narrative.
Credit: Latticework InsightsBetween Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley
The Agentic LA event series has since expanded to New York and San Francisco, two cities where Shea has deep roots and where retail leaders are eager to understand what data science and AI agents mean for their business. Taking the series on the road also sharpened his view of what makes Los Angeles distinct.
The sunny, casual culture of Los Angeles, where “serious” business is often done out of plain sight in coffee shops and run clubs, is often cast as the unserious cousin to New York and San Francisco. “San Francisco is about technology, and New York is about technique. Los Angeles is the intersection of the two,” Shea says. “LA has always been the one focused on the monetization of technology and the application of technique. LA is where left brain, right brain thinkers figure out how to make the rubber hit the road.”
New York taught him media buying, LTV:CAC modeling and financial forecasting, the discipline of putting a price on things. San Francisco taught him big data, machine learning and software engineering, the discipline of building things that scale. “I talk about how retail brands need to build a latticework to get to the insight,” Shea says. “They need to build software and databases to help them understand trends and culture. But this is hard work that requires real leadership.”
“The difference between a retail brand and an elite retail brand comes down to mastering both disciplines. Fixing data sprawl with ETL pipelines and data warehouses, but also knowing how to tell a story with data. Building a retention model and a predictive algorithm, but also winning over your teammates and getting people to work efficiently together. Until you build a healthy data culture, it’s impossible to succeed.”
Shea talks extensively about how the most expensive problem in a brand’s data strategy is human. The hard work of building a brand, he says, is getting teams to align on common definitions, hold each other accountable, experiment and learn, and invest in data leadership that can make it happen. “Data people often blame marketers for not being data-driven. But data people often fail to acquire the vocabulary and domain expertise of marketing. Marketers, in turn, need to invest in data people who have earned their seat at the table with a strong point of view.”
“Brands often say to me, ‘data is cool, but what about my intuition as a founder,’ and I always say to them, ‘yes, 100 percent, but intuition without analytical rigor, without A/B testing, without a quantitative lens, is just guessing.’ It’s like the small-market, resource-strapped baseball teams that started playing moneyball. They started beating incumbents by finding high-leverage patterns in their own data. It’s the same playbook for retail brands.”
Credit: Latticework InsightsAre High-Performing Retail Brands Playing Moneyball?
Shea’s answer is yes. Just as successful sports teams invest in great coaches and development programs without overlooking their competitors’ analytical skills, Shea feels that retail brands need strong data leaders and capable data practitioners. “For any new retail brand that we take on as a customer, we look deeply at the undercurrents driving the business. LTV and CAC, retention and churn. We have a ‘SMART’ framework where we look at the speed, margin, attribution, retention, and tier of each customer. This helps us find high leverage behaviors that can support revenue growth and help create a return on analytics spend. It’s a bit like playing moneyball for retail brands. But to do it right, we need to apply deep knowledge of data science and agentic AI as well as our domain expertise in marketing, operations, and finance.”
It is a scrappy, unglamorous approach, which might be why it fits Los Angeles so well. Despite the glitz and glamour of Los Angeles, the hard work is rarely done in plain sight. Much of that work happens behind closed doors, where teams quietly develop ideas they hope will shape the next big retail trend. Shea has spent 25 years being one of them. He just decided the people doing the real work deserved a room of their own.
Credit: Latticework InsightsTo learn more about Latticework please visit LatticeworkInsights.com. To learn more about attending an AgenticX event please visit AgenticX.vip.
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