Episode
Pandora: How Much Freedom Should a Shopping Agent Have? (AI Summit LDN)
- Podcast
- The Brave Technologist
- Published
- Jun 24, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1322
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Summary
Riccardo Arnaldi, Agentic AI Product Manager at Pandora, shares what it actually looks like to build and scale a brand-facing LLM shopping agent live with millions of customers. He explains why too much autonomy is a liability, how a deterministic routing layer keeps the AI from going off-script, and why traditional QA teams had to rebuild their processes from scratch. He also breaks down a real customer interaction that exposed the gap between automation and appropriate human sensitivity, changing how the team handles frustrated users. Key Takeaways Which metrics Pandora uses to measure success of Gemma, their customer-facing AI agent What breaks when traditional QA processes meet agentic products, and how testing an agent differs from testing software How a brand's voice gets engineered into an AI agent, including exact words it's allowed to use and the persona it borrows What a frustrated customer's outburst revealed about the line between automation and human sensitivity Guest Bio: Riccardo Arnaldi is a product manager with 6+ years' experience building and iterating on digital products through data, experimentation, and AI. Currently, he owns end-to-end development and strategy of LLM-based shopping and customer support agents at Pandora. Previously, he drove X60M+ DKK in incremental revenue by scaling Pandora's website and CRM personalisation programme from the ground up across 7+ markets. An Italian based in Copenhagen, Riccardo is a sports lover and guitar strummer, and is always on the lookout for the next great travel destination (with hype-worthy local foods). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- About this Show: The Brave Technologist is here to shed light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging te…