23:02, 26 December 2025

Major Russian Retailer Recruits AI Agents

The company is prioritizing AI agents to help employees work faster and more accurately.

Retailer X5 Group is steadily expanding the use of artificial intelligence across its operations. The company has assigned AI a growing role in automating office routines and forecasting consumer demand.

Mikhail Neverov, director of AI development at X5 Group, said machine learning technologies have been used at the company for several years. They are applied in pricing, logistics, assortment management, and demand forecasting.

“X5 has long used classical machine learning, including computer vision, recommendation systems and advanced forecasting models,” he said.

More broadly, the company is prioritizing AI agents that help employees work more efficiently and reduce fatigue from routine tasks.

Marketing and Support

A separate area of focus is generative AI and large language models. These are used as support tools in marketing, customer service, and call centers. Generative models handle text, customer requests, and other unstructured data.

“Lawyers, for example, can use AI to compare a new contract with a previous one and highlight changes in terms,” Neverov said.

X5’s AI development team now numbers in the hundreds. According to Neverov, the main emphasis today is shifting toward integration and oversight.

“The basic capabilities of language models are becoming a standard technology. What matters more is how to embed them into real business processes,” he said.

‘Recruiting Agents’ and Marketing

In 2025, X5 concentrated on two main AI development tracks. The first is agentization. The company has built a platform for assembling AI agents that employees can customize for specific tasks.

“These are assistants that remove routine work and help with documents,” Neverov said. An internal CoPilot already allows office staff to save a significant amount of time.

The second track focuses on marketing and computer vision. AI models are used at kitchen factories and in logistics, where they monitor compliance with sanitary standards and verify delivery schedules.

“Computer vision models significantly reduce the time it takes to move from an idea to real-world deployment,” Neverov said.

According to him, AI is already delivering measurable economic benefits. It allows the company to handle larger workloads with the same number of employees and improves operational accuracy.

“We have learned how to build AI agents and apply them in ways that actually generate revenue,” he concluded.

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