Linnworks CMO Hilary Smith on the manual work hiding inside "automated" operations

The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström® | What CMOs Need to Know About Marketing Technology, AI & CX · Sep 11, 2026 · 23m

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…