Batteries Plus Put Three AI Agents in Every Store. Now What?

Batteries Plus just finished what a lot of companies are still PowerPointing about. On October 26, 2026, President Jon Sica announced on LinkedIn that the company had completed the rollout of three AI agents across all of its locations, more than 800 stores open and in development across the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Three agents. Every store. Done.

I ran an auction company for twenty years. When the online bidding platforms first showed up, the auctioneers who thought "that's for the big guys" were right, for about eighteen months. Then it was just the floor. The ones who waited didn't get to decide when to adopt, they got to decide how far behind to start. This feels like that moment for retail and franchise businesses.

What Batteries Plus actually built

The three agents have names, which I appreciate. It's easier to explain to your staff what a named thing does than what "the AI system" does. Here's the breakdown, straight from the source:

Savannah handles franchise development. When a prospective franchisee calls, Savannah sends them a follow-up email with a business overview, a franchise application, and a discovery call already on the calendar. It also does outbound prospecting and SMS. Chief Development Officer Joe Malmuth said "Savannah is changing the game in our franchise growth strategy." The company signed 19 new franchise agreements in Q3 and opened 13 new locations. Sica was careful to note "this momentum comes from decisions made well before this quarter," which is the kind of honest framing you don't hear often enough in AI announcements.

Edison answers the phones. Store hours, directions, battery questions, product and service inquiries, all handled in English and Spanish. It filters spam, listens for keywords that need a human, and routes those calls to staff. Customers who don't want to talk to AI can say so and get a person. Edison was built with SynthFlow AI and serves more than 700 stores, each averaging about 30 calls a day. That's 21,000 calls a day that someone used to have to answer, or miss.

Wattson lives at the point of sale and helps store associates, especially new ones, look up products fast. For automotive batteries, it only asks for the vehicle details that actually change the answer, cutting the lookup time down. That same logic now runs on the BatteriesPlus.com search tool too.

Sica called the whole platform "a multi-million dollar move" when it was announced in August. The company built it with vendor partners, consultants, and in-house research. They have not disclosed specific performance results from the agents.

The one principle worth repeating tomorrow

I want to name something here, because it comes up every time I look at a deployment like this: the Job-to-Agent match.

Batteries Plus did not build one giant AI thing and hope it covered everything. They mapped three specific jobs that were creating friction, calls that weren't getting answered, franchise leads that weren't getting followed up, new employees who slowed down at the product lookup, and they built one agent per job. That's it. The genius isn't the technology, it's the taxonomy.

When I talk to business owners who say AI "didn't work" for them, I'd bet good money they tried to solve a vague problem instead of a specific one. "Make our customer experience better" is not a job. "Answer the 30 calls a day that come in asking for store hours and product availability" is a job. Savannah, Edison, Wattson. Three jobs, three agents. Use that framework when someone pitches you a solution: can you say the job in one sentence? If you can't, the agent can't either.

What this means for your business

If you own a single retail location or a small franchise, you are not building a Savannah. That's fine. But Edison is absolutely within reach, and probably this quarter.

We wrote about a Texas restaurant that put an AI host in place for $300 a month and kept the dining room running during a staffing crisis. The price point for a voice AI that handles inbound calls, routes to a human when needed, and works in two languages is not a secret. SynthFlow, the vendor Batteries Plus used for Edison, is a real product you can look up today. There are others. Our own AI receptionist builds start with exactly this kind of job-to-agent mapping before we touch any technology.

The Wattson use case matters too, and it's underreported. New employee onboarding is one of the most expensive invisible costs in retail and food service. If your newest staff member can ask a question and get the right answer without pulling a manager off the floor, you've cut training time and improved the customer experience at the same time. That's not a future benefit, it's a day-one operational gain.

The franchise development angle, Savannah's job, is mostly relevant if you're a franchisor or if you're running multi-location lead generation. But the concept scales down. Any business that gets inbound inquiries from people who want to become a client, a patient, a customer, can apply the same logic: respond fast, give them the information, get the next step on the calendar before they look somewhere else.

Under the hood

What's technically interesting here is the architecture choice: three narrow agents instead of one broad one. This is the right call for a franchise system where consistency across 800 locations matters more than flexibility. Each agent has a defined scope, which means it's easier to test, easier to retrain when something breaks, and easier to explain to a franchisee in Tulsa who's never touched AI before.

Edison's keyword escalation logic is worth noting. It's not trying to handle everything, it's trying to handle the routine 80 percent and pass the other 20 percent to a human cleanly. That's a much more reliable design than an agent trying to be a full customer service department. The bilingual capability (English and Spanish) is table stakes for any retail business in a market with significant Spanish-speaking customers. If your phone system isn't there yet, that alone is worth a conversation.

Wattson's connection to the point-of-sale system is the most technically involved piece. Giving an agent live access to inventory and product data means it can answer questions that change daily. That's a real integration, not a chatbot on a static FAQ page. The same logic running on the website's search tool means the customer-facing experience and the associate-facing experience are pulling from the same source. That's good architecture.

What to do this week

• Count your inbound calls for one week. Literally tally them: how many came in, how many got answered, how many were routine questions your team answered the same way every time. If you've got 20 or more routine calls a day, you have an Edison problem and probably an Edison budget.
• Write the job in one sentence for each friction point. Not "improve customer experience." Something like: "Answer calls about hours, prices, and availability without pulling a staff member off the floor." That sentence is the brief. If you can write three of those sentences, you have a roadmap.
• Look up SynthFlow AI. Batteries Plus used them for Edison. That's a public vendor reference you can act on. There are others in the same space. Start with who built a live production system at 700-plus locations, not who has the best demo video.
• Don't wait for a "multi-million dollar" budget. The Batteries Plus build was proprietary and built for a franchise system. A single-location version of Edison is not a multi-million dollar project. The logic scales down. The price point does too.

Skip it if

You're a solo operator with five or fewer inbound calls a day, a staff that knows your product catalog cold, and no plans to grow locations. This is infrastructure for volume. If you don't have the volume, you don't have the problem. Check back when you do.

The floor just moved

Here's the line I keep coming back to from Sica's announcement: "already accelerating franchise growth and improving the in-store experience." Not "we hope this will" or "we're piloting." Already. Across all locations. Done.

The last time I watched an industry have a "floor moment" like this, the businesses that moved in the first year built real advantages. The ones that waited two years were playing catch-up with the same tools the leaders had already optimized. I wrote about GE Appliances running 800 AI agents through its supplier network a few weeks ago. The pattern is consistent: when a recognizable company completes a full-network rollout and names it publicly, that's not a press release. That's a signal that the technology is production-ready and the competitive gap is opening.

So here's what I'd actually ask you, the way I'd ask a peer over coffee: what's the one phone call your staff answers the same way forty times a week that an agent could handle by Friday?

Because if you know the answer to that question, you're already further along than most.

Sources

• Batteries Plus Now Has Three AI Agents in Every Store, AIM Media House / Deployed, October 29, 2026