can improve operational efficiency while maintaining strict oversight and security controls. For company president Ryan West, the promise of agentic AI lies not in replacing employees, but in empowering teams with tools that help eliminate administrative friction and transform information into actionable outcomes. “We have team members exploring tools like OpenAI Codex working locally on their desktop to reprocess spreadsheets and external documents, creating lo- cal agents that don’t run amok across our company resources,” West said. As a long-time user of the Microsoft ecosystem, West Music partnered closely with its internal IT team to ensure AI adoption aligns with existing security standards and operational requirements. “We have signed up for the Microsoft Frontier program to enable agentic work in our Copilot en- vironment so we can explore agents with the com- fort and security of our IT staff,” West said. “That’s enabling new workflow exploration with our early adopters, enabling processes like inbox processing of emails for filing, categorization, removing spam and creating new inbox rules to lower the daily noise. I’m also exploring using it to reprocess meeting record- ings and transcripts to identify action items, who is responsible for it, when it’s due, and putting it together in a project management workflow so I can follow up with team members to make sure we’re taking our conversations in meetings and turning them into action and completion.” At Five Star Guitars, Murfin said he’s implemented several internally developed AI-powered tools designed specifically to reduce operational inefficiencies and improve communication across the business. One of those systems is an employee handbook chat assistant trained on the store’s internal hand- book, letting staff members quickly access infor- mation about policies, procedures and tasks, such as requesting PTO. Murfin has also developed AI- assisted delivery tracking workflows that automati- cally scrape invoices and shipping notifications for tracking information, ping carriers like UPS and FedEx for updates, and place delivery notifications directly onto store calendars. If delivery timelines shift, the calendar updates automatically. “When we switched POS systems, I lost a lot of my ability to dynamically run reports on inven- tory, sales, and ROI, and most of the history isn’t accessible, so I automated the download of daily reports to store them locally, and I’m building my own analytics from there,” Murfin said. “It runs every morning at 5 a.m.” For Murfin, AI has become less about eliminating
work and more about reshaping where his time and energy are spent. “I’m meeting one-on-one with more of our crew and going over reports, charts, summaries, budgets and planning, so I don’t really have extra time, I have ‘different’ time,” Murfin shared. “I’ll find a piece of the analytics that I don’t like doing and try to au- tomate it. I look for a new problem to solve, and so on. To date, I’ve made around a dozen little tools.” The Future of Agentic AI in MI A s agentic AI continues gaining traction across the MI industry, many retailers are approaching the technology with caution. While AI-powered work- flows are helping stores automate repetitive tasks and improve operational efficiency, dealers remain wary of handing over too much control, especially when it comes to customer interaction, employee value and data security. “I really like AI, but it’s just a tool. Maybe some- day it will be more than that, but today isn’t that day,” Murfin said. “I would caution against think- ing we can replace meaningful staff with AI bots simply because we call them ‘agents’ with a capital ‘A’ now. Do we truly see the potential of AI, or are we overestimating its capabilities and undervaluing our employees?” Murfin remains a strong advocate for maintain- ing a traditional hands-on retail experience where employees remain at the center of customer interac- tions and AI agents don’t answer phones or emails. “I would humbly submit that taking care of employees is job No. 1,” Murfin said. “The point isn’t to replace employees, it’s to make life easier for them and for me. Indirectly, I’d say it’s enabled more sales. When you’re not bogged down by re- petitive tasks, you can focus on what you actually enjoy doing — connecting fellow musicians with new gear.” “While we are excited about what AI can do to unlock productivity and innovation, we also recognize there are risks to [moving] too fast and unregulated,” West added. “Agentic AI unlocks some amazing new capabilities, but having guardrails has been a consideration.” Echoing a similar sentiment, Dods said he cur- rently uses Google’s Antigravity IDE and AI-assisted browser agents to automate repetitive operational tasks that take up his team’s valuable time. “Agents can handle a lot of grunt work these days,” Dods explained. “But, I won’t let them talk to custom- ers directly. I’m still old school about that. I don’t trust what could happen with a chatbot on the website or an automated email response yet.” MI
38 I MUSIC INC. I JULY 2026
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