WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

WHY IT MATTERS: this list of technology questions for 2022 feels like an answer to the question "what is digital disruption?".

We have reached a moment in time where old technologies - eCommerce or videoconferencing for example - are finally breaking into established industries. And the impact, at scale, cannot be found in technology but rather in every single industry it disrupts.

Very thoughtful piece, very good questions.

WHY IT MATTERS: as marketplaces become popular, finding a specific product in a catalog of millions of products will become harder and harder. The holy grail is visual search: snap a picture of something and get some AI to help you find something similar, or that matches well with that. eBay has made tests, Google lens has returned amazing results in my recent experience. Not sure what Amazon is doing but I assume it is top of their list.

Facebook is a major player in this game as it wants to make marketplace the shopping destination (don't forget it owns instagram as well). So the investment in grokNet is critical and recent results appear promising, though not yet perfect. 

So if you build a marketplace, as we are for panier bleu, then this is an area of innovation we cannot afford to bypass.

WHY IT MATTERS: warning! this article is not about your typical "robots will rule retail" or "everything has to be AI driven unless you die". Well, in some parts it is.

The reality check that retailers - and their technology vendors - must make is: retail is difficult, focused on the bottom line, with no appetite for innovation with short term results. Retail innovators must find a way to experiment while staying focussed on the bottom line.

Best quote: "‘I think the majority of the problems come from the unwillingness, perhaps the fear, of investing in something that
doesn’t automatically bring a load of cash onto your balance sheet."

WHY IT MATTERS: an interesting list of retailTech solutions, with recent updates.

WHY IT MATTERS: a great new overview of the digital transformation (my words), with fact-based data-full slides. I especially like everything about eCommerce in there which will become reference for me in coming months. I extracted just one striking illustration of the wide variation of eCommerce penetration depending on industry. This chart highlights how different the digital transformation strategies must be in the toys&games industry vs the grocery industry. Love it. Many more in the full presentation.

WHY IT MATTERS: an essential part of shopping is product search and discovery. Easy to do in stores: just walk around, look at products on racks. More difficult to do in eCommerce websites. Technology, and especially AI, is being pulled to help identify product characteristics automatically so that searching for a "confortable summer dress with flower patterns" becomes possible.

WHY IT MATTERS: an article that summarizes many of the important trends of the retail transformation. Important note: this is pre-covid....

WHY IT MATTERS: an amazing overview of technologies that are on the horizon. They range from bizarre - empathy design? - to the probable and useful - supply chain tech improvements. Read it.

WHY IT MATTERS: covid crisis may further put pressure on the workforce. If you had a choice between a store with humans or robots that perform most mundaine tasks - cleaning floors & disinfecting area, providing help, checkout & payment, replenishment of shelves, ... - would you prefer the one with fewer possible infection vectors? 

WHY IT MATTERS: Aura is a SaaS solution that I saw in recent technology shows where they use AI to analyze your camera feeds to report in real-time metrics about your store. Here the article is all about how pop-up stores can use this information to fine-tune their stores. But the use cases are endless.

WHY IT MATTERS: this diagram shows well that the next improvements will come from technologies that impact the real world. We thus will move from a digital transformation to a real world transformation. Am I already obsolete with digital transformation? *sad*

WHY IT MATTERS:  robots are leaving the factory floor to enter the workplace. First stop, warehouses. This new generation of autonomous robots can carry orders from one place to another, navigating against the human and robot traffic.

See this video that I shot at NRF2020: youtube.com

See this article I wrote about this (french): e-marketing.fr

See this article on these robots: ailatech.com

WHY IT MATTERS: since the launch of amazon GO convenience store in 2016, the concept of walk-in, grab stuff, leave, felt perfect for small orders (sandwich, drinks and cookies for lunch anyone). They just opened a grocery store now, which has the potential to disrupt the retail market more profoundly (Amazon bought WholeFood a while back). This article explains how the store works but also uncovers a flaw in the camera system: if you change your appearance during a visit the system can loose track of you. Interesting use case... 

WHY IT MATTERS: this report provides insights in the many transformations that the beauty industry is going through, with many being digital technology driven.

WHY IT MATTERS: realistic looking avatars is essential to convey realism in many retailTech use cases from customer support to online video promotions. If this is realistic, cheap, easy to do, then this opens up the possibility of truly personalized video advertisement for example. And one step closer to digital disruption acceptance by blurring real with digital...

WHY IT MATTERS: order fulfillment and delivery is the last remaining hurdle to eCommerce. Loblaws in Canada will pilot a micro-fulfillment solution from TakeOff that impressed me last year at Shoptalk. In short, they create an automated back-store where eCommerce orders are prepared with a huge amount of automation. The question remains whether the economics is better for micro-fulfillment or if centralized warehouse fulfillment with hub-and-spoke delivery is better suited for high volume / low margin eCommerce that grocery is about. Thus this "test" by Loblaws. Note that Sobeys has decided in favor of more centralized ocado-driven automated warehouse and Metro remains with the more traditional decentralized (and manual) store-based pick-pack-deliver process. Given the low volume of orders for online grocery in Canada I remain partisan of a store-based manual approach but the economics I got from TakeOff was promising. Below additional links if you want to read more about takeoff and ocado.

- http://fmcs.digital/blog/a-new-store-experience-windowless-automated-micro-warehouse-with-hyperlocal-presence-may-be-the-future-of-grocery-shopping-takeoff-solution-suggests-this-may-be-the-case-robots-ai/

- http://fmcs.digital/blog/video-of-the-inside-of-ocados-robotic-warehouse-where-thousands-of-robots-pack-groceries-retail-robots/

- https://www.takeoff.com/why-takeoff

WHY IT MATTERS: technology is tackling manpower shortage in retail. Here an example of how cameras, robots and drones are leveraged to perform out-of-stock detection on store shelves. When you realize that certain store may have 25000 or more products, the time required to identify out-of-stocks for replenishment and the lost sales makes those technologies useful and cost effective.

WHY IT MATTERS: the trends is clear, technology drives a number of business innovations in Retail. Questions is: is there a business model behind those innovations? Not always unfortunately... Nevertheless, useful insights about what's trending.

WHY IT MATTERS this report presents and categorizes the retail trends in 2019. Some are technology-based (AR, VR, QR codes, ...) but all are technology-driven, even those that improve product or distribution (small stores, popup stores, store as fulfillment centers, localization, ...)

WHY IT MATTERS: this is a big deal because the Boston Dynamics robots appear to be the advanced and versatile. The fact that they are made commercially available is significant after years of being research project. You have to be in the market for an early device with lots of limitations but, looking down the road a few years, one has to start planning for robots to start making their way into practical use cases in construction, etc. Plus the videos are just fun to watch!

WHY IT MATTERS: this is the obvious killer app for facial recognition - it uses AI technology and similar hardware that iPhone uses to unlock your screen. You can now spend without any friction, not event the need to take your phone out of your pocket. Of course this raises obvious privacy and security concerns - but in China the concept of privacy appears different than in the West. But the most important factor is that Asia is deploying this *at scale* first, waaaaaaayyyy before the USA where you still have to sign paper slips for credit card transactions... Who is leading the techno war these days?

WHY IT MATTERS: this is by far the best review of Amazon GO stores to date. More important is the description of the R&D process, with its hits and misses, failure to deliver, etc. Underlying it all it is a testament to the relative efficiency of conventional supermarkets and convenience stores: large space, racks of products, a checkout counter and as little as 1 person paid minimum wage to pack the shelves and take payment. Technology has a long way to go to be that cost effective. Then again, it is experiments like these that push the limits of what's possible and make the technology readily available to reach the tipping point at which time everything falls into place...

WHY IT MATTERS: the report is not available for free but the 42 slide summary is a great overview of key trends that are presented with observations and outcome.

WHY IT MATTER: facial recognition used to be a very difficult thing to do but AI and machine learning specifically has blown this out the water opening the way for a slew of real world useful applications. 

WHY IT MATTERS: Ii find clothes folding robots to be an interesting benchmark in robots use in commercial environments. Folding clothes is a complex task as clothes come in different shapes and made of flexible materials. I've been tracking them since early 2010 where it took many hours to fold one shirt and cost 50000$ or more. At CES 2018, folding clothes machines were introduced at a cost of 3500$ but are yet to be fully commercialized. And now this 5000$ robot from UCBerkeley is another point in the trend. With labour shortages in countries like Canada, having robots perform those mondaine tasks will become important but as we see there are still a few generations before they are very cheap and widely available.