WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

What’s next for retail tech? We examined 21 of the biggest retail trends to watch this year, ranging from automated checkout to inventory management.

What’s next for wellness? Our analysts identified 18 of the biggest wellness trends to watch in 2019, from wellness tourism to boutique meditation.

The retail industry is rewriting the laws of physics. Change is coming at an ever faster rate each year and 2030 will be upon us before we know it. Explore the world in 2030 and the future of retail 2030.  

“We chose right from the very start to not hide the technology,” Hanrahan explained.

Beyond the world of email marketing in the wider world of business, the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on productivity and employment has risen to prominence in the last two plus years as more affordable systems have become available from vendors. This has naturally prompted marketers to review the potential marketing applications of AI. To answer this question, in our guide to marketing applications of AI , Smart Insights has reviewed the opportunities and tools for AI across the customer lifecycle. This report highlights the critical trends and techniques that will help you transform your brand-customer relationships using the most powerful channel in your marketing mix: email!

It’s an incredibly exciting time to be working in the retail industry. Ten years from now, consumers will look back and say: “Did shopping really look like that in 2019?”

Online or offline: These cannot be the only options for consumers. See how Alibaba is transforming traditional retail with a complete digitization of commerce.

Key Findings

1. Digital commerce innovators are moving beyond the traditional commerce site, and even mobile, to focus on emerging channels such as conversational interfaces.
2. New business models, such as subscription-based ordering and enterprise marketplaces, enable sellers to generate new revenue streams and focus on customer outcomes.
3. AI is playing a big role in digital commerce, improving customer experience, increasing revenue, reducing costs, and driving double-digit improvement in related metrics.
4. Customer-facing features continue to be the primary selection criteria for commerce platforms. However, agility, ease of deployment, flexibility to update content and deliver new features, and ability to scale are also crucial aspects of a commerce ecosystem.

Here’s a look at how the forces of IoT tech and data collection are already shaking the retail world, even as consumer activity becomes folded into the overall smart city experience.

In our 27-criteria evaluation of product information management (PIM) providers, we identified the 10 most significant ones — Agility Multichannel, Contentserv, EnterWorks, IBM, Informatica, inRiver, Riversand, Salsify, SAP, and Stibo Systems — and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report shows how each provider measures up and helps digital business professionals make the right choice.

Retailers at the Future Stores event in Seattle had a lot to say about where they thought the future of the store is headed. Here are some of the top takeaways.

In this article, we cover a variety of examples in which AI is being integrated in the retail industry, broken down into the following sub-categories: Sales and CRM Applications, Customer Recommendations, Manufacturing, Logistics and Delivery, Payments and Payment Services

IoT has paved the way for brands to use connected devices in their physical spaces too. Learn how location-based brands can invest in technology-rich locations that raise the bar for customer experience.

The Qube, our all-in-one artificial intelligence consists of many different engines working in harmony with each other to analyse shelf images instantaneously and extract information on product, brand, price and placement.

The future of food retail is to be found in China. Following Alibaba, major competitor JD.com has also opened its technologically advanced supermarket: 7Fresh uses eCommerce technology and aims to open 1,000 stores.

Will it have robots? No checkout counters? Virtual fitting rooms? Almost anything seems possible.

Amazon is getting into more brick-and-mortar stores. While the retail giant purchased Whole Foods last year, Amazon had previously opened up a convenience store for employees under its own brand in Seattle in 2016.

Exclusive research by us at LDV Capital is the first publicly shared, in-depth analysis which estimates how many cameras will be in the world in 2022. Key Findings include:

• Most of the pictures captured will never be seen by a human eye.
• A paradigm shift will take place in the meaning and use of a camera.
• Over the next five years there will be a proliferation of cameras integrated into products across industries and markets.
• Where there is growth in cameras there will be tremendous business opportunities in the capture, analysis and interpretation of visual data.
• Depth capture will double the number of cameras in handheld cameras.
• By 2022, the number of cameras will be nearly 12X the 2012 figures.
• Your smartphone will have between 4 and 10 cameras by 2022.
• The Internet of Eyes will be larger than the Internet of Things.
• In the next five years, robotics will have 20X more integrated cameras.
• By 2022, all new vehicles will be equipped with more than 25 cameras and this does not include Lidar or Radar.

This is what your shopping experience will look like in the future.

Walmart is investing in NVIDIA chips, which are high-level graphical processing units (GPUs), in order to build out its cloud network.

Instacart is excited to announce our first public dataset release, “The Instacart Online Grocery Shopping Dataset 2017”. This anonymized dataset contains a sample of over 3 million grocery orders from more than 200,000 Instacart users.

For each user, we provide between 4 and 100 of their orders, with the sequence of products purchased in each order. We also provide the week and hour of day the order was placed, and a relative measure of time between orders.

• 70% of retail decision makers globally are ready to adopt the Internet of Things to improve customer experiences.
• 73% of retailers rate managing big data as important or business-critical to their operations.
• 78% of retailers say it is important or business-critical to integrate e-commerce and in-store experiences, so an omnichannel experience is delivered to every customer.
• 87% of retailers will deploy mobile point-of-sale (MPOS) devices by 2021, enabling them to scan and accept credit or debit payments anywhere in the store.
• 90% of retailers will implement buy online, pickup in store by 2021.

The Artificial Intelligence Revolution isn’t around the corner—it’s here. A common remark is that as soon as some new form of AI is possible, it’s no longer AI, it’s just what computers “do”. And while we won’t notice most of AI’s effects in our world, there will be visible signs as digital technology is infused with AI. Through the lens of commerce, it’s easier to see AI’s deep effects as progress continues. Here are a few examples.

A motion graphic showing how Amazon’s new shopping experience Amazon Go will work. Simply scan in, take what you want and “Go”.