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The coronavirus outbreak will continue to propel funding, acquisitions, partnerships, and experimentation by brands and retailers as they are forced to grapple with global supply challenges posed by our increasingly interdependent world. Regardless of the coronavirus’s impact on the global economy, we will surely face a similar situation in the future; brands, retailers, and their supply chains will need to be prepared. 
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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.
Farid Mheir's insight:
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, ...)
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This chart shows the cloud infrastructure services market worldwide from Q1 2016 to Q2 2019.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: a key component of digital transformation is moving to cloud infrastructure and services like AWS, Azure, Google, Salesforce, etc. The growth is the reflection that digital transformation is a reality for many organizations. Yet most organizations still have most of their IT servers and infrastructure in house, leaving a lot of room for growth in the future.
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From
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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.
Farid Mheir's insight:
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.
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“We chose right from the very start to not hide the technology,” Hanrahan explained.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: when I ask about what the "store of the future" looks like I often get descriptions of a robot-filled location with huge displays and computer kiosks. In fact the trend is to HIDE the technology to make the store experience more and more about what you had when you visited the general store of the past. Walk in and speak to an employee that is very knowledgeable about you, your needs and the products they have to sell. The only difference is that this knowledge comes from AI, cameras, sensors, and all kind of technologies that support and enhance the retail employee to make you believe they know you and their products. THAT is the magic of the store of the future. Get used to it.
Rich A.'s curator insight,
April 27, 2019 9:32 PM
A superb case study for the way Industry 4.0 is impacting the retail sector. Great for use in the study of technological impacts as part of a PESTLE analysis looking at a business' macro operating environment. 
Haylee Hutchings's curator insight,
May 17, 2019 10:11 PM
This artefact explores Walmart's new technology and its aims to improve the customer shopping experience. Named the 'Intelligent Retail Lab, or 'IRL' for short, this utilises Artificial Intelligence (AI) to track inventory availability and compare to upcoming promotional demand. In brief, it ensures that customers can confirm that their desired item is in stock prior to visiting the store via the app. Walmart is exploiting AI for competitive advantage, aiming to improve customers' perception of reliability and overall experience. However, the article doesn’t actually mention the words ‘competitive advantage’, which will necessitate students adopting critical thinking skills to evaluate where the advantage occurs and justify why. Within the unit, this artefact will be utilised as a stimulus item for students to discuss competitive advantage through embedding it as a link to Flip Grid. Flip Grid is an amazing website and app that allows a teacher to create a closed community topic where students respond to set discussion questions through posting authentic videos explaining their answer. Students will first view the artefact, reading through Walmart’s new Artificial Intelligence technology and then read the related questions displayed on Flip Grid. Students will then respond to each question through Flip Grid’s unique video features to respond to the questions in the topic through recording videos of themselves answering these designated questions. The learning is transformed as students will utilise the higher order cognitive verbs of evaluation and justification when viewing this article to answer a number of questions on competitive advantage within this scenario. These questions and the article are embedded within Flip Grid, allowing the task to be redefined, engaging students.
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Augmented reality (AR) – technology that overlays computer imagery over real-world imagery as seen by cameras in real time, is being eagerly adopted by business.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: using AR to visualize how you look in a hat is possible. The article provides links and other retail use cases where AR may prove useful. I tried it out and found it a bit on the gadget side but - no app to install and very simple use made it easy to try it out. Looks promising, especially combined with AI where it could "suggest" hats based on your outfit. This may prove a useful business case...
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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!
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: a recent survey provides numerous insights into email marketing tools and techniques. A great reference with numerous examples, tools and technologies. One highlight of the report is the role that AI plays in the creation and delivery of email campaigns in the coming years.
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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?”
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: one page, 75 elements that will transform retail in coming years, most are technology-driven. Shoptalk conference is all about those.
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Online or offline: These cannot be the only options for consumers. See how Alibaba is transforming traditional retail with a complete digitization of commerce.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: watch this short video to see what Alibaba is doing to transform the retail experience, the retail stores and truly create an omni-channel experience. Can this model be applied in North America or Europe remains to be seen but it certainly raises some very interesting options for what the future of retail will look like: try things, get service and counsel, then buy everything online and get it to your home in 30 minutes.
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Key Findings
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: great analysis but as with every predictions, take with grain of salt... ;-)
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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.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: a recent review of the top PIM solutions.
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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.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: I read and research this topic *a lot* and find this summary is capturing some of the key issues retailers face today in their digital transformation. Must read.
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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.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: store of the future will focus on customer experience and technologies such as IOT are key enablers to make the enhanced experience seamless and complete. This research document classifies applications for IOT into 3 categories, track, intuit behaviour and deliver experience. I find this classification and the examples in the document very useful.
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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.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: I was floored when Amazon announced the GO concept in Dec 2016 (13 months ago!) and commented about it in different posts http://fmcs.digital/?s="amazon+go". Now their 1st store opens and pictures start surfacing. The big question now is: how are established retailers going to compete with this level of digital innovation given their anemic investments in R&D? Most don't even have a good eCommerce website. No wonder pundits predict a retail armageddon...
top 20 R&D spend: https://www.statista.com/statistics/265645/ranking-of-the-20-companies-with-the-highest-spending-on-research-and-development/ retail armageddon: https://news.usc.edu/121222/retail-armageddon-more-bankruptcies-in-four-months-than-all-of-2016/
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This is what your shopping experience will look like in the future.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT First, it is from the head of the largest retailer on the planet. Second, it draws from insights - and a great video - from the World Economic Forum.
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Walmart is investing in NVIDIA chips, which are high-level graphical processing units (GPUs), in order to build out its cloud network.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT The chart says it all: walmart investments in ecommerce have paid off with 60% growth in recent months.
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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.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT In today's eCommerce world, winners do not limit themselves to building great catalogs and payment processing experience. They actively analyze data to understand customer behaviour, to provide them with exceptional information to speed-up their shopping experience, but also maybe make them buy more or more expensive products. This is a great example of such a data analysis by grocery shopping leader instacart. It provides amazing insights into grocery shopping but also has open sourced the data for others to benefit.
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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.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Very proud to share an article I recently co-authored on CloudRaker blog with Simon Hudson. It sheds lights into the potential impacts that AI will have on retail stores. A must read ;-)
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A motion graphic showing how Amazon’s new shopping experience Amazon Go will work. Simply scan in, take what you want and “Go”.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Below are some articles that describe AmazonGO technology in more detail, including a video animation. As you can see, we know very little and everyone is guessing at this time based on patent filing and an article from a consultant now hired by Amazon.
Various other articles:
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As we pass 2.5bn smartphones on earth and head towards 5bn, and mobile moves from creation to deployment, the questions change. What's the state of the smartphone, machine learning and 'GAFA', and what can we build as we stand on the shoulders of giants?
Farid Mheir's insight:
Amazing insights into the mobile industry state and trends.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT Andreessen Horowitz, and Benedict Evans in particular, have been known to spot trends long before everyone else. Here again, it appears they are making predictions about retailing - following in the steps of the print industry when Internet came along. Not certain I agree about the parallel but I agree that mobile and AI and other technologies will impact and transform the retail world in the near future. However, as opposed to the print media, retailers often sell physical goods that cannot, for now, be 3D printed at home. So either you pick them up in the store or get it delivered by FedEx or a drone. That being said, retail stores are bound to transform in showrooms and service centers as I wrote about in the past. And this is a major shift that many will fail to take.
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Ecommerce research, latest blog posts and training. Includes case studies, recommended reports, buyer's guides and supplier search.
Farid Mheir's insight:
A great blog on different elements regarding eCommerce, from strategies to solutions and statistics. Here, one post that identifies the issues that prevent ecommerce deployment.
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Curated by Farid Mheir
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WHY IT MATTERS: once we get over the health crisis, we will need to address the economic crisis. Key supply chain technologies will offer retailers and manufacturers solutions to reduce cost and their dependency on global trade fluctuations.