The retailer of the future will harness the power of data, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality, says serial entrepreneur and technology expert John Straw.
Farid Mheir's insight:
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."
A comprehensive survey designed to surface consumer comfort levels with new and emerging technologies.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: the scores and the ranking is not important. This list is meaningful because it shows just how broad and deep the automation has become in retail stores. Expect to see a lot of those in your local shopping destination.
At an early stage, apparel was identified as the starting point for Xunxi – a sector in which the lengthy production cycles and high inventory levels have long been a problem for small and large players alike. Powered by new technologies such as real-time resourcing, process and cost planning, automated in-house logistics and Xunxi’s manufacturing operating system, the factory is able to produce small-batch orders at reasonable costs and with shorter delivery times, consequently increasing manufacturing efficiency from 25% to an average of 55%.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: this is a huge step forward and a sign of the times: manufacturing automation. Fueled by digital, automation, and robots, this enables production of smaller batches economically. When this is rolled out at full scale - I assume it still requires development and lots of tweaking - we can expect retailers to shorten the time from idea to production. with eCommerce, it enables the make-to-order that was made popular by Dell computers in the late 1990s: onl;y build the computer when an order has been placed. Expand this idea to t-shirts and you can see why this new Alibaba production facility is so important...
The future travel experience will be personalised, delivering seamless and safe services that are high value, low touch and consumer-centric, thanks to an accelerated digital transformation post-pandemic. These new advances in technology will usher in a new era of automation, requiring upskilling for employees to provide greater levels of high-quality service. Tracking climate impact across consumers, brands and destinations will be critical for building resilience, agility and speed to combat future risks and accelerate the green transition. This white paper outlines a vision for how consumers will book and experience travel in 2040, exploring how technology and the need for sustainability could change the travel experience over the next 20 years. In particular, this analysis will focus on the future of travel — exploring what online travel agents, urban mobility, air travel and hotels will look like.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: short white paper on what travel *may* look like in 20 years. I think it is idealistic and far fetched but there are elements in there that feel very probable (ie. renting clothes instead of packing your own, robots that carry your luggage, AR-VR to help with travel planning). Not saying if this future is good or bad, but will certainly be very digital. Thoughts?
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.
Farid Mheir's insight:
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.
Workers can pick 2x-3x faster with near-100% accuracy and less labor, delivering higher productivity and a better workplace.
Farid Mheir's insight:
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
Gestion des stocks, de la caisse ou amélioration des services en magasin : face aux enjeux de digitalisation du point de vente, de quelles solutions technologiques disposent les détaillants ? L'édition 2020 de l'exposition NRF Big Show à New York nous a permis d'en identifier certaines.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: quelques-unes des innovations du récent salon NRF à New York.
The technologies on the list, which is curated by members of the Forum’s Expert Network, are selected against a number of criteria. In addition to promising major benefits to societies and economies, they must also be disruptive, attractive to investors and researchers, and expected to have achieved considerable scale within five years.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: always good to look beyond digital transformation into practical applications of the digital technologies. In particular, #2,6,7 in the list. Here an extract from the #7 highlights an application of blockchain which we've been tracking for a while as a disruptive digital technology that has received a lot of bad press with the bitcoin debacle but that has real future...
"Together, a pair of technologies could reduce both food poisoning and food waste. The first, an innovative application of blockchain technology (better known for managing virtual currency) is beginning to solve the traceability problem. Enhanced food packaging, meanwhile, is providing new ways to determine whether foods have been stored at proper temperatures and whether they might have begun to spoil."
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.
New research from Bossa Nova indicates retailers are in dire need of a solution for severe inventory problems and recognize that automation is the answer.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: the survey suffers from biais as it comes from bossanova that develops store inventory automation robots. Knowing that however the report does provide insights into the most important problems and time wasting activities that store employees face and that robots can/could help solve.
Ocado's new warehouse has thousands of robots zooming around a grid system to pack groceries. The thousands of robots can process 65,000 orders every week. They communicate on a 4G network to avoid bumping into each other. Is this the future of retail?
Piloting a drone or an unmanned vehicle by only using your gaze sounds like a scene out of a science fiction movie, but now it’s a reality. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and collaborators developed a deep learning system that uses NVIDIA GPUs to enable a user to control a drone by simply directing their eyes towards where they want to steer.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: being able to control devices without your hand - using eyes or voice - is still being explored. I find this a great example of merging new technologies - drone, eye gazing, AI - to expand digital transformation beyond the current scope envisioned today.
Piloter un drone ou un véhicule sans pilote en n'utilisant que votre regard ressemble à une scène d'un film de science-fiction, mais c'est maintenant une réalité. Des chercheurs de l'Université de Pennsylvanie, de l'Université de New York et des collaborateurs ont développé un système d'apprentissage profond qui utilise les GPU NVIDIA pour permettre à un utilisateur de contrôler un drone en dirigeant simplement son regard vers la direction qu'il souhaite prendre.
The last mile is seeing disruption from new business models that address customer demand for ever-faster delivery, as well as new technologies such as drones and autonomous ground vehicles.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: delivery is the last problem to solve to continue ecommerce growth. McKinsey explores the different delivery models for the last mile in this article.
Companies benefit from optimizing collaboration between humans and artificial intelligence. Five principles can help them do so: Reimagine business processes; embrace experimentation/employee involvement; actively direct AI strategy; responsibly collect data; and redesign work to incorporate AI and cultivate related employee skills. A survey of 1,075 companies in 12 industries found that the more of these principles companies adopted, the better their AI initiatives performed in terms of speed, cost savings, revenues, or other operational measures.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: use this diagram as a guide to determine where and how to combine humans with AI.
Companies benefit from optimizing collaboration between humans and artificial intelligence. Five principles can help them do so: Reimagine business processes; embrace experimentation/employee involvement; actively direct AI strategy; responsibly collect data; and redesign work to incorporate AI and cultivate related employee skills. A survey of 1,075 companies in 12 industries found that the more of these principles companies adopted, the better their AI initiatives performed in terms of speed, cost savings, revenues, or other operational measures.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: we tend to think AI as replacing humans. Studies are starting to show that in the short term, best bet is to combine humans with AI.
An overview of influencer that inspire me daily when reading the newest trends on digital transformation. Feel free to add your favorite influencer on this list. I personally have no influence on the ranking - a neutral algorithm calculates who has the most impact online. So all fame and blame belongs to the algorithm.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: the list provides a great starting point to get a shot of digital transformation leadership. The focus being mostly on technology, you should look elsewhere for impact on society, work, and life that digital transformation brings.
International Federation of Robotics presentation.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: robots present a solution for the skilled labour shortage and requirements to cut production times and reduce costs in an era of personalization. Read the report for more data.
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This paper examines the essential eight technologies that matter and what business leaders now need to do about them, and emerging technologies in general.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: A good summary of potential use cases and applications for key digital technologies that revolutionize business.
Something that often bothers me about sci-fi is the loner inventor trope. A guy in a garage builds a robot, or AI, or frequently both that are somehow decades beyond the technology of his day. It’s hard to even appreciate how hard this is for robots to do, because it’s hard to appreciate how difficult walking still is for humanoids. I wrote a whole piece about the problem of building walking robots back in 2011 — it wasn’t pretty back then, and it’s still a challenge for most full-sized humanoids.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: we've heard that robots will replace humans for so many years now that we tend to dismiss such claims. This demonstration shows that this may change in the near future with huge impact on manufacturing of course but also in autonomous vehicles, delivery drones and maybe personal robots. And this would be something very significant given the difficulty that employers have finding workers for certain low skills jobs such as truck drivers https://www.forbes.com/pictures/lmh45edlmk/2017-30-under-30-the-st/#28c4963119b4
The robots are indeed already here. I work at a university where my job is teaching students and doing research and robotics and so I really what I want to convey to you today is the trends that I see robotics research going that will ultimately turn into actual products and directions that you might be able to take advantage of in the future.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS : the video provides a great review of the state of technology when it comes to robots and robotics today from one of the leading researcher in the field. The talk is peppered with short videos of actual robots so you get a good sense of what's possible today. But remember that we live in an exponential growth era, so things improve very fast.
The theme of both the robot-ization of the global workforce and the populist desire for a hike in the minimum wage have been popular and ongoing ones here at Zero Hedge. However, never has it been more clear just where the future lies than this chart from BofAML's Michael Hartnett... As he says, "we are long robots, and short human beings."
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: robots will grow and bring back manufacturing to "developed" countries such as the US but they won't bring back jobs.
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Rozmowa z Johnem Straw, o tym jak m.in. komputery kwantowe mogą zmienić biznes