The Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are the foundation of the next major shift in the retail technology landscape – the intelligent edge. Edge computing allows data to be accessed where it is created and enables business processes outside the core IT environment.
Retail margins are under pressure from all directions – labour costs, supply chain challenges, inflation, and digital budgets that need to meet customer expectations – yet retailers are missing opportunities to automate store management.
Metaverse seems to be the buzzword ever since Facebook announced its name change to Meta to highlight the company's focus on building a Metaverse. This led to an avalanche of interest in Metaverse-related projects with global Google searches for "metaverse" going up by 7200% in 2021. Total investment into Metaverse has already reached $120 billion in the first five months of 2022.
More than 20 years ago I worked with algorithmic and heuristic-based supply chain management solutions. These were aimed at harmonising and optimising the disparate data signals that at that time emanated from siloed systems which, in the main, were either ‘challenging’ to integrate and in some instances, probably all-but impossible to do so.
I recently engaged in an interesting discussion with an internal Mastek colleague who was investigating the impact of online returns in an omnichannel retail environment. Retailers have to cope with delivering a seamless customer experience across the expanding channels of operation and grow their businesses whilst ensuring customer retention through continual satisfaction.
This means that the technical and, increasingly, digital solutions which support these operations perform together flawlessly to provide a holistic experience for shoppers for whom ‘brand loyalty’ is fast becoming a thing of the past.
