Retail’s “Big Show”, the NRF 2024 event in New York city this week, did not disappoint. Ostensibly an opportunity for the largest global retailers to connect in-person with their top service providers, the show also acts as a portal to future of commerce, in so much as it showcases the most advanced, relevant technologies, including martech, data harvesting and predictive analytics, payments, point-of-sale, kiosk, inventory and workforce management solutions, omni-channel, robotics, and ERP. But the real show-stopper was the systematic weaving of today’s newest general purpose technologies (GPTs) in software (machine learning and blockchain) and hardware (IoT and robotics), into a complex, dynamic, and elegant web of seamless, fully-autonomous commercial solutions – solutions that not only create an extraordinary, almost science fiction-like front-end shopping experience for the consumer, but also connect that front-end to a data-rich, intelligent and secure back-end. The upshot being a virtuous cycle between information collection, analytics, and automation from production to sale with unprecedented efficiency.
For the consumer, whether shopping online or on-premise, purveyors will anticipate everything you want, when you want it, and transact with you in a manner almost 100% virtual.
For purveyors (retailers, wholesalers and brands), real-time measurement of consumer demand, fully optimized inventories, and fine-tuned production to a 1:1 ratio between goods made to goods purchased, will be the new normal.
And all this courtesy of the harmonization of GPTs:
Blockchain through its application to supply chain and logistics, being the ultimate statement of record and providing costless verification for the movement of goods.
IoT sensors collecting sheaves of data in real-time for production, wholesale, and retail monitoring and management.
And profoundly powerful machine learning optimization and prediction engines whose power will grow exponentially as a function of the massive quantities of structured data sets that IoT networks will provide.
Based on this year’s NRF show, commerce as we know it isn’t approaching a Jetsons-like world, it’s already blown past it.
