The National Retail Federation of AI

We spent three days exhibiting, listening to panels, going to parties, and talking to attendees. There was one big outlier.

You Can't Build Without AI

Almost every single booth and speaker topic included AI (including us!). From hardware to software, consulting to road mapping, human and business innovation stemmed from an algorithm according to businesses, panels, and keynote speakers. But what did it all mean? The answer is that you can’t cultivate business anymore without it. We heard several times that the consensus was not only business but customer attrition if AI wasn’t being considered in the offering. One from our booth quote “if I see two comparable products, if one doesn't have AI, I don't consider them.”

Operating In the Right Now

At a conference where there was intermittent cell phone and internet access, it was hard to consider the challenges of the future, when the problems of right now were still lingering, i.e. Verizon nationwide outage. The big outlier? How do we fix what’s in front of us while preparing for the future. The truth is that our retailers and manufacturers are still a mix of old and new, aging equipment, tech debt, and pilots that are underutilized or misunderstood. The first generation of solutions is out the door. A new generation of platforms and products are fixing those early offerings, making systems and infrastructure more approachable and less experimental, and are okay with being a part of the mix. The real winners are the incremental and invisible layers of software that retrofit into what people already have and expect. And, yes, they are also AI.

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