Artificial intelligence, RFID, and unified commerce: key retail technology takeaways from NRF 2024
In her first article for RTIH, our new US correspondent, retail analyst and influencer, Christine Russo, reviews NRF 2024, which took place last week in New York.
Expectations at the 2024 National Retail Federation’s Big Show were enormous.
Outside of, say, CES, the event in New York benefits from the industry’s need for constant innovation.
Unlike any other industry, retail seems to be a punching bag - constantly beat up with any and every form of disruption both small and large: from pirates, to weather, to pandemics, to unionisation, to global instability, changes in culture and more.
We say that the retail workers are in the front line and I would add that retail, the industry itself, is on the front line. Each and every year, retailers are charged with knowing about what it takes to succeed. NRF brings together much of the services it takes to succeed.
And this year, all eyes and ears were on AI - retailers came to understand how it can help, how to expand deployment and ultimately retail executives want to define what is the six month, 12 month, 24 month AI plan.
About the show
The main floor booths were enormous. The top floor folks are clearly dedicating a tonne of money for a huge presence: NCR VOYIX, Aptos, SAP, Microsoft and more.
The lower level booths came to compete. The mix of solutions made it worth spending a lot of time there, learning about mid-sized service providers in omnichannel PoS, digital shrink reduction AI, social commerce and more.
The Startup Zone seemed unusually quiet. This has served as the launching point for many companies that have graduated to the big leagues. But traffic in this section seemed way down in 2024.
My own opinion is that it could be that the big guys have really sucked up all eyeballs and feet with their mini startup zones. SAP, Microsoft are now well known for having their own startup villages showcasing different technologies like RFID, personalisation etc.
International booths were back. There were concentration areas for international solutions by countries such as France, Israel and the UK.
I think this is interesting and should grow to include more countries and increase the options. Retailers should see important technology solutions coming out of the likes of the Czech Republic, Ireland, and Germany.
Key takeaways
AI: The discussions/presentation around AI remain bifurcated.
Discussions are still around incremental deployment for productivity changes and also there are discussions (not applications) about the full scale changes causing disruptive modification to business, people and society.
Data and cloud: well, any retailer who waited on this is now behind not just digitisation but will also be behind in AI. So, there were a lot of solutions to get people up to speed.
RFID: People are talking about RFID (again). The RFID people are thrilled! Let’s see how this goes but this as people want better checkout experiences, inventory tracking, self-check out; this may actually be their moment in time.
Another take away from an event like this is new jargon. Retail advisors and tech solutions love new jargon.
Here is the new list: we are now calling omnichannel unified commerce. Other nomenclature to watch is whether the term composable commerce survives. My personal sub-set of CIOs and CTOs that I polled tend to not like this term (viciously hate the term is more like it).
And here is a new one that came out of the show: adaptive retail.
In summary, there was a voracious hunger to consume as much information as possible.
And since there is an actual need; that is great for the NRF because it drives both sides of the show. Retailers show up eager and tech solution providers are pleased with their interactions and potential sales.
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