Hello and welcome you live from NRF to the Special Retail Podcast and E Tab Day One recap. I'm joined by Simon, Head of Sales for the UK. Yep, Mr Head of Marketing for etab Global, ETAP Central. Then what do you call it? Ethan Brick. That's it. And I and. You and. I'm. I'm. Looking for? Ohh. Yeah, perfect. So what we're gonna do, we're gonna spend the next 15 minutes going through what we took away today. What was the sort of highlights
for us? We, I know we had, Simon, I think you were looking at innovation, right? You were looking for key innovations and what you saw. Yeah, I was. I was looking for innovation, but also looking around what I thought the key trends were and how things would translate into the needs of retailers. Fantastic. And Emma, what was just, I'm interest, what was your focus? Was there anything that you were sort of keeping an eye on as you were going through the talks?
Yeah, I were focusing on the innovation and grocery mainly, OK. And the AI parts of all of it that the personalization and of course very interesting for me as a marketeer is the marketing is very much in focus, Yeah, now so. Yeah, I mean it it it was incredible. I think the scale you can see behind me, we're on level 1 mezzanine, basically the, the, the. To give you some context of the depth of of how big this event is, the building behind the camera is where the main. Talks are.
Behind me there are three to five ex rivals, depending on how you split it on three different levels, again depending on how you split it And innovation and food innovation, which is new for this year so let's get straight into assignment. I'd love to know. You know, innovation trends. What what did you? Come away with like, I guess just mirroring what you say, The scale of the scale of the show is incredible. There's what, 6000 booths to
look out. So finding innovation is easy and really difficult of finding that gold. But I think for me, if you take the Innovation zone, other than a a 3D mannequin and a robot, everything else was AI. Every single stand has the word AI in. And and also one of the trends that I see here is that there's lots of startups that have something really interesting, but can't quite explain what that is.
Yeah. So when they, when they describe it on their stand versus the conversation that you have versus how I would describe it for the needs of retailers is quite different. So I've found that AI is a theme. I've learned some new words. I've learned about composable AI. That's the thing, apparently. And also deep, you mean you don't know. So composable AI is about how the connectivity of different things together, so connecting different parts of AI together into a single thing.
And generative AI is mentioned quite a lot. And again I had to ask what do you mean by that and and that's about AI that can generative. Yeah. And it's about being able to then create images or text as as a base of AI which is quite interesting. So I think that I've found lots and lots of stands that have tried to elevate was talking about AI to try and add a few more words to to to add a little bit more value to it.
However I think well I have found is that the use of AI is covering so many different things. It's not all capturing consumer behaviour, but whether it's stock forecasting, replenishment behaviour in store, footfall, tracking, all about data. Everything I've seen today has a dashboard and there's dashboard for everything and I think that the clever thing is being able to take the use of that data but being able to take it back into something that's actionable.
Insight, which I think will be quite tricky, but but definitely a I is the theme of for the day for sure. Yeah, I I 100% it's interesting. Is it, is it do you think is it because there's a lot of technology startups who think ohh, I'm gonna go and start selling to retailers and that's why when you sort of say give me a use case then they're like ohh well you know we can do stuff with pledge. Tell me about that. And they're like it's all. It's that. It's a fact.
I found it a lot. People explain something really well. And you ask, how does that change consumer behaviour? Yeah. And that's when it starts to crumble a little bit, because they're not quite yet. Sure. And and I think there's a whole lot of people that have invented something really cool. Yeah. And whether that really cool is something that translates into something that a retailer can use or something that just becomes a flagship that's really quite interesting.
I'll probably do one. It is, there's a fine balance between those things at the moment. But yeah, it's AI recurring theme, but not necessarily. It's not necessarily all about AI changing the world, but how AI can complement some of the things that already happened. Understood, everyone. How about for you, what was like the the main part from a I, you know but I guess the AI themes we can't say apart from me because people watching this.
Yeah. I'll probably thinking about how do I use these Yeah. So what? What was it for you? For me it was like you need to have the base first. You need to have the digital ground pillars like the CRM system, your data warehouse, your data management. You need to have everything in place first and then you can go further and have the customer experience in the centre of all of it.
Yeah, yeah, you need to think through, OK, where can I do efficiency with a where can I do stuff less dependent on the staffing itself, Yeah. So you can focus on the customer experience instead of doing this repetitive task that we can use AI4. So that was very interesting. A lot of talks were focusing about how can we improve the customer experience and how can we automate with AI so we can have time to do the stuff that we are good at as humans. Not that a I do. Yeah.
So that was very interesting. I think efficiency driven out of tasks being automated is 100%. But the the key thing is, and this is depending on who you speak, you need to have a base to build on, right? You need your data to be there. You need to have had the, I don't know, your supply chain needs to be in some shape of water or your front of house loyalty programme needs to have that data. Yeah. So I'm. I'm curious Emma, did you have any talks on loss today?
Did you see anything about loss? Yeah, I did it. There are of course still a big trend with a loss prevention or trend maybe a threat to all retailers that we have this loss prevention issues. We yeah, but and they are also new names for it. So they say terms. So it's now that. Actor. Yeah, Bad actor. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. Remember first I said, well, what are you saying about it anyway? Yeah. Yeah, there's so many buzzwords right now about loss
preventions. You need to collect all of these and write them down to be on top of mind of these loss prevention solutions. Is there anything as a market here that you're thinking when I get back home, there's something I want to experiment with? Is there something that I've inspired you? From the whole show, yeah. From from today because there was an inspiration from today. Yeah, actually it was that the retail media part, OK, Like a lot. Of the big trend? No. Retail media?
Yes. Yeah, Yeah. And that the marketeers lead the way based on their analysis and their data-driven campaigns, data-driven work through like Google Analytics. We haven't done that for a while. We've been marketing and now it's time for retail to step into that because of all these AI possibilities. Now you can be, we have sensors, we have the smart way of measure things. We can measure things based on all these AI smartness that we have. Now. Yeah, that I've been doing for a while.
So now I think that OK, what I know based on my work, I can apply on this retail thing. Yeah. And we can do basically think that the store could be like a website. Yeah, so. Take, which has been the the the thing that I've been saying for years. Make the invisible visible, right, And that's how you make your store operations and everything that you can't see become always.
I think Marc Benioff in the Walmart final keynote sort of summarised there when he sort of asked the audience, does anyone remember Minority Report right in terms at the moment when he goes into the Gap and, you know, he's recognised.
He's. I I think for me, the one thing that I noticed on a few of the analysis, trends, panelling, trend talks that I went to is the fact that people who are already in your customer base want more and a bigger acceleration of customisation, that threat to my privacy. I'm already there. I'm already bought into you as a retailer. Yeah, I want you to know me. I want you to offer that service to me.
Yeah, I think that was one of the big sort of stats for the day that that's coming up. OK, final thoughts, Final thoughts on. As much as today's been great, I think the thing that I was expecting see more of that happen is around sustainability. Yes, I I thought he would be one of the big themes that I would see today. And there's a there's a sustainability corner, yeah. But there isn't really the level of messaging that I would say about helping retailers be more sustainable.
I hope that's that's been something that's somewhat of a surprise to me saying OK. And that. And I will bring the personalisation. I think, yeah, that we in the future will be so well known by the stores that when I walk in they will already know what I will order. Yeah. So that's a really cool thing that I'm looking forward to.
OK Can they read my mind? Kind of with AI when I walk in and they already have picked out the really nice theme of clothes and I can just choose and walk out that would. Be very cool, Yeah, I think. I think retailers are are definitely challenged with understanding all of these themes. Let's look at what day two brings. We'll be back again tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow to to provide. So thank you so much for tuning
into this LinkedIn live. Look forward to meeting with you tomorrow if you have any questions. If you if there's something on top of mind, reach out to your local I tab or TAB team Ohh, message us directly. We're here to answer your questions, so if there's anything else that you need to know, just let us know and we'll do our best to go hunt and bring it to you. Thank you so much.