New Research

Summary

This IDC Survey Spotlight looks at data from IDC's 2023 Global Retail Operations Survey to determine which technology strategies retailers are using, by subvertical, to mitigate their most pressing pain points and store operations challenges. Becoming a truly omni-channel retailer is challenging and requires striking the right balance of store operations and digital transformation technology. Retailers worldwide are looking for technology to support their top 3 priorities for digital transformation: improving customer experience, developing new revenue monetization opportunities, and improving employee experience.

Summary

This IDC study provides IDC's top 10 predictions for future of industry ecosystems.

"The move to more open, extended, pan-industry ecosystems is the next phase of digital transformation. Organizations continue to recognize that innovation is more successful, resiliency is stronger, and customer, consumer, citizen, or patient experience is better with a varied, diverse ecosystem of partners in place," said Jeff Hojlo, research vice president, Future of Industry Ecosystems.

Summary

This IDC study provides IDC's top 10 predictions for the retail industry in 2024.

Leslie Hand, group vice president, IDC Retail and Financial Insights, emphasized, "Retailers are not investing in small step changes to their portfolios — they are digitally transforming and investing in the massive scale and speed of digital, cloud-based, connected, AI-driven, and sensor-driven automation. We are in the middle of a customer-led, technology-enabled revolution in retail."

Summary

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation presented at the October 18, 2023, Retail Leadership Conference offers IDC Retail Insights Group Vice President Leslie Hand's current (October 2023) take on how retailers should think about their strategic technology investments for the store. New data from IDC's latest Global Retail Operations Survey demonstrates that retailers are ramping up for more aggressive investments in infrastructure, mobile first, and workforce engagement to combat ongoing challenges in connectivity, world economic trends, and changing customer demands.

Summary

This IDC Market Perspective highlights major announcements made at Google Cloud Next held in San Francisco on August 29–31, 2023, with a focus on how they will impact the following industries — education, financial services, government, healthcare and life science, and retail.

"AI is everywhere, and industry leaders are working tirelessly to adapt," said Matthew Leger, research manager, Government Insights at IDC. "Google's new AI capabilities, coupled with the company's robust partner ecosystem and industry solution approach, position Google — and by extension its customers — well to serve as a strategic partner to leaders across sectors."

Summary

This IDC Innovators document profiles five emerging vendors that offer computer vision AI solutions for automated checkout and self-checkout in stores. Computer vision at checkout can take many forms, including automated checkout with no scanning, augmented self-checkout that reacts to customer behavior and identifies items, kiosks that see and scan multiple items on a tray, autonomous turnkey shops and stands, and data collection and analytics that shape employee alerts and trigger tasks. Each of these five vendors provides a differentiated solution, but all of them help retailers address labor shortages and the need to improve customer experience and reduce shrink.

"Our recent survey of over 800 retailers worldwide revealed that appetite for using computer vision to solve problems and improve customer experience at checkout is significant, with over one-third planning to invest in the next three years. These IDC Innovators, Everseen, Grabango, Mashgin, Standard AI, and Zippin, have demonstrated a high awareness of the complexities facing modern retailers and have successfully implemented technologies that will help organizations drive down operational costs, reduce shrink and loss, and improve customer experience in stores," said Leslie Hand, group vice president, IDC Retail Insights.

Summary

This IDC TechBrief examines the benefits, risks, success factors, adoption rate, and required investment for retailers considering implementing a workforce engagement platform for their frontline staff as part of their strategy to digitize the store. It also lists several key suppliers of workforce engagement platforms.

"Retailers want to move beyond time and attendance and scheduling to build deeper relationships with their store associates. Frontline workforce engagement platforms allow retailers to give employees what matters most to them: flexibility and control over schedules, access to learning and growth within the company, more choice in how and when they receive their pay, and community-building resources and communication tools," said Leslie Hand, GVP, IDC Retail Insights. "Happier, engaged store employees with access to information that allows them to do a better job will in turn create better experiences for shoppers, building lifetime, high-value customer relationships."

Summary

This IDC Market Presentation summarizes key findings gathered from IDC's 2023 Global Retail Survey on digital or technology-enabled initiatives across all retail business functions, products, and services. This survey polled 840 retailers across four regions: Asia/Pacific, the U.S. and Canada, EMEA, and Latin America. Respondents were distributed across countries, subsegments, IT and LOB roles, functional areas, and departments.

The study illustrates retailers' key challenges, business priorities, and strategies across customer experience, commerce, store and workforce engagement, supply chain, and merchandising. Results include innovation efforts, business use cases, and related technology investment plans over the next three years. The survey also shows today's retailers' IT architecture strategies, highlighting changes in their IT spending for 2024, the balance between cloud and on-prem, and the maturity of their headless and modular Retail Commerce Platform (RCP) architectures.  

Finally, the study provides 10 key actions, derived from the survey results, that summarize how future-oriented retailers are crafting their digital transformation strategies across the retail value chain.

Summary

This IDC study helps retail decision makers identify and navigate the areas of the retail ecosystem that are being digitally transformed as retailers adopt new processes and technologies to underpin organizational change. This annual study updates definitions and introduces new programs and uses cases that will be employed to implement strategy while highlighting the benefits of moving from current processes to digitally transformed processes, and the technologies that will be required. The rate of digitization is increasing for retailers, which seek to stay ahead of the competition by improving customer experience, engaging frontline workers, and optimizing operations.

"In this new era of AI everywhere, technology is opening up new sources of revenue for retailers that are willing to invest in the infrastructure and tools that connect their customers and their workers to interactive, personalized experiences," says Leslie Hand, group vice president, IDC Retail Insights.

Summary

Oracle is evolving into a service-focused technology provider in tandem with the evolution of its retail platform, which unifies data, applications, and AI across a single platform built on Oracle OS in the cloud. Applications use one source of data, AI engines span cloud services, and natively integrated extensions provide private endpoints for retailers to flow easily into other applications. All of this is supported by a global Oracle team including a relatively new, dedicated unit devoted to helping customers extract more value from their systems. To this unified offering, Oracle has added Collect and Receive, a new integrated retail service to the platform that aligns retailers' last-mile assets – inventory, customers, and sales associates – with "delivery" capability in partnership with Uber while bringing the weight of the platform data to this crucial segment of the supply chain.

Summary

This IDC Perspective investigates the current and future role of computer vision within the retail industry. This includes a deep dive into computer vision — what it is, how it works, and the approaches for developing, validating, and deploying it within retail organizations. IDC also identifies and analyzes key experimental, emerging, and established computer vision-enabled use cases for retailers. IDC's research and ecosystem discussions reiterate the long-term role that computer vision will play in improving customer experience, increasing operational efficiencies in stores, and finding opportunities for innovation. Although the journey to fully realize computer vision's potential remains long, retailers and their technology partners should remain committed to future development and adoption.

"The potential value of computer vision to help retail organizations is crystal clear, yet the primary hurdle for retailers remains determining which use case should be prioritized and pursued first," said Matt Arcaro, research director of IDC's Computer Vision AI Tools and Technology Research Program. "The broad applicability of computer vision and its strong alignment and fit with a retailer's current and future operational goals create a high-value use case pipeline to be unlocked."

"We see computer vision solutions adding value across operational domains," said Leslie Hand, GVP, IDC Retail and Financial Insights. "Combined with emerging AI tools and technologies, computer vision will help retailers capture and operationalize data that has previously been hidden, making brick and mortar stores function more like online shopping environments with the same insights into customer behavior, preference, and engagement."

Summary

This IDC Perspective looks at the market conditions that are leading hardware providers to pivot to a software and services model, as well as how that pivot requires an organization to change how it does business. We examine three companies (Honeywell, Panasonic Connect, and Zebra) known for their retail hardware devices that are broadening their offerings to include software and services. We also offer advice on working with hardware providers moving forward. The software-as-a-service model has gained significant traction among retailers as the primary way to digitally transform their businesses, remain agile, and juggle compute loads at the edge or in the cloud. Software helps retailers personalize customer experience, engage the workforce, and digitize store operations. In this shifting model, hardware devices become data collection points, transactional interfaces, and problem-solving tools that enable the software, while the software drives the value for the retailer. As a result of this shift, traditional hardware vendors are repositioning themselves, adding software and services capabilities to their offerings to add strategic value to retail businesses.

"Put simply, the role of handheld devices in retail has changed. It used to be enough for hardware devices to solve single process problems, like receiving or ordering, and as a result, only a select group of employees had access. Now retailers need handheld devices to connect the frontline employee with information, tools, their peers, and next best actions to improve the overall customer experience. Software drives this connection, and hardware companies are moving to meet retailer needs through strategic acquisitions, software innovation, and culture change," says Leslie Hand, GVP, IDC Retail and Financial Insights.

Summary

This IDC Survey Spotlight highlights our most recent data (April 2023) on which retail team members have access to data and which technology and organizational barriers can get in the way of serving customers most effectively, as well as IDC's take on what steps retailers and their technology vendor partners must take to digitize the store and equip the frontline workforce with the information they need to improve customer experience. Giving real-time data to frontline employees allows them to serve customers more effectively and efficiently, yet retailers face significant challenges in making this data available.

Summary

This IDC TechBrief examines the benefits, risks, success factors, adoption rate, and required investment for retailers considering implementing an electronic shelf label (ESL) solution as part of their strategy to digitize the store. It also lists several key suppliers of ESL technology worldwide. To respond with agility to price changes across channels, and to manage skyrocketing labor costs, retailers are turning to electronic shelf labels to automate tedious, manual price changes.

"I am optimistic that electronic shelf label technology will be adopted more broadly as price and product transparency become more important for the consumer and in-store process automation becomes essential in store operations," said Leslie Hand, GVP of IDC Retail and Financial Insights.

Summary

ServiceNow, the digital workflow company, announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire G2K, an AI and IoT technology company on May 12, 2023 – financial details have not been disclosed. The acquisition improves ServiceNow's ability to connect the workflows that it enables to G2K-powered real-time data across stores and digital properties thus providing a complete view of operational data while streamlining customer and employee experiences. Two of the greatest impediments to innovation today for retailers is managing the complexity inherent in data management and integration to workflows and ensuring that valuable data is actionable — ServiceNow's acquisition of G2K promises to address these challenges.

Summary

This IDC Survey Spotlight looks at the most recent survey data that reveals the top 3 types of vendors retailers are turning to for strategic vision, as well as our take on why these vendors are top of mind. Retailers want their technology providers to do more than provide hardware, software, and services; retailers are looking for technology vendors to act as strategic partners, with an understanding of how operations can be streamlined, workers can be more engaged, and customers can have interactive experiences in stores.

Summary

This IDC Market Presentation features recent retail IT budget shifts and investment priorities. Timely topics covered include the projects that must be completed now and those that may slow down until the disruptive force of the macroeconomic climate settles down. Other highlights include top priorities in cloud, AI, and services and a brief note on generative AI (including ChatGPT).

Leslie Hand, group vice president, IDC Retail Insights, suggests, "The current macroeconomic climate has retailers evaluating the current value in ongoing and future technology investments frequently, and the technology vendors that serve retailers need to be diligent in tracking shifting priorities on a quarterly basis at minimum — monthly is even better."

Summary

This IDC study provides a systematic assessment of the retail operations technologies that make up a fully digitized store. The IDC TechScape model is designed specifically to capture progress in the adoption of emerging disruptive technologies, mainstream technology buyer alignment with current industry best practices, and support technologies that promise to deliver operational advantages to organizations that choose to adopt them.

"In the fully digitized store, the customer receives all of the ease, personalization, and choice they get online, and the retailer gets the same level of data and analytics that ecommerce offers," said Leslie Hand, group vice president, IDC Retail and Financial Insights. "Retailers are moving quickly to meet customers where, when, and how they want to shop. The challenge for retailers will be building a modular framework that can rapidly integrate new technologies as they emerge, keeping customer choice, employee engagement, and real-time inventory and operations at the center."

Summary

This IDC Perspective discusses how, despite an anticipated recession and continued disruption from global events, retailers and vendors came to the 2023 NRF Big Show ready to celebrate the ways that technology has transformed retail since 2019. With 10 analysts onsite, IDC covered 160 meetings, gathering insights into the types of problems retailers are hoping to solve in the coming year.

This document also covers the technology we saw at NRF 2023 that optimizes and automates operation in stores, with an emphasis on frictionless customer experience, workforce empowerment, and the essential components of the digitized store. Technology investment continues to make sense for retailers despite economic conditions, as modernization and automation in IT management, business processes, and contextualized engagement will reduce costs and drive growth.

"Technology investment continues to make sense for retailers despite economic conditions, as modernization and automation in IT management, business processes, and contextualized engagement will reduce costs and drive growth. We saw evidence at the NRF Big Show that technology vendors are ready to help retailers ride the waves of market volatility expected in 2023 — from customer experience tools that power frictionless interactions to workforce experience tools that help employees fulfill a purpose, not just fill a shelf, to hardware and software that form the connective tissue of the digitized store," said Leslie Hand, group vice president, Retail and Financial Insights at IDC.

Summary

This IDC Perspective reviews key trends and technology innovations that were highlighted at NRF 2023: Retail's Big Show — held January 15–17, 2023, in New York City, which attracted over 35,000 attendees across the industry, double the number seen last year at NRF 2022 in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Technology innovations focused on seven key areas: customer experience, intelligent operations, end-to-end connected supply chains, AI for better decisioning and operational efficiency, workforce optimization, sustainability, and infrastructure modernization. Retailers are accelerating data-driven automation to improve customer experience and resiliency.

Leslie Hand, group vice president, IDC's Retail and Financial Services, noted, "The exuberance for retail and retail technology investment at NRF this year spoke volumes. Retailers clearly understand that the future of retail business depends on the ability to meet customer experience needs for frictionless, personalized shopping experiences, even as they continue to change. Becoming digital businesses is core to meeting changing customer expectations, but perhaps more importantly, to be more resilient and seize a competitive advantage (and new opportunities). We are in the middle of a customer-led, technology-enabled revolution in retail."

Summary

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation highlights the hot topics and technology trends presented in the Retail's Big Show. Gleaned from across our retail analyst team, the insights presented in this IDC Presentation reflect the highlights and insights from the NRF 2023: Retail's Big Show, held January 15-17, New York. This presentation was delivered to retailers in a post-NRF event, giving context to what happened at the show with supplemental IDC insights and predictions for the retail year ahead.

The investments covered in this presentation will help retailers to scale and gain the agility needed to drive better customer experiences and improve business performance. Topic areas covered include Customer Experience and Engagement, Intelligent Operations, Connected End-to-End Supply Chain, AI for Better Decisioning and Operational Efficiency, Workforce Experience Catches up to the Human Experience, Operationalizing Sustainability from Concept to Consumer, and Intelligent Foundational Technology.

Summary

This IDC Web Conference presents a discussion of IDC's 2023 predictions for the global retail industry. Amid myriad sources of disruption, retailers are steadfastly reimagining business models, business processes, and the technology that will drive breakthrough growth and profitability. IDC's Retail Insights team will present several of the top 10 predictions of 2023 for the global retail industry. As retailers continue to adapt to the omni-channel, and increasingly digital retail reality, we'll provide both IT and line-of-business executives clear guidance on the long list of changes in technology priorities, innovation strategies, and business success metrics that retailers are embracing. The ante is bigger to stay in the game — retailers must perform better for customers but also for employees, ecosystem partners, management, and shareholders, as the cost of disappointing any of these constituents is too great.

To learn more about IDC FutureScape 2023, go to www.idc.com/events/FutureScape.

Summary

The IDC Retail Insights team attended AWS re:Invent 2022, held in Las Vegas from November 28 to December 2. "A key message from the event was the importance of an industry-specific focus in order to understand and empathize with the experiences of companies such as retailers and CPG businesses. These companies started their business model revolution years ago and now, despite external and internal challenges, can point to their fully digital business renaissance," said Ornella Urso, research manager, IDC Retail Insights.

Summary

This IDC PeerScape looks at several practices for choosing how and where to implement computer vision + AI in order to drive sales, improve customer experience, and create operational efficiencies in grocery and convenience store settings.

"Solving one operational problem may not be enough for a retailer to justify the cost of implementing computer vision and AI at scale. Retailers should start with the area of operations that will deliver the biggest value, then compound the benefits over time by leveraging the same technology to solve other problems," says Leslie Hand, GVP, IDC Retail and Financial Insights.

Summary

This IDC Survey Spotlight highlights current trends in retail to fill IT hiring gaps caused by workforce attrition and successful mitigation strategies. Filling positions with the right talent or upskilling workers is imperative, given the magnitude of change underway. The ability to innovate is impacted most as a result of IT staffing challenges (see IDC's Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey, Wave 6, July 2022, n = 816; n = 95 retail).

"Retailers have embraced the need to continue hiring contract labor but also to address internal IT workforce needs by having flexible workplace policies and by investing in internal knowledge management/information sharing, communication, and automation technologies to address employee staffing gaps," says Leslie Hand, group vice president, IDC Retail Insights. "Career development paths and learning, workplace flexibility, and compensation are the keys to IT employee retention."