Every technology decision touches the customer.
Retail technology connects customers, stores, employees, supply chains, inventory, payments and data. The goal is a connected operating model that improves experience, efficiency and resilience together.
Can you answer these questions clearly today?
Five critical questions on the Retail leadership agenda.
Is technology improving the customer experience?
Are stores and digital channels truly connected?
Are we turning customer and operational data into decisions?
Where can AI materially improve margin or productivity?
How resilient is the technology behind revenue?
The value of decisions, in practice.
Examples from Retail.
Licence types assigned to ERP users did not match their real needs. Inactive accounts and incorrect assignments inflated the need for additional licences, and audit preparation took a long time.
ERP licences were restructured by analysing user roles and actual usage. A licence optimization solution made inactive accounts and unnecessary assignments visible. In the period reviewed, the cost of additional user licences fell from EUR 9.5 million to EUR 2.4 million, creating EUR 7.1 million in savings. The time needed to gather information for audit preparation dropped from up to a year to under six months. Existing technology was managed more accurately and used at lower cost.
There were many AI opportunities; it had to be decided which areas came first and how they would deliver measurable benefit. In customer-facing applications, experience, data quality and running cost had to be managed together.
About 200 possible areas were assessed and roughly ten were prioritized first. For the shopping assistant, safety boundaries, data quality and unit cost were improved, and benefit was measured through comparative tests. Conversion was reported at twice the rate of sessions using search and five times the rate of sessions without the assistant. Before launch, cost per chat session was reduced by 93%. The commercial value of customer interaction and the operating economics of AI improved together; this result does not mean total sales increased fivefold.