5 years. 60 months. 260 weeks. 1,825 days.
That’s how long this retail industry metamorphosis is going to take. The digital transformation of retail has already started.
And time is of the essence.
Welcome to Retail 4.0
Your complete guide to the future of retail 4.0
What is Retail 4.0
The massive fast moving consumer goods industry has passed through three ages: The Age of National Brands (1.0), The Age of Big Retail (2.0), and the Age of the Shopper (3.0).
The digitalization of retail has launched us into Retail 4.0: The Age of Metamorphosis.
Unlike the prior evolutionary shifts, the development of Retail 4.0 will be breathtaking in its scale, scope, and speed. This digitalization of retail - the industry transmuting into a new, higher-order, ecosystem - will be accompanied by a radically different economic model, disrupting the nearly century old industry. The digitalization of everything powers this change, blending the digital and physical worlds of shopping, vast customer intelligence, and enabling exponential value creation.
“The future will be far more surprising than most people realize, because few observers have truly internalized the implications of the fact that the rate of change itself is accelerating....”
Retail 4.0: The Age of
METAMORPHISIS
A briefing for retail industry executives on a future arriving sooner than expected.
Are you Ready?
Automation and digitalization are poised to disrupt the massive fast-moving consumer goods retail industry in surprising ways, ensuring a dramatic restructuring that many companies won’t survive.
The realities of automation and digital transformation are pressuring the FMCG retail industry to adopt new capabilities in realtime even as the forces of change have intensified in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. The good news is that Retail 4.0 opens the door to exponential value creation, giving traditional retailers the opportunity to level the playing field with digital-native competitors. The bad news is that companies need to prepare their organizations for convulsive change, embracing new practices, processes, and business models.
Will the retail industry be ready for a future arriving sooner than expected?
What’s inside:
“The future will be far more surprising than most people realize, because few observers have truly internalized the implications of the fact that the rate of change itself is accelerating....”
Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near
Introduction | 5
A New Digital Reality | 6
A Lexicon for the Digital World | 8
Converging Technologies Accelerate Digital Everything | 9
Digital Doppelgängers | 10
Spatial Web / Web 3.0 | 11
AI-Powered Metamorphosis | 12
Where Did All the People Go? | 14
AI-Powered Smart Objects | 16
Automating AI-Powered Revenue Growth | 17
The Gateway to Exponential Value Creation | 19
Retail 4.0: A New Business Model for FMCG Retail | 21
In the Digital World, Speed Rules | 24
Are You a Caterpillar or a Butterfly? | 27
It’s All About Possibilities | 29
Mind the (Expectation) Gap | 31
Planning in a Time of Exponential Change | 32
Guardrails for an Uncertain Path | 33
Three Steps to Prepare for the Future | 34
Call to Action | 37
Additional Resources | 38
About Gary Hawkins | 39
The Path to Retail 4.0
NAVIGATING THE FUTURE OF RETAIL
The Path to Retail 4.0
A series of papers designed to guide you into the future as the industry shifts in a way like never seen before.
The Path to Retail 4.0
As the DNA of traditional retail becomes digitized and mixed with accelerating and converging technologies, the massive FMCG industry is undergoing profound change. Retail 4.0: The Age of Metamorphosis promises to be a near-total transformation in how people shop, how retailers operate, how products are distributed, and how brands manufacture and market. The development of Retail 4.0 will not be evolutionary; instead, the digital transformation of retail will be breathtaking in its scale, scope, and speed. But to realize the opportunity companies need to prepare their organizations for convulsive change, embracing new practices, processes, and business models.
The Path to Retail 4.0 is a series of papers intended to help industry participants understand and prepare for this new world. Sign up and stay up to date for new releases.
Customer Intelligence
A Customer Intelligence Platform (CIP) provides one source of truth for customer analytics and insight across the entire retail organization
True customer intelligence platforms support a comprehensive customer-first approach by coordinating operations, activities, and initiatives across the enterprise.
AI expert systems effectively magnify the power of our human brains so that appropriate strategies are developed automatically for each individual customer at scale, systems able to process millions of shoppers and react to minute changes in behavior in realtime.
The Battle for the Future Customer
The COVID-19 pandemic not only accelerated the growth of online shopping, it is also accelerating the broader digitalization of the grocery industry, bringing with it new business models and new ways to create value.
Online grocery shopping should no longer be thought of as an activity separate and distinct from shopping in the physical store - the digital and physical worlds of shopping are crashing together, fueled by new capabilities to engage the shopper.
Just as the utilitarian stores of decades ago have given way to experiential stores, so too are utilitarian, first-generation, online shopping solutions giving way to a true customer driven digital experience.
Seeing the Future of Retail: Computer Vision Platforms
Just walk out is Just the Beginning.
Computer vision is a classic example of exponential growth technology. Retailers that wait will be left behind.
As the physical store becomes digitized it promises a near quantum leap in store performance.
Understand human-supplemented systems vs fully autonomous machine-learning systems.