A study from market research and insights firms Incisiv and Verizon Business reveals retailers are prioritizing investments in technologies that improve operational efficiency to reduce costs and increase profitability.
The recently released 2023 Connected Retail Experience Study indicated real-time inventory management has risen to the top of the investment agenda in the face of supply chain disruptions that retailers have faced recently. The deployment of artificial intelligence to improve operations will increase, the study determined, with specialty and department stores adopting it at a higher level than grocery and general merchandise stores.
According to the study:
- AI use to improve operations is likely to increase nine times by 2025.
- Mobile point-of-sale and curbside pickup sensors will get significantly increased deployment across all retailers, especially in the specialty and department store channels.
- The deployment of robotics for worker tasks, although still relatively low, will increase during the next few years, particularly among grocery and general merchandise retailers.
The study also pointed to a retail expectation that automation would increase with up to 70% of routine tasks becoming partially or fully automated by 2025. As such, 18% of retailers anticipate leveraging the labor and productivity benefits by re-deploying employees to customer-facing high-value tasks while 26% will shift workers to support business operations.
The increased employment of emerging store technologies, adoption of cloud applications, additional customer and employee device use and increased in-store associate devices will test the store network’s ability to handle additional traffic, particularly when it comes from devices that require low latency and process bandwidth-heavy files, the study revealed.
“Improving operational efficiency is crucial for retailers in today’s competitive landscape,” said Gaurav Pant, chief insights officer at Incisiv. “Automation is imminent, and retailers must embrace it to streamline processes and reduce costs.”
Scott Lawrence, senior vice president, global solutions, Verizon Business, added, “As the number of mobile and connected devices continues to accelerate in stores, the need for faster speeds, less network downtime and a better ability to manage peak traffic will become more critical. The key is to build a network architecture that will give in-store applications access to the right bandwidth at the right time and enable them to scale up or down as needed.”
