Cross Talk Recap #1
This year’s Cross Talk started with a Retail industry outlook presentation by Deloitte following the opening keynote. Retailers worldwide are still facing challenges including climate change, labor shortage, and stressed supply chains. Despite challenges, there are opportunities for the taking: Consumers’ rising awareness on health and wellness, technology to support personalized offers across channels, and the possibility to leverage AI in terms of product recommendations, employee/vendor management, supply chain, and marketing. To seize these opportunities, retailers need to invest in innovation and adapt quickly to stay competitive, transform, and grow.
This leads to the theme of this year’s Cross Talk: Accelerate.
Accelerate the awareness:
Earn customer loyalty by providing a consistent and personalized experience to build trust. Give modern tools and access to data to your staff to simplify, automate, and enhance customer service and turn them into brand ambassadors. Improve transparency within your supply chain through seamless interaction for transaction, traceability, and compliance capabilities.
Accelerate the innovation:
Leverage demand forecast to build assortment that optimizes inventory investment, maximizes sales, and reduces cost. Achieve better performance by effectively using the insights generated from your data assisted by applied AI.
Accelerate time to value:
Prepare your team to be ready for the faster pace of the cloud era. Implementations now take weeks instead of years, and updates are available regularly.
Are you ready to accelerate?
Up to 68% of available data is not analyzed in most organizations which results in employees losing 12 hours of productivity per week chasing data; up to 82% of enterprises are inhibited by data silos (Forrester Research, 2022). According to Gartner research, only 20% of analytics projects will deliver business outcomes through 2022.
In the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit that took place in Orlando in March 2023, it was revealed that less than half (44%) of data & analytics teams effectively provide value to their organizations. Top roadblocks to the success of data & analytics initiatives are skills and staff shortages, lack of resources and funding, culture challenges to accept change, lack of business stakeholder involvement and support, and poor data literacy. In another Data & Analytics Summit held in Sydney in July 2023, Gartner also predicts that 30% of Generative AI projects will be abandoned after proof of concept, due to poor data quality, inadequate risk controls, escalating costs, or unclear business value.
In order to accelerate, we recommend retailers to pave the three following foundations:
Data:
Retailers should at first establish a clear view of their data landscape by identifying the location of each type of data and if any data silos exist. Remove the silos to make the data available and easy to find. The next step is data cleansing. No analytics could provide an ideal result from outdated, false, noisy data. After making sure the data cleansing is properly completed, determine the insights you need and the data to support these.
Talent:
Labor shortage is a real-life struggle for a lot of retailers. Often, it’s hard to find skilled staff to implement and to interpret analytics. An alternative could be collaborating with an experience third party partner to gain immediate access to expertise without considerable time and effort investment. Besides, retailers should foster a data-driven culture in their organizations. Analytics is only useful when the outcome supports business decisions. Make sure your business users are ready for this change.
Technology:
In order to harness the power of analytics, retailers need a solution that is modern, scalable, and evolutive. Oracle Retail’s solution suite provides a complete unified platform for planning and execution that covers retailers’ needs from plan, source, buy, move, market, sell, fulfill, to replenish, supported by the powerful Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, applied AI, and the given retailer’s data. This allows to create a connected, engaging, optimized, AI-driven journey for retailers’ end-to-end business process. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is built to be future-proof, for fast innovation, and to empower customer success. It embeds AI/ML services into your data, enables low code/no code developments, and provides best in class multi-cloud integration services with prebuilt adapters. It has an extremely competitive compute price to performance, and is the lowest cost network provider. Retailers not only can benefit from Oracle’s cloud lift services, but also can enjoy one vendor, one support for all of their cloud infrastructure and retail applications.
McKinsey & Company reports that 66% of business gained higher revenue due to their AI systems. Retailers must not wait more for modernizing their organizations with analytics, AI, and data-driven decision making.
