Artificial Intelligence

Trends offer new opportunities, responsibilities

The next great thing isn’t a piece of tech, an improved process, a branded message, or a fast-changing business model. It’s all this — at once. The fact is the next great thing is retail itself.

Retail lies at the convergence point of some of the most profound changes any business can experience. More, it plays out in front of customers and the rest of the world in real time. Retail brands that quickly harness new ideas by learning the details that make them work well become the winners.

There’s no denying that Amazon has changed the face of retail, but there are many misconceptions about how the company actually operates. Unfortunately, these fallacies are leading many retail companies into making bad strategic business decisions as they try to duplicate Amazon’s success.

The following is a breakdown of some myths — along with a few takeaways:

Retailers looking for dramatic energy savings at the lowest cost should think radical – and that means using an integrated design process right from the start.

“Radically efficient buildings are, among other things, 75% more energy efficient than typical construction” said Paul Westbrook, president of RE:source consulting, at the SPECS session, “An Improved Road to Energy Savings.”

As digital commerce forces brick-and-mortar stores to innovate, industry experts share their views on the future of physical retail.

From department stores to discounters to home improvement chains, nearly all retailers are engaged in the same game: trying to imagine what stores of the future will look like in an increasingly digitized world.