Apple launched the first iPhone in 2007. Ten years later the mobile phone has become an obvious part of our everyday lives, at the same time that it has reshaped the retail landscape and remoulded large portions of the consumer purchasing process. We are currently living in the mobile era, and typically experience technical development as barrelling forward at lightning speed – but how fast is development really progressing? According to a McKinsey report, only 30-40% of the potential value within ‘data/analysis’ has been realised within retail trade in the U.S, which indicates that the coming decade will be every bit as revolutionary and that new disruptive players will create new concepts and business models that continue to transform the retail trade.

Artificial intelligence is one of the areas experiencing the most activity at present. Virtual reality and augmented reality are producing a new wave of digital experiences and autonomous vehicles that are connected to the web, which are likely to change our views on both stores and logistics – just to give a few examples. This means opportunities for retail players to produce new innovations and more effective processes.

Some people believe that we are about to enter a new era, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which will weave digital, physical and biological aspects together. This will create new conditions for living our lives and behaving as consumers. We can already see how cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) is starting to find a place in our homes through products like Apple’s Siri, Amazon Echo and Google Home. Towards the end of 2017, over 10 million of these room-based screenless devices are expected to be found in our homes. By 2020, analysts expect 30% of our online searching to take place without a screen or keyboard. By 2020, it is even likely that we will speak more to these devices than we do to our partner during the course of a day.

Of interest in relation to the development of voice searching is that it will change how we communicate with computers. As humans increasingly interact with these devices, they will increasingly learn more about us. What emerges is the concept of a virtual personal assistant of sorts that helps us keep track of all of the information and offers that are available online. The devices can serve as a filter between us as consumers and retailers, which begs a philosophical question – who will the consumer actually be in the future? How much of the purchasing process will the virtual personal assistants take care of for us?

There are any number of unanswered questions, but what we can say with certainty is that the conditions for retail and consumption are changing at an ever increasing pace. At the same time, it is clear that physical stores have not appreciably changed over the past 100 years. The retailers that are unable to adapt to the increasingly changing environment will be edged out by more agile players. Disruptive retail will continue to develop new business models and concepts as well as upset old ideas – typically through new opportunities that arise due to digitalisation. Conditions shift when new technology results in less expensive options. Investment flows can change direction and older technologies and assets can lose their value more quickly.

In a completely connected world, commerce will take place not only in physical stores, but via laptops and mobiles as well. Consumption will basically be possible everywhere and any time a need or desire arises – in the smart home, in the car, in the virtual world or in some other context. In short: Retail Everywhere!

During February and March, HUI Research, together with Tieto, conducted a Nordic seminar series. The lectures addressed how digitalisation is transforming the retail trade and were based on information from the world’s largest retail conference, Retail´s BIG Show in New York. The trendspotting session in its entirety is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kmgUSEEz7U