As I note, Amazon first launched its AmazonGo contactless no-checkout supermarket in 2016. It has over 20 stores open in the US now, has recently licensed their technology to other retailers, and was reported to be planning thousands of outlets across the US in the next years.

Of course their early move puts them well ahead of the game as other retailers now rush to make the shopping experience involve as little contact as possible. Among others, Walmart’s Sam Club now has “scan and go” using your phone to avoid checkouts.

While physical retailers want to avoid touch, online retailers want to replicate the sense of touch that is so important to buying a whole array of goods from clothes to household utensils.

One promising new approach is using ultrasound, with the recently launched Emerge (shown in the video) and Ultraleap both prominent purveyors of ultrasound to evoke touch at a distance, for applications including retail.

There are a variety of other haptic technologies, with the new approaches suggesting strong potential for the future, though it will likely take some time to play out.

So on the one hand in physical retail is designing experiences to avoid all touch.

At the same time online retail will become a more powerful competitor to in-store buying as it is able to emulate the sense of touch.

Image: Emerge

At Travelport LIVE 2017, world-renowned futurist Ross Dawson’s keynote homed in on this point. There he shared his EPIC framework which identifies the four domains of value in retail and applied it to the world of travel. You can watch a video of the full keynote with slides here.

As Dawson shows, competition has already begun in these domains. Travel companies that want to succeed in the years ahead can’t afford to ignore them. They must start work in the following areas now to avoid being left behind. In his keynote Dawson shared numerous examples of leadership in the industry.

1. Experience

Having a taste of a good experience entices travelers to want more. But how do companies create physical spaces that offer stronger, more tempting experiences than smartphones and tablets? That surely surpass what can be gleaned from videos and brochures?

With virtual reality, German airline Lufthansa has begun giving people the experience of flying business class en route to San Francisco. Similar experiences such as simulated tours through an exotic city aren’t a replacement, but compel people to live the reality of actually being there.

2. Personalization

Personalization is the nub of physical retail today. Combing the physical with the digital to understand the individual and give them more personalized offers is the future.

Already the Houston airport employs beacon technologies to provide travelers with personalized navigation tools. Retailers inside airports are also using them to make offers to people as they pass by, giving customers a better way to make decisions and purchases for themselves.

3. Immediacy

From drone delivery to Amazon’s dash buttons, what customers want is arriving faster and faster. All of retail is seeing this push to immediacy, one that gives instant service and ultimate convenience.

In travel, the smartwatch speeds up check-in and boarding times. The demand for immediacy, especially among frequent travelers, continues to grow and is rife with opportunity for growth.

4. Community

In the world of travel, communities are fundamental and are, in fact, often created by the travelers themselves. There is incredible opportunity for retailers to take advantage of this desire to connect and share value by matching people together themselves.

In particular, travel agents have tremendous potential to link travel communities worldwide instead of simply offering products for individual travelers to buy.

As Dawson demonstrates, travel businesses that focuses on these domains will keep far ahead of their competitors as the world of travel rapidly changes.

Here are a couple of the quotes from me:

On Immersive Reality:

Futurist Ross Dawson, who heads Advanced Human Technologies Group, says the debut of Facebook’s Oculus Rift (and a host of other virtual reality head-sets arriving next year) is his “big game changer”. It will be arriving in the first quarter of 2016. Dawson believes it could transform the retail, travel, education and property industries. It is not augmented reality (as in Google Glass) but immersive​ reality: the images move in sync with a user’s head movements.

It could be used to offer virtual snapshots of off-plan apartments to prospective property buyers, give travellers the opportunity to peruse a virtual city or visit a mock art gallery in cyberspace, Dawson says. “You could immerse yourself in a battlefield or spend a virtual day in Rome, Paris or Berlin.”

On Automation:

Dawson expects to see greater automation in the retail and hospitality sectors, but believes fast food outlets will be the first to deploy robots. He mentions US-based Orchard Supply Hardware whose “OSHbot” answers questions and directs customers to products. There is also California’s Aloft Hotel, run by three-foot-high (91cm) “botlrs” which have 7-inch touchscreens to interact with patrons.

Here are videos of these robots:

Companies large and small need to be actively thinking about and exploring how these kinds of new technologies will change their business, and how they can seize the emerging opportunities.

City of Melbourne’s over-arching vision for the annual Melbourne Spring Fashion Week is to position Melbourne as Australia’s premier fashion destination, and have a real economic impact by driving increased sales for retailers in the city.

In partnering with IBM for the second year the intention was to extend the impact of the event beyond the week and to drive ticket sales and in turn sales by tapping the social currency of influencers.

Melbourne Spring Fashion Week is unusual in fashion shows in that everything on the runways can be bought at stores in the city. This contrasts to the traditional role of fashion shows as breaking new fashion, which may not be available for many months after it is launched.

Melbourne Spring Fashion Week used IBM Social Media Analytics on Twitter and Instagram to uncover the top 50 relevant fashion influencers, used Watson Personality Insights to work out how best to approach them, and invited them to be MSFW “insiders”, asking them what content would be most useful to them.

Ticket sales have been considerably higher than last year, with 4 of the events sold out.

The initiative is particularly interesting in showing how social analytics and engagement can help drive shoppers into shopping centers and physical stores.

While individual stores can do a great deal to merge their digital, social and physical engagement, the real power comes in bringing people to a shopping center or area, or even an entire city center.

All shopping is becoming social. Retail strategies for merging physical and digital are best envisaged and implemented on a large scale, tapping collaboration and activating buyers.

Image credit: Eva Rinaldi

The central theme of my keynotes was the boundaries and relationship between humans and machines in customer experience.

Today, extraordinary insights from data and analytics enable us to address individual’s unique preferences to an unprecedented degree.

Yet the emotion, empathy and engagement of humans cannot be replaced – we all seek personal connection and a real sense of caring.

Virtual agents mimic humans in providing customer service. Until recently they have been very crude, little more than animated puppets. Yet the state of the art is very rapidly progressing.

The video below shows a real-time rendering of a human face being taken through a range of emotions. Have a look to see how far the state of the art has advanced.

This face takes 2 Teraflops of computing power to render. To put that in context, that is equivalent to 2,000 Cray2 Supercomputers, which were not that long ago the extraordinary pinnacle of computing.

This is the state of the art. But it won’t take much longer until this kind of technology can render a human face on a video screen that we cannot distinguish from a real human. We still need to improve at speech recognition and Turing test-passing conversation, but it is fascinating that we can already generate a human face that is virtually real.

If consumers are smarter, they are expressing it with not just increased expectations, but an increasingly active expression of their displeasure if expectations are not met.

The following chart, provided to me by IBM in response to a request for more detailed information, shows that in all major countries advocates – those who actively advocate for their primary retailer – have decreased, while antagonists – those who would actively discredit their retailer – have increased.

Source: IBM

In fact from 2012 to 2014, advocacy rates in Australia have declined from 34% to 10%, while antagonism has increased from 12% to 37%. Sobering statistics for retailers.

Increased expectations are supported by the shift to online and mobile buying. The pace of the shift to online buying is highest for the most expensive goods.

Where there is trust, customers are more willing to share information with retailers than before. However this is happening in conjunction with heightened expectations, meaning that they will only continue to do so if that information is used to create clear value for them.

And it is clear that consumers are want to be in control. They understand the issues and while they will share information if there is trust, their expectations include personal control.

In summary, people are less likely to actively support retailers and more likely to attack them in increasingly public forums such as social media.

However trust can still grow, but it will only create value for retailers if it first creates real value for their customers.

One of the themes was Cities Reconfigured. The section began:

Urbanisation has proved to be a dominant global force, shaping both developed and developing countries. We know cities are both spreading out and become denser at their centres, but radical shifts are now reshaping the structure and shape of cities. The rise of flexible, remote and freelance work and shifts where and how people shop and socialise are significantly changing travel patterns. The widespread deployment of data sensors is providing real-time insights into environmental, traffic and infrastructure conditions, enabling rapid response and a deeply-needed increase in urban efficiency.

In highly summarized form, some of the most important shifts reshaping cities are:

Changing work
Work is becoming increasingly location-independent, with employees dividing their time between traditional offices, home, and co-working ‘third spaces’ that provide attractive collective work spaces far closer to home. Many more people will work independently or across a portfolio of activities, while many low-skilled service jobs will be replaced by new high-touch roles.

Shifting retail
As more purchasing of everything from fashion to groceries moves online the mid-tier of retail will shrink, leaving highly localized offerings and larger complexes that incorporate not just shopping and entertainment but also work and community centers.

Community at the heart
Always-on digital connection is, paradoxically, driving demand for real community and connection. Retailers, property developers and even banks are recognizing that they can only succeed if they support the drive for community, with local social networks supporting a shift from government to citizens in providing vital social support.

Networked transport
Car sharing, ride sharing, and new driver networks are providing lower cost and more efficient alternatives for travel, while driverless cars could transform how people move around. Collective public transport will increase in importance, but cities will vary enormously in their success at meeting demand for attractive, comfortable systems. However the context is that transport needs could be dramatically different from today.

Public data
The explosion of data available on everything from micro-traffic trends to air quality and even commuter moods – almost all shared publicly – will enable the design of government and commercial services that support efficient use of resources.

Environmental imperative
Well-designed dense urban living has a substantially lower net environmental impact than a more distributed population, however people will only want to live in cities if they are clean and beautiful. Thoughtful development and restructuring will shape urban environments.

Many people and organizations are acting with an implicit belief that cities will have similar shapes in the future that they have now.

However fundamental forces are reconfiguring the very nature and structure of how people live together in major urban centers, and there is a long way further for these forces to play outt.

Image credit: Twelvizm

The next phase of development will be to enable phone users to Shazam actual objects, said Riley, such as a cereal packet in the grocery store to get more nutritional information or a DVD case at home to buy the movie soundtrack.

The capability is not new, with services such as Amazon Firefly allowing users to identify objects and buy them on Amazon, and Slyce identifying objects within a store for lookup and purchase. However Shazam’s excellent and long-standing service suggests they will execute well on object recognition and take the domain further.

There are massive implications for both retail and product design.

Design
A couple of years ago, anticipating this development, I wrote about the idea of “Shoezam“, that could recognize and order shoes on the street. I wrote:

With 3D printing and other customized manufacturing techniques, apps that allow the essence of items to be captured through images will mean that anything can be duplicated virtually at will.

What will this mean for designers?

In a world of open information flows and inexpensive manufacturing all recognized designers are already getting copied wholesale. Yet this may be miniscule compared with what is coming.

Of course recognition technologies used in the app and the manufacturing processes will not be fabulous for some time to come. Customers will only be getting an approximation of the original.

Over time the quality will improve, gradually and surely.

Yet even at the apogee of replicating technologies, there will of course be a premium for buying original designer clothes and objects, for many reasons. It will give prestige and status to have originals, people will prefer to reward designers, and there will always be some quality difference. Quality will be truly to the fore.

In-store comparative pricing
The most obvious implication of Shazam’s object recognition capabilities is simply making it easier for customers in a store to identify an app for comparative pricing.

Shopping on the street
This only slightly streamlines the process of putting in the object’s name or scanning its tag when you’re in a store. However it does allow people to identify objects – such as clothes – on the street or in places other than stores in to purchase them.

Contextual information and reputation
One of the great possibilities is gathering deeper information about a product, not necessarily from just the manufacturer. A ‘Wikipedia’ of products could bring to bear both manufacturer information and others’ data or opinions. This would be an excellent route to access aggregated consumer opinions or manufacturer reputation scores.

Accurate, easy and widespread object recognition was only a matter of time. With Shazam’s reach that is likely to be very soon.

In this shift there are certainly opportunities as well as substantial challenges for retailers, designers, and manufacturers. The landscape of buying is rapidly changing.

However in preparing for some TV interviews at the turn of the year I have pulled together 7 themes that will help define 2015. Here they are, together with illustrative videos.

1. Robots are here

Robots have so long being part of science fiction that many have come to believe they will never arrive. With recent technological advances, the age of robots is finally beginning, with humanoid robots finally entering the mainstream in work, retail, aged care, the home and even warfare.

2. From reactive to predictive medicine

Health and medicine has traditionally been about reacting when we get sick. New technologies are turning it around, allowing us to constantly monitor ourselves so we can take action before we get sick. We can get direct feedback to help us change behaviours, and DNA analysis means we can soon get medicines that are personalised for us alone. Health management tomorrow will be very different from health today.

3. Technology is fashion

Technology is not just a fashion accessory, but fashion itself. Smartwatches are making tech giants into purveyors of fashion, and establishment French and Swiss luxury companies are becoming tech firms. Clothes themselves are becoming ‘smart’ as textiles embed technology, monitoring our health, communicating with friends, and displaying people’s moods for all to see.

4. Immersive entertainment

Entertainment is going beyond watching to experiencing. Facebook, having purchased Oculus Rift for $2 billion, as well as Samsung and others are launching virtual reality headsets that will allow people to feel immersed in movies and games. Other immersive technologies that may emerge in 2015 include Star Wars-like holographic communication on mobile phones and the highly secretive Magic Leap, which has attracted a $500 million investment from Google with a mission to transform entertainment.

5. Technology transforms finance

Money, payments and investment are all being transformed by technology. Cash is rapidly disappearing from our lives as payments by mobile and biometric identification become commonplace. Artificially intelligent ‘robo-advisors’, already commonplace in the US, will compete with human financial advisors in helping us make wealth planning decisions.

6. Reversing ageing

Humankind has never been satisfied with mortality. New figures show that the life expectancy of Australians has increased 4.8 years over the last 24 years, more than in any other developed country. Now heavily-funded medical research promises to rapidly extend our longevity. Scientists have recently successfully reversed ageing in mice, with human trials now in progress. Beyond leading-edge medicine, healthier habits of many Australians and changed attitudes are dramatically shifting the perception of age, with an increasing number of 60 year-olds being as vital as our image of 40 year-olds.

7. It’s easy to be perfect

The debate over air-brushed models in magazines has moved on. Now powerful editing tools make it easy for anyone to make themselves look wonderful in photos, and we will soon be able to choose how we look in video calls, making us appear well-dressed, perfectly groomed and made-up even if we’ve just dragged ourselves out of bed. Social media is allowing people to shape how they are perceived online, making boring lives glamourous and fraught relationships appear perfect. We are making our lives appear flawless, and are only seeing the shiny gloss of others’ lives.

The Wall Street Journal notes:

The home improvement retailer is testing robots that use natural-language-processing technology to understand customer queries in English and Spanish. Video screens allow for video conferences with store experts—actual people—while a 3-D scanner can help customers identify items. Lowe’s Innovation Labs, which built the robot with startup Fellow Robots, equates the technology with making the shopping experience more personal.

There are a number of other initiatives in the space. SaviOne is a hotel concierge robot that delivers snacks and amenities to hotel guests, shown below. I have been told by sources close to Savioke, the company that makes the robot, that they are also planning robots for retail which may be available soon.

Of course automation in retail is not new, with bank tellers now largely replaced by machines.

Fast food is one of the domains which is the most prone to automation. As I described in an interview on Today Tonight, pre-ordering and service are beginning to be automated in fast food chains.

There are of course stories about robot restaurants in China and elsewhere which are largely novelties, but do point to the future.

The reality is that service will be more efficient and lower cost – leading to less expensive food – so many fast food chains will rapidly adopt robot and automated service. Just as we have grown used to banking at ATMs, we will soon accept the same trend in fast food.

As the pace of progress in robotics accelerates, initiatives such as Lowe’s OSHbot that can have conversations with shoppers are becoming feasible. When necessary they can switch to video conversations with live humans, just as many US auto rental companies are now using video kiosks to serve their customers, creating significant improvements in the productivity of staff as they can help in whichever store in the country the queues are the longest.

Physical retail is highly challenged by online alternatives. Cost efficiency pressures and the drive to create unique experiences in a physical store mean that robots will become commonplace in retail in the relatively near future.

Let me know when you next spot a robot when you are shopping!