Retail Technology Show 2025 Review

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The ReThink team shares fresh insights from the Retail Technology Show 2025 at the Excel in London, where AI applications in retail have evolved beyond marketing buzzwords to practical implementations in forecasting, computer vision, and data mining.

• AI usage becoming more sophisticated with specific applications rather than just marketing claims
• Computer vision technology now identifying shoplifting, tracking store traffic, and creating heat maps of customer movement
• Surprising amount of cash handling technology despite declining cash transactions
• RFID innovations eliminating manual scanning with fixed readers tracking merchandise throughout stores
• Footfall tracking systems can detect mobile phones even when powered off
• Stock management systems now prompting intelligent markdowns to reduce waste
• Employee communication platforms continuing to evolve for frontline worker engagement
• Notable absence of customer experience measurement technologies and concrete ROI metrics

Join us for our upcoming forum on September 11th in Birmingham featuring an innovation lounge with exciting tech partners, and catch us at NRF Europe in Paris the following week.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Productivity Podcast.
This is a bonus episode as wereturn from the Retail
Technology Show in Excel lastweek at the time of recording,
Delighted to welcome Sue andJames Boll who were on the stand
and hopefully his feet havecooled down like mine, Hi both.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Hi Simon.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
So interesting show First year at the excel as it
moved from olympia.
James, do you want to talk usthrough your thoughts, as you
kind of cast your mind back tolast week and some of the things
that, um, maybe brought on somelight bulbs or caused curiosity
?

Speaker 2 (00:39):
yeah, I mean, this was a.
This was a great experience forme this year.
It was my second retailtechnology show and therefore I
had a little bit better ideawhat to expect this year than
last year and I have to say theshow didn't disappoint.
There were two areas I wasparticularly interested in.
One was AI how much people weretalking about having AI and the

(01:00):
other was some generalinnovations.
We spent some time going aroundthe Innovation Award winners at
the show and there were somereally neat ideas, I think, on
display there.
On top of that, I felt like itwas just a great opportunity to
network with clients andpotential clients strangers and
just get together and see whatthe temperature of the industry

(01:22):
was.
So, yeah, I really enjoyed itoverall.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
And Sue your initial reflections.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
Yeah, I thought the venue.
It was good to have more space.
It felt like there was a bitmore room to breathe and it's
got very cramped at the lastvenue, so it was good to have
that.
Yeah, as James said, it'salways good to catch up with
lots of familiar faces, whetherthat's clients that we've worked
with, other vendors, peoplethat have swapped jobs and are

(01:49):
doing something different thatyou get a chance to catch up
with.
So, yeah, it's always good togo along and see people yeah,
agreed, like the like.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
The new venue took a bit of getting used to as we got
into a tried and trustedroutine in the old one, but
relatively straightforward,which is good.
So let's start with the big one.
Then let's start with ai.
I think we talked on this kindof review last year around lots
of ai badges, lots of ai wordson stands, I think so you, you
feel it's progressed a littlebit more this year yeah, there

(02:21):
still is that ai marketingelement where and in some cases
it can still be a technology insearch of something to do with
it.

Speaker 3 (02:29):
But actually I think we're starting to see some good
use cases come through now.
So, um, people are using it forforecasting in quite
interesting ways.
So, whether that's planningspecialist resource, um applying
it to uh stock and that sort ofthing.
So I think there's some genuineuh use cases.
It feels like people are beingrelatively quiet about them

(02:51):
still, but as you kind of diginto it a bit, you start to
think that there is some reallyinteresting stuff starting to
happen and james, does that?

Speaker 1 (02:59):
do you share that view?
Have you seen lots of uhdevelopment in that area, on the
stands and from all the peopleyou were speaking to?

Speaker 2 (03:06):
yeah, in addition to what to what sue said, I saw a
bit more use of computer visionthis year, um, or at least
openly shared, more than lastyear.
So some people who are usingcomputer vision on cct CCTV to
make heat maps of wherecustomers and staff were
standing to actually point,looking at CCTV cameras that

(03:29):
were pointing at the doors tocount footfall going past the
store, which was interesting,and also some facial recognition
and some really neat computervision stuff to identify when
people were putting things intheir pockets.
So there was, you know, therewas one system where the
computer could tell if someonewas shoplifting and could send
an alert to a security centerand record the face so they

(03:50):
could go on a register for thesecurity team in future.
So yeah, I thought there weresome real, specific use cases
that might add value forretailers and not just kind of
whizzy things people havedeveloped for the sake of it.
There are also a couple ofexamples of rapid data mining
where people were taking dataand analyzing it kind of in real

(04:11):
.
The ai was analyzing it in realtime to generate new insights,
which I thought was reallypowerful.
So yeah, I think a lot morespecific application this year
than last year that's good tosee.

Speaker 1 (04:22):
I think we were skeptical last year, weren't we,
of the marketing angle over the, the proof in the pudding.

Speaker 3 (04:27):
So good to see that's come through and be interesting
to see where it's at next year.
Because if you think I meantypically within uh tech world,
as you learn stuff, it kind ofgrows exponentially.
So I think there should be somereally interesting stuff on it
this time next year yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:43):
People not just saying oh, we've got ai, but
saying we use ai to do x, y andz and actually marketing the the
benefits rather than thefeature yeah, yeah, lots, lots
of cool stuff.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
Um, I was having some interesting conversations
around using ai to forecastopening hours in light of making
sure you're you're open at theright time with ed and the team
at solved by ai.
So lots going on that space,lots of interesting conversation
.
I think you mentioned off air,so it feels also a little bit
like some people are keeping itclose to their chest.

(05:14):
They think they maybe got the,the golden or the silver bullet
and they don't want to share ityet yes, yeah so that that's ai
good, good to see it movingforward.
A couple of things thatsurprised me uh, the amount of
hardware, I suppose, and a bitof technology that was there
around cash.
Now lots of coffee shops arenow cashless and others wanting

(05:37):
to deal less with cash, so I wassurprised that there was that
much still there around cash.
Do you agree, sue?

Speaker 3 (05:46):
Yeah, it's surprising when you think that you know
cash is.
It keeps dropping all the time,doesn't it?
And there's conversations atthe moment about should the
limit of what you can putthrough on a card be increased
as well?
So I guess for businesses thatdo continue to use it, then
there's you do have to haveefficient ways to handle it, and

(06:09):
there's no doubt there is somesmart equipment for kind of
automatic counting and all thatsort of thing.
So perhaps it'll be with uslonger than we think.

Speaker 1 (06:19):
Yeah, maybe that's just my view, but yeah,
surprised by that, Saw all theusual workforce management
vendors there.
So good to catch up witheverybody on the stand and see
how their technology again isstarting to leverage AI in a
more detailed way.
For the forecasting piece,James, we looked at some
interesting RFID technology,didn't we?

Speaker 2 (06:39):
Yeah, there was one business in particular, I recall
, that was using fixed RFIDscanners, so people didn't need
to use handhelds, so you couldtell where any stock was in the
store at any time and actuallysee how it moved around, which
was interesting, and it feltlike that technology was
potentially kind of moving on tobe a bit more sophisticated.
I don't know what you felt,simon.

Speaker 1 (07:00):
Yeah, yeah.
From removing the manualprocess of having to wand
everything, it does it itselfwhich kind of links into the
other one.

Speaker 2 (07:17):
We saw James on the footfall counting that didn't
need any, uh, any install, whichwhich kind of freaked me a
little bit.
Yeah, well, I mean this.
This was a, an organizationthat was using um pings from
mobile phones kernel layers toto see how many mobile phones
were in um in different areas.
So a bit of an insight there,in that your location be tracked
even if your mobile phone'sturned off.
But actually potentiallypowerful, potentially a very
powerful solution.

Speaker 1 (07:41):
Yeah, absolutely yeah .
Yeah, that worried me a littlebit that they could not there,
but you can get the location ofyour phone even when it's off.
I suppose we shouldn't besurprised.
Stock management.
So lots on prompted markdowns,intelligent markdowns, reducing
waste.
And, sue, that's probably oneof the big things left for
retailers to tackle, isn't?
It is well one the stockmanagement piece, but within
that the whole markdown piece.

Speaker 3 (08:00):
If you've got date-sensitive product, yeah,
yes, and if you think about thejourney that a lot of retailers
have been on, where the thingsthat took time were taking cash
from customers, andself-checkouts made a big
difference there we're seeingincreasing adoption of
electronic shelf edge labels, sothat whole pricing piece and
maintaining things has gone down.

(08:21):
So the bits that are left arethe physical putting stuff on
the shelf, putting stuff on theshelf and then it's very time
consuming to be doing markdowns,especially if you're doing two
or three cycles of it during theday.
It can become kind of afull-time job for somebody, or
even more in a biggersupermarket or whatever.
So really interesting to seethose developments around

(08:43):
prompting markdowns so you knowwhen stuff is going out of date
prompting lockdowns so you knowwhen stuff is going out of date.

Speaker 1 (08:51):
Yeah, absolutely.
And last but not least, lots oncolleague comms.
So again been a theme reallysince lockdown, where there was
that recognition of how do you,how do you reach people that
work in a store other than theleadership team.
So lots around the comms andengagement apps.
Spent some time with the teamat work jam looking at those
points.
You know, task training,frontline comms so a really
interesting piece that's openingup to many more user cases

(09:14):
linking to WFM, hr systems etc.
So always good to see where thedevelopment's going there.
Any other bits that you'vethought of, sue, that we didn't
cover in my list there?

Speaker 3 (09:29):
no I don't think so.
They're the things that I thatstruck me while I was there good
james anything from you.

Speaker 2 (09:36):
Well, there were two things.
One was something we remarkedupon at the time, which was, um,
the absence of many peopletalking about the customer
experience, um, particularlyaround customer experience
measurement.
We talked to one one guy from astartup that had won an
innovation award.
He was using AI to mine data onthe fly, which was interesting,
but you would think,potentially, how you

(10:00):
differentiate your customerexperience might also, and how
you can use tech to do that andmeasure the impacts might be on
people's minds.
So I was surprised there wasn'tmuch of that there.
And the second thing wasobviously it's a point that
James BW, our colleague, madeabout all of these things, which
is everybody was claiming areturn on investment, but of

(10:21):
course, you actually need to getin and measure how much time
you're saving with some of thesethings and how, um how, people
didn't seem to be talking to usas much as they could have about
that.
So that was.
That was something else I guessI would know yeah, that's a
fair point, um.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
So we're going back next year, which is is good for
us, good for them, good if youwant to come and speak to us.
Not so good if you don't wantto come and speak to us.
Um, but a couple of key eventsthat are coming up.
So we've got our forum on the11th of September in Birmingham
so you can register on thewebsite if you've not already.
And we've got our innovationline this year where we've got
some exciting tech partners thatare doing some cool stuff that

(10:57):
you'll be able to have a chatwith.
And then we'll also be at NRFEurope, which is in Paris the
week after.
So lots to come.
Keep an eye out on the websitefor details and our socials.
And, james sue, thanks verymuch.
We'll catch up soon bye thankyou.