This is the obligatory post-NRF followup post – those of us in the Retail Industry will have seen dozens and dozens of them over the last couple of days.
First of all – it was a good Expo. Plenty of healthy traffic – we gave away over 40 lbs of Lindt, Godiva, Hershey Nuggets, Belgian truffles, Pirulina and other cookies. Lots of happy customers came by, so we got our share of hugs and handshakes and affirmations – nobody came to complain (and we did have an interesting discussion about mythological eggs and refrigerators with one team :-)). We got our share of solid prospects based on an offer of a “full blown Planning System PoC with your data”, and so have tons of followup yet to do.
BUT, BUT, BUT
The vendor GroupThink has jumped the shark and veered into outright insanity. It’s as if the “marketing” departments –presumably tasked with establishing brand identity and credibility – all generated their messaging with ChatGPT or Claude personas trained in the Drunken Sailor AI Emporium, located in an alley off Times Square.
This year’s NRF put on display the widest gap between reality and marketing blather that I’ve ever seen. Every other ERP or Planning/Forecasting booth blared action verbs like “Transform, ReInvent, ReImagine, Leap…”. Never mind HOW or even WHY –the magic messaging is “AI will…” There was a giant banner near our booth that promised a 25% Sales increase on 40% Inventory Decrease. Double the ROI? Who can resist such hype???
I kept waiting for a flock of robotic white owls to descend on the Expo, dropping AI-generated missives splattering onto the attendees’ heads, inviting them to the Big Ideas AI Session 19.5 located behind the public bathrooms in the basement….
Who believes such bombast?
Nobody I saw in our booth… If you have a successful retail operation – a complex organism with thousands of moving parts and variables – do you really want to ReImagine or ReInvent? Or do you want to make money by doing better what you are already doing? And if you have a struggling retail operation – do you have the CapEx to take on an experiment to Transform and ReBuild using magic promises? Or do you want to make money by doing better what you are already supposed to be doing?
Puhleezee…
If you are a Retail IT vendor – lets everyone try to get back to reality, and it’s less likely that the next prospect you are talking to – will be assuming from the first sentence that you are lying, and that everyone else out there is lying too.
If it’s your Risk Capital that’s funding this nonsense – harken back to that long forgotten prehistoric era of the Birth of Ecommerce, where 1000 Ecomm sites were chasing (and promising to capture) the same pair of consumer eyeballs, one VC business plan at a time.
And if you are a Retailer that is looking for solution that promises The Magic Bullet – consider why you are ready to believe such promises, and what can be done through hard work and clear vision of reality.