Technology Disruptions that Retailers Need to Navigate in 2022 and Beyond

Retailers across the world would need to accelerate through the current wave of technology disruptions in order to sustain and grow in the future. While most enterprises today are in a better position to prepare for what’s coming ahead, they need to start experimenting right away and investing resources in these new innovations.

In a note titled Retail Technology Vision 2022 posted by Accenture, the company recalls a similar situation at the start of the digital era and specifies four key trends that will become the building blocks for the future of the retail industry. The report highlights that retailers would need to uproot themselves from today and plant themselves firmly in the future.

Enterprises in the retail space appear more than keen to begin this exercise with as many as 55% of consumers believe that more and more of their lives and livelihoods are moving into digital spaces, the report revealed. The report is titled “Retail Technology Vision 2022 – Retailers, Meet Me in Metaverse”

Therefore it is hardly surprising that 72% of global executives believe that the metaverse will have a positive impact on their organisations, with 45% holding the believe that it will be breakthrough or transformational. Also, 94% of retail executives believe that future digital platforms need to offer unified experiences, enabling interoperability of customers’ data across different platforms and spaces.

In fact, 90% of the retail executives believe that leading enterprises would be pushing the boundaries of the virtual world to make it more real, thus enhancing the need for persistence and seamless navigation between digital and physical worlds.

While over 90% of retail executives agree that artificial intelligence (AI) is assuming a very pervasive role across their organizations’ business processes, about 95% of the executives also feel that their organizations are committed to authenticating the origin of their data and the genuine use of AI.

The four key trends that the report speaks about includes (a) the natural evolution of the world wide web into WebMe (b) Programmable World (c) The Unreal and (d) Computing the Impossible.

The WebMe explores how the internet is being re-imagined with enterprises looking at new modes of digital experience that pushes people to live virtual to an even higher extend than they ever expected. The metaverse is emerging as a natural evolution that reconciles how the internet is currently design and what we will demand from it going forward.

The Programmable World tracks how technology is connecting the physical with the virtual world in sophisticated ways. The convergence of 5G, ambient computing, augmented reality, and smart materials is making businesses consider newer means to interact with customers.

The Unreal is the trend where our business ecosystem is filled with machines that can pass off as humans. These unreal qualities are intrinsic to AI and data analytics that companies aspire to integrate into mission-critical functions.

And the fourth is Computing the Impossible where computational possibilities limits are getting extended each day with new class of machines – from quantum to biologically inspired and the high-performance computers.