Welcome everybody to a quick tank top. I realised I hadn’t done my third NRF video about the things that we saw at the show that were interesting.

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I’ll come to AI in a minute.

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But for me, the conversations and the stories that were interesting and what I saw lots of, were lots of conversations amongst retailers about efficiency and flexibility. Those are the two things that they are desperate to try and achieve over the course of this year. Lots of conversations about stores. You know, in the end, NRF has tried to become…actually, no, not tried to become –  people have tried to ^ it into an eCommerce show. 

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It’s not, it’s a physical retail show.

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And finally, the thing that I was blown away by this year was robotics. There was the most incredible roboticised kitchen in the basement. Not the best place to be, but just some incredible robotics! Food was being cooked by robots, live, in kitchens and then being served into cubby holes that you could pick up. It was just incredible. That was the most exciting thing about NRF for me.

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As far as AI goes, and I’ll try and be quick, there is one thing to say: I still just a word that everybody slacks onto the end of an app or SaaS platform. 

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And when people talk about it, when vendors talk about it, it’s talked about as a feature. When we are taught to sell, we’re taught to go feature, advantage, benefit. But the advantage and the benefit of AI are being lost by a lack of clarity. 

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Presumably, because of whoever is doing the sales enablement to say what this is, what it’s going to give, and what benefit it will give the customer. Is it going to save them time from their teams? Is it going to take work away from the people involved in or who are currently running the digital practice? 

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That’s the thing that’s missing. At the moment, it’s just being left with “we’ve got AI as a feature. “ And the connection to the customer's problems and the customer’s business is being lost, and it needs to be fixed. 

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So for me, that’s the thing that I would focus on for the next few months. Thank you.