The Theatro Blog

Greetings from seat 26G. I’m on my flight back from Miami where the Theatro team spent a few days at the NextPoint retail technology networking event connecting with some of the leading retailers in the US and Canada.

This week Google and Walmart just took the conversational commerce “voice wars” to 11 by announcing a strategic partnership to integrate Walmart with Google Assistant (Google’s intelligent personal assistant) and Google Express (Google’s same-day delivery service).

I look forward to a world where I can walk into a store, talk to a sales associate who actually makes eye contact, has their hands free to help me look for whatever I’m shopping for, and can tell me the price or what’s in stock at the speed of thought.

This week Macy’s announced that it will be bringing its new self-service shoe concept to three Chicago-area stores, allowing customers to bypass the sales associate during their shopping season.

We know the challenges in retail stores…and stores continue to close in response. The industry press is constantly reminding us that stores are closing and it feels like the sky is falling.

Over the past few years a new breed of retailer has been emerging, one that is data-driven and channel agnostic.

A great way to keep current with rapidly evolving IT innovations and control costs is to employ a Software As A Service (SaaS) model that incorporates the cost of hardware into the subscription price.

Never before have we seen so many technological advances in so short a time; we are surrounded by devices that are intelligent in some way or another.

As a general rule, part-time employees in retail, hospitality and warehousing (enterprise indoor mobile workers) are on the front-line of an enterprise’s engagement with a customer and are a crucial to the execution of the enterprise strategy.