Every retail conversation I’ve had this year has had the same word in it. AI. AI for stock, AI for pricing, AI to stop theft, AI to answer the customer before they’ve finished the question.
I sell the least glamorous part of that story. Barcode scanners, mobile computers, label printers, point-of-sale kit. And the more I hear about AI, the more I think my unglamorous kit is where the whole thing starts.
An AI model can’t see your shop. It only knows what got captured. What came in at the back door, what moved to the shelf, what was sold, what went missing. Every one of those facts begins life as a scan.
If items get scanned twice, or not at all, or with a handheld that’s two generations old and keeps dropping off the Wi-Fi, the AI doesn’t get smarter. It gets confidently wrong.
That’s why I’ve started thinking of the scanner as the first prompt. Get it wrong and every answer after it is built on sand.
The people in the middle
The latest Global Shopper Study, which surveyed more than 4,200 shoppers, store staff and retail leaders, found 88% of store associates struggle to get timely information. That’s up from 84% the year before. In the same study, 87% of retail leaders said generative AI and automation are essential to loss prevention.
Put those two numbers side by side. Leaders are betting on AI. The people on the shop floor can’t get the information they need today. The gap between them is exactly where the devices, the data and the training sit.
How it’s changed the way I sell
When a reseller brings me a retail project now, I try to start from the other end.
What question does the retailer want their AI to answer? Where is my stock right now. Why are we losing margin on this aisle. Which store needs more people on Saturday.
What has to be captured for that answer to be true? Which items, at which points, by whom, how often.
Then, and only then, what kit does that? Sometimes it’s a big rollout of new devices. Sometimes it’s fixing the twenty that never get charged overnight.
It’s a slower first conversation. It’s also the one that tends to win, because the retailer stops seeing a box of scanners and starts seeing the thing their whole AI plan depends on.
Why I love this corner of tech
It’s easy to think the exciting part of AI is the model. I think the exciting part is when it touches the real world. A parcel, a shelf, a till, someone in a hi-vis jacket at 6am. That’s where my side of the industry lives.
Clever software, honest data, good kit in the right hands. In that order, from the floor up.
