National Retail Federation reposted this
First day of #NRFNexus. Keynote by Eric Siegal was great, focused on practical AI/ML in the enterprise. It was fun to talk with him after on all the stuff Amazon did over the years. Some other observations: → Brands, Retailer, B2B, Healthcare, DTC - all here. The insight is ecommerce is not just for retailers. Digital strategies that link tech, operations, finance span the entirety of BUSINESS. NRF gets that. → CDO, CMO, CTO, CIO, COO, CFO - all here. The insight is that getting anything done in 2025 will require cross-org buy in. → Eric's presentation was great. I'll see if it's sharable anywhere. He talks about how to roll out genuine ML projects at enterprises. We saw this at Amazon where it actually took years to get automation based on ML into the system. → The best message in Eric's presentation was shifting from technical metrics to business metrics in order to get more traction. I agree! What matter's is the objective function that ML/AI is working backwards from. That objective function is almost always business related metrics. → In the presentation, he shows a picture of C-3PO famously telling Han the odds of survival, and Han saying "Never tell me the odds" to show the mindset of most executive leaders who don't want to switch to the benefits of predictive ML. In many ways, I think the single biggest thing holding back retail at the moment is the number of people still stuck at the Han Solo slide. We have to collectively figure out how to help others help themselves. Lastly, if you're looking for trends... my observation is there are no trends. The big thing right now is that the world is really volatile, lots of businesses are grappling with changes happening everywhere, and as a result ... the prioritized initiatives are highly variable across every company. As conversations ramp back up today, I'm curious to see if some patterns emerge.
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2moSolid write-up, thanks for sharing. And that the trend is... there are no trends, just volatility right now - that presents opportunity just by itself. Look forward to what you can glean from day 2. Great venue as well - enjoy the views!