There was also Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, and Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft discussing e-commerce and e-economy at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, a series of meetings and seminars for IT managers, held this month in Orlando, Florida, in order to “understand, build and optimise the opportunities provided by digital technology and move from theory to practice”.
So what will shopping of the future be like? A true science fiction film, according to the Gartner forecasts, in which increasingly complicated algorithms take control of and decide our lives and (especially!) what to buy (carried out via smartphones and delivered with drones whistling over our heads), and with the store in the background that becomes place instilling emotions, a bit like a museum or art gallery.
Gartner, a consultancy company in the IT field, has issued its ten commandments, ten key trends that should regulate commerce in the future and that managers should certainly bear in mind. In the background, the focus, increasingly crucial for companies of the future, is to invest in people and customer experience.
1. By 2018, digital business will require 50% less staff for processes and 500% more experts in non-traditional roles such as integration specialists, digital business architects, regulatory analysts, risk professionals and lawyers.
2. By 2017, a successful digital business will be launched created by an algorithm.
3. By 2018, intelligent machines and industrialised services will lower the cost of commercial transactions by 30%.
4. By 2020, life expectancy in advanced economies will increase by six months due to the spread of wireless technology for health monitoring.
5. By 2016, e-commerce carried out exclusively via mobile devices and digital assistants will amount to 2.5 billion dollars. As a result, marketing campaigns will need not only to consider people but also to devise marketing techniques able to capture the attention of “digital personal shoppers”.
6. By 2017, in the USA “smartphone fever” will drive purchasing revenues via smartphone to 50% of e-commerce revenues. Companies will need to consider digital wallets (Apple Passbook, Google Wallet) in order to meet the growing consumer interest in commerce and payment via mobile phone.
7. By 2016, 70% of successful digital commerce models will be based on deliberately unstable processes. Company personnel will need to have increasingly greater flexibility and responsiveness to support organisational fluidity.
8. By 2017, more than half the investments in product and service research and development will be redirected to innovation of the customer experience. It will be increasingly important to know your customer through the identification of buyer personas and ethnographic analyses.
9. By 2017, almost 20% of e-commerce companies that sell consumer durable goods will use 3D printers to offer customised products.
10. By 2018, retailers using targeted messages together with Internal Positioning Systems (a kind of GPS able to exactly locate the customer in the store) will increase visits by 20%. Knowing the customer’s data will be essential in order to send targeted offers in real time, directly in front of the shelf.
Science fiction? Certainly not, the technology and its applications are already there, it’s just a matter of numbers. Just think of widely publicised innovations in the early stages only used by the niche of techno nerds, but then adopted by the many, all of a sudden: from the e-book to 3G on mobile phones. The future indeed is just around the corner.
Anna Muzio
