Due to the lingering labour shortage, 79% of retailers in Asia Pacific (Apac) plan to increase their tech investment next year to enhance customer experience, and improve mobile workforce productivity and inventory management.
According to Zebra Technologies’s 17th Annual Global Shopper Study, 22% of consumers in the region left a store without getting what they needed due to the lack of available retail associates to help.
Most shoppers expect retailers to offer easy click-and-collect and returns options too, but 85% of Apac retailers find it challenging to provide those and struggle with real-time inventory and out-of-stock tracking.
Generative AI will be one of the key technologies that Apac retailers will look to deploy next year. Case in point: 41% of Apac respondents believe generative AI will have an extremely significant impact on inventory management and demand forecasting.
Retailers in the region will also be automating product locating and item-level RFID (46%), video monitoring (36%), and stock-out alerts (49%) to give associates and shoppers real-time inventory visibility, which is a leading profitability driver.
“Adopting advanced technologies such as wearable scanners and linerless printing solutions can enable retailers to effectively address the multifaceted challenges of today’s business landscape. These solutions are purposefully designed to mitigate issues such as stockouts while enhancing associates’ ability to deliver a seamless customer experience,” says George Pepes, Apac Vertical Solutions lead for Retail at Zebra Technologies.
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The study also reveals that 72% of retail associates in Apac are concerned about the lack of technology deployed to spot theft and crime in stores. The good news is that Apac retailers plan to use AI-based prescriptive analytics (52%), self-checkout cameras and sensors (52%), computer vision (46%), and RFID tags and readers (38%) within the next three years for loss prevention.
