This year, Mi9 Retail once again exhibited at the NRF Retail’s Big Show, the world’s largest retail conference. Held at the Javits Center in New York City from January 13-15, 2019, this year’s event brought together 37k attendees and 700 exhibitors from around the world under a single roof. As the number one overall vendor in this year’s RIS Software LeaderBoard, Mi9 Retail generated lots of interest in our innovative retail technologies and stood out with our inspiring and welcoming booth. At this year’s show, Mi9 Retail demonstrated our Retail Operating System, a unified suite of solutions that facilitates closed-loop analysis, automation, and optimization throughout every step of the Plan-to-Sell process.

Here are some key takeaways from the show based on the many exciting conversations we had with attendees:

Artificial Intelligence Was on Everybody’s Shopping List

Forward-thinking retailers are increasingly embracing artificial intelligence to increase efficiency, enhance decision making, and automate otherwise manual activities. At our booth, retailers were excited to capitalize on the opportunity to meet with our tech-savvy product experts and discover how our AI-powered demand management solutions can help them optimize their supply chains and meet – or exceed – their financial objectives. In fact, the business areas attendees were most commonly working to improve in 2019 included demand forecasting, allocation, and replenishment.

Retailers are Recognizing Cloud-powered Technologies as a Competitive Advantage

Attendees were particularly interested in learning more about the advantages of hosting their retail solutions in the Cloud and the ways it can reduce their total cost of ownership. Not only were attendees pleased to learn that the Mi9 Retail Operating System can be hosted in the Cloud, but its ease of use and low maintenance requirements sparked their interest as well.

Omni-channel is here to Stay

The online and digital worlds are no longer just colliding, they’re merging, and customers expect a convenient and seamless customer experience, regardless of how or where they shop. This year, more and more retailers are moving beyond click-and-collect and towards the broader goal of offering the “start anywhere, end anywhere” single shopping cart experience. Curating consistent omni-channel experiences has become critically important, and breaking down organizational silos is the key to remaining relevant. Many attendees were given demonstrations that showed them how the Mi9 unified retail suite helps retailers overcome common omni-channel challenges by centrally managing all points of purchase in order to optimize the overall performance of their retail operations.

Customer-centric Experiences Are as Important as Ever

Personalization was a hot topic at our booth, and many attendees were interested in learning more about our recent strategic partnership with Snap + Style. While collecting customer data is a good start, using it effectively is even more important. Using data as a tool to personalize the customer experience and put the most relevant products in front of the right customers has become essential to winning their loyalty. Thanks to our recent partnership with Snap + Style, retailers can now automatically offer personalized and likely-to-convert product recommendations directly from their websites.

Thanks for stopping by our booth and we look forward to seeing you all next year!