As most of you know, we conducted our 2019 Agenda webinar last week, on September 13. We spent a lot of hours this summer working on that agenda, because our goal is always 1) relevance, 2) interest level and 3) cutting through the noise to reality.

Side note for those who are interested: the slides and a video of the webinar are now available on our website. You can find them here (you do not have to be logged in to view the video, but you do to see and download the slides).

In fact, the theme of all our 2019 research is going to be separating the real from the not-so-real. What do retailers really think? What are they looking for? What are they piloting, and what are they actually implementing?

As a general rule in our benchmarks, we tend to focus on business-oriented issues, and to some extent, we find ourselves in the same situation for 2019. You can’t have an agenda without talking about the store, merchandising, or the supply chain. But this past year we also did a study on Retail Innovation (out this Thursday!) and it led us down a bit more technical path for some 2019 reports.

Innovation is on the mind of retailers, most especially those retailers who over-perform on year-over-year sales (a group we call Retail Winners). We were pretty amazed to discover just how eager they really are to get down to it, and bring their technologies, both customer- and employee facing into the 21^st Century, and how willing they are to talk “geeky. ”

Here’s an example: The most surprising finding in the Innovation report was that the largest retailers are most bullish on Cloud Computing. One would have thought it would be the smallest retailers most eager to offload hardware, software and payroll to someone else. That was not the case at all.

This demands of us to take a closer look, and so we’ll be conducting a benchmark on Cloud Computing.

We’re also continuing our foray into the Internet of Things. We know retailers are bullish on the topic – almost too bullish. They seem to believe it will solve their problems everywhere from the store to merchandising. Our goal will be to help sort through the noise (the data was really, really noisy) and help determine which projects will bring the quickest road to ROI.

There’s also a lot of buzz around robotics. And so for the first time ever, we’re going to take a look at robotics in the retail enterprise. It’s worth noting that none of us believe that robots will actually replace human-to-human interaction in stores. But we think there are a lot of rote activities where they can and have helped retailers become more efficient and responsive.

We could have written a separate report on AI, but opted to infuse all our other reports with questions on the topic. As with the IoT, retailers believe AI can transform so many aspects of their business, and we want to get down into the nitty gritty. We want to know what areas retailers are most intrigued with, and what they might do before AI takes over their worlds.

As always, if there are innovations we’ve missed, or topics that you really want us to cover that are missing from the agenda, please let us know. We want to continue our tradition of candor, relevancy and objectivity. We’re here to help, and please, let us know how and where our benchmarks can inform your decision-making.