I have just returned to my desk following the Garden Centre Association’s Annual Conference at the Carden Park Hotel near Chester.
Whilst amazing photos of the fancy dress dinner on Monday night will flood social media the topic that dominated most speakers’ presentations concerned the accelerating use and scope of technology available to our industry.
Edoardo Bortolato, who heads Google’s Large Customer Sales Team for Italy, Spain and Portugal, spoke at our 60th anniversary year annual conference in a personal capacity.
Prior to joining Google in 2018, he collected extensive international experience from roles at BCG in Italy and the Middle East, as well as Tesco in the UK and ST Microelectronics in Italy and Japan, spanning sales, business development and strategy.
Beyond his corporate career, Edoardo is also the founder of the footwear and accessories fashion brand Bote A Mano.
He initially gave us an overview of where AI might go and answered a question from the audience regarding it ‘taking everyone’s jobs’ by saying a huge number of jobs will be created to manage this IT explosion.
He also said future data centres could well be located in space, where solar panels are much more effective, and once the orbit moves it out of the sun it is very cold, aiding the heat dispersion that these conglomerations create.
His suggestion was that routine tasks that could be automated, such as inputting invoices, making payments, creating budgets and other sales reports, would create space in labour budgets to be spent on increasing the sales force on the shop floor. He said garden centres create great experiences, which these extra staff would increase even further resulting in those essential extra sales.
He then explained how further applications of AI in areas such as stock control, covering predicting requirements, scanning shelves to show shortfalls, refining ranges and pricing is all essential. The software to do this is already available and is very cheap.
AI can also help with shrinkage, again with products already available, that can detect, deter, alert and share issues. Cameras that detect unusual behaviour, which don’t show peoples faces were considered to be useful as much cheaper than facial recognition and have no GDPR issues.
The dreaded emails also got a mention with software available that will monitor every incoming email, bin ones known to be not required, it can produce a reply to those that need replying too and leave the recipient to authorise.
He then did a live demonstration asking his laptop to write a letter to a supplier. The instructions you give to your AI assistant is critical. He told his laptop it was a garden centre manager writing a letter about a late delivery. There were a range of possible replies produced in seconds. Again, this frees up time to get more hours customer facing.
We also heard from James Sawley, HSBC’S Head of Retail and Leisure talk about how they use AI to analyse all the detail they can get from monitoring credit card transactions. The main benefit is that the analysis is done very quickly so they can spot and monitor trends very effectively, something that an individual garden centre might be able to do with its loyalty card transactions.
The big winners in retail currently are Shein, Temu and Vinted.
However, he also said garden centres are in a great position as they are places that provide uplifting experiences which is what all shoppers want.
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