Low Code Revolution In Retail | This Week in Innovation | Emerging Tech

This week on the #ThisWeekInInnovation #podcast we discuss the #LowCode Revolution in Retail.

I'm Jeff Roster, former #Gartner and IHL #retail sector analyst now serving on several advisory boards. My partner for this podcast is Brian Sathianathan. He's a serial entrepreneur co-founder of Iterate.ai. and Co-founder of Avot Media, where he had a successful exit. Together we will discuss the #RetailInnovation #RetaiStartups #Startup Strategies #RetailTrends and the #FutureOfRetail. Additionally we’ll discuss #unifiedcommerce #SocialCommerce, #ecommerce #MobileCommerce #LowCode, #MachineLearning #live-streaming, #instoretechnology, #DTC, #RFID, #SocialAudio, #LossPrevention #ComputerVision and #SupplyChain.

We’ll interview #Founders, #VC’s focused on the #retail and the #CPG space, #retailexecutives interested in innovation, #TechExecutives, #reporters, #analysts, #economists and #academics interested in #retail

We use the #5ForcesOfInnovation to frame our pod. Anybody focusing on any of these things are people we want to talk to.

Our Hypothesis:

There are 5 Forces that are driving innovation in retail and CPG. They include:

#ArtificialIntelligence
#IoT
#Blockchain
#Startups
#Data

We focus on four pillars.

The #Startup Community working in retail and CPG.
#Retailers involved in either #innovation on the business side or technical side.
#Analysts, #professors, #reporters, #economists anybody that has retail data or opinions.
#Charity anything that involves retailers or tech working in the retail industry

We don’t buy into the #retailapocalyps

Podcast Hosts

Jeff Roster

https://twitter.com/JeffPR

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-roster-bb51b8/

https://thisweekininnovation.com

Brian Sathianathan

https://twitter.com/BrianVision

https://www.iterate.ai

Podcast Website

https://www.podbean.com/pu/pbblog-f8asf-af2782

https://thisweekininnovation.com

Apple

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-week-in-innovation/id1562068014

Spotify

https://open.spotify.com/show/2QDqTUnt6jebdRHbRzSTJN

LaunchPadOne

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Listen Notes

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Trascript of Low Code Revolution in Retail Episode

Jeff

Hello, everybody welcome to podcast number two of This Week in Innovation, I'm Jeff Roster, former Gartner and IHL retail analyst with my host, Brian Sathianathan of VC and co-founder of iterate.ai. This week, we're going to be talking about low code and the revolution that it could cause in retail. This is a recording

from a room we just did in clubhouse.

Just this past week. I left the audio pretty much as it was recorded. Cause I've had a lot of questions about what it's like to work in clubhouse. And so you can see some of the challenges that, that clubhouse offers, I left the little bumps and noises that come in because any notification on your phone actually shows up in the room.

So I left that in. I thought about taking it out, but I left it in anyway. It's a fascinating conversation that we have, and I think low-code really does offer some really interesting opportunities for those of us in retail tech. Have a listen.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to ask an analyst this session, we'll be talking about low code revolution in retail.

I'm with my cohost Brian Sathianathan and we are, have just launched our first podcast. This Week in Innovation, it is now live on Podbean. It will hopefully be live on all the other services. It takes a few days. Brian, let me ask you, let me start off with giving you a definition of what I think low code is and feel free to correct me.

So my understanding is low code is a visual approach to software development, low code attracts and automates every step of the application life cycle to enable rapid delivery of a variety of software solutions. It breaks the traditional silos of business and it to promote continuous collaboration. Increased business demand for software solutions and a shortage of skilled developers have have propelled the adoption of local wood development platforms to the forefront.

Now, clearly an analyst did not write that definition, but I'll leave. I'll leave that to our vendor, friends to come up with that.

Taking out some of the fluff of that is that sort of what we're talking about?

Brian

Yeah, Def you are right. And then thinking I'll paint the picture a little bit more at a higher level but you're right. Correct. That's a very accurate I bet it's an analyst definition, but it's an accurate definition, right?

As always you guys have other stuff, but let me actually take a step back and point painted a little bit from a consumer and an enterprise. And a price perspective, right? I think the, I think what's really interesting is traditionally code or software development has been a within every organization in order to build the solution is always, has been a build was as a buy.

But if it's a building, you have to have developers and IT teams and various folks, building software in the traditional form, which is basically. Writing code. But as the times progress and a lot of different integrations showed up in the industry. There is a better way of doing things, began to -

the better way of doing things is that, how do we map the business? And the business activity, very close to the software, right? And that this is not a new concept. This is a fact been going on for years. I think if you look at the early Microsoft applications yeah, I remember when I was a kid I started with visual basic, which was actually a drag and drop desktop. Low code platform, actually, yeah. And and so on and so forth. And it began evolving over time. But I think what's interesting is where we are now is all that more and more organizations are figuring out how do we actually visually map right.

Instead of code, but how do we draw right. These flows and how do we build applications faster? And I think a couple of things that I thought I've been adding to why this is happening and accelerating the steps.

First one is, most companies on large enterprises, they want it to be quick and fast and first to market.

So that's the one need that is driving it. And how do we get become 10 X faster? In deploying other solutions and bringing them to market. So speed is one, one, one reason. The other is I think the ability to maintain and to map the business processes. That's I think another reason, and I think - I'll give you a more recent, specific to retail later, but I think the third at a very broad, a broad strokes at a very general higher level is also the.

The complexity of applications have significant increase what I mean by that is the number of areas or pieces and application as to connect to different systems that have to connect. It has also increased. So this actually through low code this connectivity is becomes much easier because most low code platforms are very good with integration.

That makes it even easier. So all these two or three factors of making low code More broader and easy to use in the industry.

Jeff

So how long has that term been in use in let's say enterprise software.

Brian

I think low code, low code. I think it's only been kind only about in the last eight or 10 years.

And in the last four or five years it's been, it's become, it's being used more frequently and more pervasive. And now that is even market adjustments and market prices for the industry like that. You'll be quite surprised that the low code market, and naturally has a really nice forecast on it.

In 2019 was $10.3 billion, like 10.3 billion, and about to grow 287 billion. I repeat 187 billion by 2030, right? That is an 18 X, right? 18 X. That's a that's crazy growth. So now that's becoming a market that enterprises are seriously looking at, take the, taking it north end. And that's why we call this session a local revolution, because this is not something or it's cool.

You gotta know it. There is already a significant amount of investment behind it. And it's going to grow 18 times bigger than what it is today.

Jeff

I'm looking at the Gartner magic quadrant that was published out there was out on the internet. So it was a legal copy. I'm looking at, just in case any Gartner lawyers are listening.

And Gartner predicts from September of 2020 was by 20, 24. So year over year into the prediction. Low code application development will be responsible for more than 65% of application development activity. 65%. That seems extremely high, that's your point though?

Brian

No, I think I, I agree.

I agree. I think it's one of the thoughts sometimes when you read these different quotes from different outlets, Gardner and Forrester, and even Microsoft and others in this space that, sometimes the numbers seem to be really high. But I think that the numbers make sense, because if you look at the applications that are produced within an enterprise they could fall into many different buckets.

And in a while will talk about what are some of the buckets that these types of applications would fall into. But if you look across all the different types of applications and the different types of buckets, those numbers are. Those numbers are quite real and you can, they can become true, right?

Even Microsoft made a common thing that's going to be the next 10 years, there's going to be 500 million apps. And then I'm not thinking of developers to build that level of apps so quickly. But then, 450 million of them will be built to low-code. And that's a predicted made by one of the Microsoft corporate vice presidents.

So that's a public prediction in itself. There are several articles on it, right? So those numbers all seem to be real because then you look at across the spectrum of the types of assets.

Jeff

does it. So I'm looking in the magic quadrant and there's, Salesforce is on it. Microsoft is on it. Service now, Oracle, All the big names, is that does low code replace existing enterprise software?

Is it transition? It'll say take three retail example. We have supply chain software, we have merchandising software. We have, every piece of software is, does some of that functionality move from existing applications to to a low-code strategy or kind of tell me how that, what that looks like in retail.

Brian

So I think in retail at the higher level I would look at four areas. Four types of applications within retail. And this is applicable in every industry in general, but specifically in retail, there are four areas where low code could could play and later on, I'll elaborate it, but just at a high level, one is the DPM RPA, right?

Which is the business process management outsourcing and robotic process. Management like things like at a very high level, things like that, but the document identifying POS and supply for supplier forms and it forms a legal form, like support center type, form, all that stuff is essentially an established business across every industry, including retail.

And this is where a low code started to make it interesting. If you look at a lot of the local providers, APN out systems that are, they'll have a lot of documentation documents and a lot of use cases in, in BPM RPA cases. But then the second one, I think is interesting, especially with the emergence of AI, you see a lot of data apps within glitter, right?

If you look at the way they are there, they have to be deep customer journey analysis. A spend analysis and wallet share analysis, right? Basket type analysis optimal card segment, dynamic segmentation, all these types of things in retail will require low code type application in time.

Because a lot of the people who are doing this are data experts, but they're not necessarily coding. Which creates an opportunity to build a more advanced application much faster. One of the things in retail, the concepts that I like to focus is the concept of upskilling. I'll talk about it a little bit later, right?

How can you use your existing workforce? And train them. Can you up-skill them? To build applications quickly, right? The third area, I think in retail, which I'm really interested as the consumer, see, this is what I'm more excited about, which is basically things likechatbots, what they all said.

Plus for customer service auto may and Skadden go apps, right? Things like click and collect that. A guide as you walk, even like guidance apps tell you with which products it is, which child, right? Things like door to door are infinite dial apps where, you run out of products and you can scan and go show up in your home through delivery.

Very interesting. Pricing apps like and ended up commerce angle. I think that's a lot of applications. They are in common, especially in my 10 day thing. Content creation and content generation because it as e commerce is increasing about 30%, right? 30, 40% of the whole ecommerce share.

Especially with COVID you see that as a massive affluent, in that 30, 40% increase. Now, suddenly you want to have your site. Be very specific and in terms of content and there's a lot of content, generation image, generation type applications that are, and they're going to become more and more strong and powerful.

Jeff

Brian, when you say. This is an opportunity for a retailer to upscale their workforce. You're talking about it, professionals picking up new capabilities. Are you talking about being able other people outside of it to learn some of these skills and migrate into the it department?

Brian

That's actually a great question, right? I think in my in my mind, I actually see like a three or four areas first is actually it, right? So most retailers have their ID workforce consist of, some network security related application developers who are essentially building maintaining website, building apps, like app related stuff.

So with the low-code, things like AI. Machine learning, IOT, blockchain, all that stuff can be abstracted. So even a web engineer can start using it. And then as in that process, they can easily become upskilled. So that's the second audience that will, that's the first audience. I think that will get trained.

And then without hiring very expensive engineers, if they could use existing. obstructed models and components and get to market very quickly. So I think that is the first upskilling that's going to happen.

Second area of upskilling is going to be data analysts, statics statistics team, because most retailers have some form of teams within marketing that focused on cart analysis and merchandise merchandising and data analytics team.

They're not engineers per se. But they can make it more local, more deeply. And third is like anybody in the business teams and RPA BPA teams can continue to use it more extensively. So those will be the three areas of propagation. One thing that I also liked too, in this moment, I also like to Jeff, if you can promote Shathera as a speaker.

I like to question because. Yeah. Just to introduce chakra is an AI expert in our company. Chatra has worked a lot in thinking about how to make AI and other types of innovative capabilities, more accessible to low code. This is one of the problems that today retailers are facing, right?

Because it's extremely hard and expensive to hire AIML engineers. And even if you hire them, it's hard to retain them. Compared to fighting with Google and all the other guys. So the question is how do you use up-skill the existing workforce and how can you do it more effectively?

Tell us what your views are.

Thanks, Brian. Yeah, so one thing I would like to highlight is in current systems, right there, easy, big disconnect between. The AI experts, meaning the researchers and incrementally implemented implementers, meaning the engineers who actually build the product and the stakeholders or the users of the application who usually have the data for an example, if you think of a customercare usually three parties associated with it.

So the stakeholder might be, like the customer care department. And then you have the AI researcher sites, and then you have the engineer who actually builds the application. So something which interplay helps. It's just trying to bring all these stakeholders through one platform and starting from like the AI expert standpoint.

Usually especially if you take like a smaller company, sometimes the rule of engineer and the research is played by. The actual AI expert themselves. This is speaking from experience. And so what something, which low-code leverage is that it helps us obstruct the way quite a number of engineering components, so you can be ready to go like in place.

So what this does for a AI expert, it's just lets them focus primarily on their craft, building better algorithm tuning the data and not worry about the engineering workload. So that really helps us actually leverage the intellectual property or actually the performance of the model.

And it reduces the workload of the actual engineer. Who's doing it as well. So in addition to that, it helps the AI expert author translates their progress to the other side for stakeholders to easily show them because of the low code platform. We can easy MI with all like use cases or proof of concept at a record low time.

So that basically brings to his experts closer to the end product. So that's one case. And the other case is that this also deliberated these experts to create a plug and play option. So then engineers, like save web developers and other types of engineers, then you see a plug and play option.

And if they, if they want any like customization, then we can just talk to these yet again. So basically at the end it just creates this cohesive, like very strong kind of innovation slash engineering pipeline among all the parties for in it. So that's sanded out the breath.

Thanks. Yeah, no, I think we got, I love to love what you said. It creates a coherence between the team and also to upscale a lot of the existing team players to come to market. Yeah. And I'll say when you sit to the friction between them and reduces the number of people who associates with actually building the.

Final product, which kind of reduces the time taken to build the product, as well as the transfer of information there from the stakeholder to the expert is like very short. So like usually the needs are met, like quite accurately in this kind of workflow.

Jeff

Brian, do we have any ROI on, on low-code I'm I'm assuming it's gonna be, you're gonna tell me that it's probably more probably cheaper, faster to market all that stuff, but have we seen any real numbers yet?

Brian

So we don't have real numbers published per se outside by third parties, right? We lead think based on our estimates. The feed could be 50%, I'm sorry, 10% fat, 10 next Besta. And about 40 to 50% cost efficiencies and ROI benefits. This, I think the reason I'm saying this is because, based on some of the speeding broom and time to market, and then that time that captured between, between, planning and, that's part of the dead time in any organizational roll of projects, it's saves time in, in that area as well. So if you measure everything you're looking at about 40 to 50% ROI benefits, it's significant.

That's why this is a revolution. That's why I think I don't know if you know this like data data statistics out there, like 70%, 74%. Read their laps out actually hybrid apps can see my face in retail, not right under there is data on this, right? 74%, right? The reason we deal with don't want to build native apps is because it's hard to convert them in low code.

But if it's because they're easy to maintain as low code apps. So that is quite a lot of low code type capabilities that the retailers and other brands and brands are beginning to already experiment. People are seeing the benefit of it.

Jeff

Where do you see that? Or what do you expect that 50% savings to come from?

It sounds like that's probably going to come from from SI work systems integration work.

Brian

Yeah. Yeah. I think part of it's going to come from, if I was it's going to come from just organization and the efficiencies of collaborating and bringing say, like I mentioned, it's going to create a coherent culture where things are going to move faster.

So I think that's just sheer efficiency, right? The other is just time to market and other benefits then maintainability and extensibility. So this is another area, right? Because if you look at any low-code application or even any applicants that you want to bring in, there are two parts to it.

One is called the visible part. The other is the invisible part, right? 10% of any application, any enterprise application is the visible part. That's the user interface USI. The forms, you see the buttons you click or whatever the maps, you get, the products you buy, whatever the standard components are.

And then there is a 90% sort of the underneath the iceberg that you never see like a command and a name consumer never sees. Only the enterprise knows. And the people inside the company knows what that and those that the invisible 90% often they a headache for the innovation team, right?

Because that invisible 90% is where you have to have technology. In AIML, you have to have IoT you have to have a blockchain, you have to have a lot of data capability. You have to have tons and tons of integrations to legacy systems, and pull data from your legacy data system. Or even for that matter, integrate with third party data.

That's the that the invisible 90% is where I think the biggest value out of low code. Because predominantly in the last six, seven years we've seen low code being marketed as an app development. You can go too quickly to market quickly prototype. So basically addressing the 10% visible part.

But I think one insight that we bring to the table and what we see here is not that 10%, that 10% eventually it could be done by anybody. It's going to be that 90% where the biggest value for you.

Jeff

Interesting. Do you have some retail examples?

Brian

Yeah, I think a lot of retail examples we have a lot of retail examples, but before that I like to ask two questions.

One is to it right in the invisible 90% startups and third-party vendors are a big plane. Dave, can you tell us a little bit about it?

Jeff

Brian? Let me interrupt. Can you introduce

Brian

Dave? Oh, yes, absolutely. Yeah. I love to sorry, Dave. Yeah. Dave Jenkins is a vice president of marketing@etrade.ai, and he's also a senior leader and executive in the, in both in the retail space.

He was a CDO of back country.com and he also was a leader at a red hat working in open source software, but he's very experienced across in this space all weekend. Dave, go ahead. Yeah, thank you. Let's start ups. Just in a macro economic sense, startups are always going to be faster at finding new ideas, just because of two things.

One, they don't have any overhead. We tell them no, and two they're usually younger and they just take as written. The generation of startups, startup authors now they've always had the internet, the internet is air to them. And even open sources, air to them, it's always been there.

Whereas I think people who are in larger companies, they have to maneuver around and, you have to protect the order management system or you have to protect the current Oracle deployments or whatever it is just because again, larger enterprises fall to the sunk cost fallacy.

Whereas startups don't have that. So startups are, just in general on a macro economics and startups are always going to have newer ideas factors. So the trick is to how to get those startups into the enterprise because the enterprise enterprises tend to buy from other enterprises that the buying process is easier.

So how do you reduce that friction and to get startups into the enterprise? And so that's what another big element or another big I guess another big fork for us is, or another big tool for us is integrating is well, two things. One how to spot those startups and sort, and rank them because out of a million startups might be only a hundred thousand, know what they're doing.

And then within that, and only 10,000 actually have a viable solution maybe, but that's, that's just how it goes. But so that's that one, how to find a good startup and then two, how to integrate startups into your existing enterprise systems. Frictionless as possible. Thanks.

Yeah. Thanks Dave. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think startups play a big part in this and I think in this entire integration paradigm, and I think Jeff, you also asked what sort of applications and what sort of speeds you can get benefits on. Can you also add Shamrock to, if someone's a machine learning engineer or manager.

Yeah, he's also a manager in some of the iterate projects he leads a few of our projects with some customers and especially one of the things that he did recently was a very large, replatforming project in basically built a micro-community site, all the PL powered by low code Shamron can you tell us about what are the benefits you got and so on.

Hey, can you guys hear me? Okay. Hey everyone. Yeah. So thanks, Brian. We'll actually toss up on a lot of other points that I've already mentioned on the call. So when we went and rescanned this whole platform interplay, which is what we realized is two things. These two things were one of the reasons why the process was pretty much faster compared to that.

So the first thing, when you bought the regular wheel writing code, And I'll give you a very classic example. If you want to connect your the front end to a database connection on the back, you've got to have a script for that. And that writing time is a lot. It depends on what you're going to do with it and how the connection should be.

So that time dictate that amount of time dictates when you can get over that line just to have a connection, but in our, this particular scenario where the whole platform that was talking to the database, Increasingly like every other second, this connection that we had to do was actually done using the interplay though, which we did not have to sit and develop overnight.

It's something that we already have in the platform. So we just had to worry about small things. What's the credentials, which database to connect to. So that saved up a lot of time. Like you don't have to sit and write the code and just make the database connection and then you have to figure out why it's not working.

So these nodes in the platform, they simplify the whole process connect faster. So you just have to make sure what database you want to do and what other credentials, and you can just connect it and go over and do what is next. So that was one of the things that was, that stood out and that improved our process connects on with the speculum development time.

The second thing, like if that we did integrate a bunch of services in this slow as well. So we use SendGrid for emails. We use Twilio for texting. We also use a third party vendor, which is nearby for video. So we have all these integrations going seamlessly through the platform as well, which if you actually try to connect them on the outside world, you have to follow the documentation.

You have to see how do you make this get request to get the service from them. And then you have to pull something back to them. This whole process takes a lot of time. And since you have never worked with these startup, you have to spend, you don't want to time. We'll figure it out, how this works going through the documentation to figure out okay, if I do this but we, since we have these startup labs as notes, and at that time, this process was, I wouldn't do that connected with 28 class because we just had to get a paid account connected by the API.

I'm good. Rolling. We just texted until you're done. And this is something my team added last week, the user can actually replace top who stopped getting the texts. And that is also handled by, into, we don't have to worry about adding that feature on the affiliate side. And that is something. If you do it outside of low-code platform, you will have to sit there and write the code where if the stock comes in, what you're doing on the API side, how do you doesn't want to get texts so you stop texting them, et cetera.

So these two features of adding start-ups and not able to not have to write the code to do that, or maybe switch start up capability. You don't want to use failure. You want to use something else? You can just put it out. Here's something else, things like that when you're trying to in the platform were very helpful.

That's where the feed of that time was super high. We were trying to be, we're aiming to do this , and we were actually very close to it. And half the problem all the time for that. And the thing was the UI as well. When you have to do UI, you have to go through a bunch of pay days outside and you have to put the code in, but we also support low-code UI.

So you just drag and drop things and you do the apply and then give you the code. And then you deploy it on that platform in a bunch of places. This platform was one of the reasons why the whole

thank you. Thank you, Shamron that's really helpful. And also in a very practical manner, right? Not just concept, but rather at a very practical manager. Walk us through, the details of how we can get benefits, what we're doing with Jeff. Hopefully that answered your question. It was a long answer but hopefully we were able to capture all the nuances of the question I'm

Jeff

sitting here as fortunately, I don't have to do forecasting anymore for software spend, but if I did, do I have to create a new bucket for low code or is that just is just, is.

The merchandising software spend, 30% of it become driven by low code?

Brian

No, I think it's the latter, right? Low code is a bit like a horizontal it's a little bit like horizontal AI. What it means is it's low code is across your organization and it's across your departments, right? Just like you said, they will be low coding in the BPA group.

They will be low code in the RPA teams. There will be low code in the data analytics teams. Consumer facing teams will have it. It will have their local parts as well. So they are, so there is local that will get broken across many different areas and it think of it as more of a horizontal and it will be rolled into your existing costs.

Jeff

Okay. Interest. So more like a platform that, that platform spend that sort of

Brian

evolving. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Actually it's interesting, Jeff anybody who wants to refer to it, I think Gartner had an interesting report. They have a local development technology, revenue breakdown, but what they've done is they've done the breakdown I've crossed the different sections of the department, right?

How much spend is going to happen in in RPA versus how much on citizen development versus how much is on, management suites and all that stuff. And we can share that info out.

Jeff

So as long as it's freely available and not

Brian

yeah.

you can Google it and you'll

Jeff

see it. Yeah. So where are we at? Where are we with adoption on this? How early would retailers have to do? If I'm a retailer, I'm sitting here in this conversation and I've spent 25 years or so building merchandising or supply chain software and working with supply chain software. W hat do I, what are my actions?

What do I think about now? What kind of questions do I ask?

Brian

See, I think that the it's a great question. Yeah. I think a number of things you want to probably start looking at, one is first, first to understand where does low code apply? What are the right use cases and the business cases where you can apply low code within your organization?

Because I think that the problems that we've defined earlier, for example, the problem of getting to the market quickly, Upskilling your existing workforce, right? So that, your existing workforce can actually come back to the new challenges created by digital life. All those they are there.

I would call them the universial need of all the tenants, right? Like a lesson where you are, right. Including Amazon, every Emily is a universal need of all the readings. So now at the mean, those are your needs. I think what would be good is to my first advice would be to look across your organization and look at your own department because only the CEO can look across the organization.

But the individual leaders look across your department and figure out area or use cases because yeah, because I think it's good to use the good to think about use cases first, then thinking about a development technology or a platform, because same thing, everything around use cases, right?

So you say, if I am a vice president of marketing, somebody may innovation, vice versa, innovation, cDO of a company. I would think about all the consumer facing use cases, right? Things like, how do I deploy cannon go apps faster? How do I do a store to door quickly? How to do I how do I do an associate helper?

How do I do a navigation? Take me there apps like anything that can increase my bottom line conversions. And how do I apply use case in those use cases? How would I apply local? That those will be my first steps. Like second I will think about low code is great, but how do I actually apply low code in a sustainable, scalable manner within an enterprise?

That's a very important part of this journey, right? Because there's a lot of local platforms that are out there. But they're all like SAS platforms. I call them like toy platforms, right? So you are a marketing leader or a marketing team person. You want to copy some data from somewhere to somewhere.

You want to format and create a table and export it to an Excel sheet. Great. That local platform will satisfy that use case. But the law that same local platform may not satisfy your use case of building a scan and go app or a. Oughta click and collect them. That's going to be served across 5,000 stores for 200 million transactions a year.

So you want to think about that as well, because what are the applications that can actually scale? What are the applications that that, that are, that I can take to my IC, right? Another problem that's happening within enterprises today. And in fact this is not a problem that happened today.

It's been there for the last 10, 15 years, but it's more it has exacerbated in the last couple of years, which is, marketing leaders and, business leaders. They go to it with their needs. And then it says guidance. Great, wonderful. But get in line because we are doing a re-platforming, which is going to take a year or whatever other projects there.

So we can't attend to it. So what they do is they have these business leaders, they turn around, they're going to their brand shop or their existing agency and say, guys, why don't you build an app? And then they build an app, they build some solution and then they launch because more marketing is rewarded by campaigns.

And launch is done. Something happens. And eventually the app is abandoned. There is no path to production in life, India. They take the app to the it teams and they say this is not very, this is a toy. And eventually it becomes pro they work like so I think what's interesting with low-code is when you're selecting a low code platform, think about how can low code gracefully help you to launch something into the market, but at the same time, great, fully transitioned it into production because that's an important part because it ended the day.

Funding running in production and providing business continuity and sustaining business is equally important as the speed to market and launch the product. So those are the three or four things I would love. Yeah. So interesting.

Jeff

So it is It will low code displace existing functionality. In merchandising and supply chain, or will it be adopted to, to go after new capabilities?

Brian

I think it's I think it will. It will. It will. It would be doesn't. Replace existing functionality. What it does, is it integrate to existing functionality?

Jeff

Brian? So does it replace, sure. I understand what you just said. Does it replace existing functionality or it accentuates existing functionality?

Brian

It accentuates everything

Jeff

function on it. We're not ripping and replacing anything. We're basically using this as a way of extenuating extent, extending capabilities, probably adopting AI, some other ideas. Okay.

Brian

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It is supercharging. It is supercharging what's already out there.

One of the interesting at the best parallels that I would draw to low-code is the same parallels that, that, that has been drawn to AI. So when AI, when they say I revolution started Romania, it's been there since 1950. But after. They invented backpropagation and AI began to, and Nvidia started creating all these advanced chips, starting in 2009, 2010. When everybody said AI started increasing, I became thought of the electricity. Everybody was afraid aI is going to take over my job. Some jobs yes, it did. But it also increased the amount of jobs because it ended up creating all these use cases, new cases that you couldn't do before.

It's not a supercharged, two cable thing. That's existing and added AI to it. And it's super targeted. That's exactly the same thing that low code is going to do. It's going to take everything that's there and it's going to start off super target.

Jeff

So because I reduce everything to NRF. Next year, when we're actually back in, in in New York city for the show, will there be

my wife, we're going to have to drag me to that. But I think I think that's probably coming in my very near future. Yeah, because I'm too young to really have to worry about that. Yeah. There, will there be a whole row or a whole section of low code or we'll just, will it be down in the lower or in the upper sections with that, with the start-ups or it will be down on the, the lowest in the basement for where the smaller younger companies are going or will it be right on the main floor?

Brian

No, I think that'd be a few small company in the main flow. And also some of the bigger companies in their main floor might focus on the mod more on low code F1. Because I think what happens is some of the bigger companies are already thinking about it because they already have large enterprise apps and they've got to this place where now they have to start providing better tool sets and integrating deeply.

And they're seeing the retail shift very fast. Because earlier, we did, it always wanted to go to a one-stop shop and have a one provided easy to maintain contracts right now that is it's changing. They're seeing the retailers are seeing the digital benefits across every platform that's out there and everybody, and now there is a focus on best of breed, right?

So these bigger platform providers the guys who basically typically are in the main floor slowly seeing that, like that the cop is being lifted and shifted on any of them. And then some of them do already have local capabilities. So they will end up, providing and integrating that low code into their customs, into not in their custom, but rather into their traditional legacy stacks and providing surfacing features and functions.

So you're going to see both.

Jeff

Interesting. So what is the, in your estimation in retail? What is the state of adoption? Let's say the top a hundred retailers represented a trillion dollars in revenue of those hundred, how many, and obviously it starts with Walmart and target and all those folks.

How many of those have some aspect of low-code in operation today?

Brian

I think today, I think probably very small. We are looking at early double digits, right in the 18 20% adoption, 18, I don't know, 15 to 20%. This is just, I don't have numbers. This is essentially.

Jeff

You're rolling with an analyst.

You're rolling with an analyst now, Brian, you can just make crazy a crazy statements, right?

Brian

No. Sometimes we actually have, it's funny and iterate. We actually write models sometimes to come up with some of our numbers. I don't know if you noticed, like at one point in 2020, I think 2020 beginning of the year, we predicted the the number of AI companies that are going to get.

A quiet and we only came short of I think two 15 or something like 15 companies thought. Because we do actually write models sometimes because we have a lot of ML people here. All the guys who are like you, who you spoke to. So we do the thing sometimes but this is something that we don't have proper numbers, so it's just a guest.

But what's I, thing more interesting. I think this is where I think where the rubber hits the road right. In my mind, I think what's really fascinating and interesting is. If you take all these industries, take insulin, take oil and gas, take take defense take healthcare right now.

You'll take lead in, I think retail is a industry that is super primed for low code. I'm telling you what there are a number of reasons. First is that digital is growing faster. Way faster in retail, right? Number one, number two, every action that happens, KPI and financial benefits. That's one of the industry in the, that's one of the exciting things about retail as an industry, right?

In a lot of the other industries. When you do take some actions, you build up a, put out an application, you can easily show KPIs. Retail, that KPIs are very highly, nicely defined, like conversion Cod. Engagement, all the mentors are very cleanly defined, right? So that's interesting because now, if low code apps are tied to apps that have significant KPI, and then these locals are going to grow, it's going to ride that way.

Which I think is second. And I think what's going to be third. I think retail. And then the prior set I use 74% of all retail applications, consumer facing retail applications are all hybrid. That means they are all web based applications. Retailers have a higher number of them engineers compared to AI or other types of engineers.

It's like insurance has been in the data business for a very long time. They actually, because they have to deal with actually cable is modelings and everything. They have a lot of physicians and eventually they all signed with an into MLS data scientists. But retailers don't have enough data scientists, proportionately compared to other industry.

So they have to do a lot of obstacles. So low code is going to help them really fast to up-skill really quickly.

Jeff

Interesting. I'll have to think about that a little bit. Huh. Okay. I'm actually, I've been really remiss to offer offer questions to the audience. So if anybody has any questions that were coming up probably another 15 or 20 minutes or so.

So just go ahead and raise your hand and we'll pop you up to the stage. Wow. That's interesting, Brian. You actually think that retail will see a faster adoption of low code than other verticals. Interesting. Okay.

Brian

Yeah. It may be a dollar value. Total dollar value wise. It may be lower because some of the other interims are heavy.

It spend dollar value away. But but adoption wise, I think retail is primed for them.

Jeff

We, they definitely let's see, let's bring Ruben up. Definitely every other, most out of their vertical have a higher percent of rev to it. But there's 500 tier one retailers and 10,000 tier two.

The sheer scale size of the retail industry creates a whole different model.

Brian

Yeah, that is true. That is true. That's another interesting thing. That's a, that's another sexy thing about retail, right? I was actually, it was so funny. I'm a that, when I, before this, I used to be in the media industry.

And then at that point Jeff you probably know I invested in a couple of startups and one of them was in the media industry as well. And you said, Brian, you should start looking at retail, right? Yeah, exactly. So then I didn't know anybody at retail and, but finally I was on a board and at, thank God I met John Nordmark.

And then I was talking about this company I invested in and Johnson and I said, that'll be, we been talking to I dunno, like four media companies for the last one year. And he said, Brian did a 500 retainer and then suddenly just dawned on me. It's a much more exposure quite efficient in terms of Like number of tier number of customers that out there.

And let me ask you this. Oh, checked on that point. Yeah, just real quickly. If I can interject on that point by comparison, the healthcare industry is a $300 billion industry. But at the end of the day, it's so consolidated that the technology buyers there's maybe less than 500 people that determined.

What technology is being bought for that entire industry, again, because you don't, hospital chains, clinic chains, there's only so many companies compared to retail, which as you say, there's, 10,000, 20,000 retailers out there in the healthcare industry, technology buyers, there's only 300 to 500 people making those decisions on what technology gets bought.

So as far as the innovation cycle now is, if you're a startup, even though there's a lot of money there. It's just such a difficult place to get entry to. It's such a protected club, if you will. Yeah. Said, Dave, absolutely you're spot on. Because, in the media industry, it's even worse, right?

There are eight players. If you are in the carrier in the U S there are four players, they all consolidating even with all the FEC government regulations.

That's fine. As a big discussion, this is a topic is really close to my heart. As I invest in a lot of startups. and how do you the market quickly and so some Randy would then go and under the hood stuff later. So one question that from retail versus I come from telcos, I come from many of these enterprise where there out bodies.

We define some standards and based on the standards, for example, cell phone, two CDMA, three, all of them. I've been multiple people can come and build around it and all that. So then you go to low code to me, that is also important is to be able to be into appropriately play teachers there, your thing that you have that your company.

So the body defining these fenders for too. Do the kind of explosive innovation going in. It's a great question, Rubin, but I don't think when it comes to the tech, the only organization that's doing a little bit of work in here is NRS, whatever CIO council and so on. But unlike in the caveat or the standards, they don't necessarily set implementation and the tech standards per se.

There are some high-level accepted best practices, but I don't think they set standards

Jeff

Brian, we probably have a couple minutes just curious as we wrap up what's the play for tier two and tier three retail with low code. I'm guessing they might even be a faster adopter or what do you know? What's your thinking?

Brian

See, I think local is not a discriminating force. What I mean by that is because most local platforms are very cost-effective to use. And in fact that's it very well. You need to do MP3 play, especially to tier two plan, because they have the same set up broad use cases like the tier one player, maybe slightly less.

But at the same time, even less workforce so the upskilling there we'll have to play, we'll play in a much stronger way. And you will see the benefits of low coding, especially in theater.

Jeff

And then how low can low code, is it something that a, so tier two typically is a billion dollars down to 250 million, then tier three is two 50 to 50 million.

Does it? Does low-code have a play it at the tier three level?

Brian

See, I think the entry level we'll be mostly point solutions. And then existing platforms are gonna provide built-in capabilities. And then these local will be bound to those existing platforms.

Like for example, Shopify and all these other type of, big commerce, all these platforms at all, there we'll actually have these type of local and capabilities in their marketplace. So the tier 3's may not use low code as a platform within the company, but would be the beneficiaries of apps built on top of local.

Jeff

Okay, great. That's probably a pretty good place to wrap it up by Brian. Any final thoughts on on what a retailer should be looking at, what they should be thinking about?

Brian

No, I think with a district kind of wrap it up. I think this is a serious revolution, the numbers. And I think this actually allows retail

retail as leader things within retail to get to market faster and upskill your workforce and be ready, thought of the forces of innovation that keeps you going independently. And I think that there's a lot of value in this. So I would say, read up on it, learn more about it.