The agent will need to prove who it is before it can spend your money

12 August 2026

Everyone is racing to build the AI agent that shops for you. Almost no one is answering the question that decides whether it works: when a piece of software turns up at the checkout claiming to act on your behalf, who verifies that it is telling the truth?

That is the quieter half of this week’s agentic-commerce noise, and it is worth pausing on. Amid the fanfare about assistants that run errands, a smaller conversation is happening among the people building the plumbing. Writing on X this week, a GenLayer follower described the project plainly: infrastructure for “the emerging agentic economy”, where AI agents transact and interact autonomously, and candidly admitted that its “direct impact on ordinary daily routines is limited” today. That honesty is more useful than most of the hype around it. It names the gap. The agents are coming; the trust layer beneath them is not built yet.

Hold that next to the other signals crossing the desk this week. One founder put the tension exactly right: everyone wants an assistant that can run errands, nobody wants to hand a chatbot their credit card and hope for the best. Meanwhile the agents are quietly becoming the new front door to commerce, shifting shopping from search-driven browsing to agent-driven decision-making. Two facts, one problem. The demand is real. The guarantees are missing.

Here is why it matters, and it matters most through what I call the machine lens. For a generation, the retailer’s question was how to rank on the shelf, then how to rank in search. The new question is what the machine believes about you, and increasingly, whether the machine at your checkout is even the machine it claims to be. When a human shopper arrives, a brand knows roughly who it is dealing with. When an agent arrives, the retailer faces three unknowns at once: is this agent genuinely acting for the customer it names, does it have the authority to spend, and can the transaction be trusted after the fact if it goes wrong. Answer those badly and you have not built convenience. You have built the most efficient fraud channel in the history of retail.

That is the real work companies like GenLayer are circling. Not the shopping, the settling. Not the recommendation, the reconciliation. An agentic economy does not run on cleverness; it runs on verifiable trust, on some neutral way for one machine to confirm what another machine did and who stood behind it. Get that right and agents become a payment rail every retailer can accept. Get it wrong and every retailer will do what retailers always do with risk they cannot price: refuse it at the door.

This is also where the West should watch China, though not for the reason people assume. China did not win at digital payments by building better wallets. It won by embedding identity, settlement and trust inside a handful of ecosystems, so that when you paid through Alipay or WeChat, both sides knew the transaction would clear and could be resolved. The agentic economy needs the same foundation, and the open question is whether the West builds it as neutral infrastructure or lets a few platforms own the whole rail. That is not a technology choice. It is a power choice.

What to watch. Ignore the demos of agents booking dinner and buying trainers. Watch for the first serious standard that lets a retailer verify an agent’s mandate and settle a disputed agent purchase. The company that owns that verification layer will sit between every brand and every shopping agent, and take a toll on both. That is the position worth tracking, not the chatbot with the friendliest voice.

The Roth Read. Stop just asking whether an AI agent can find your product. Although that in itself is a must. Start also asking whether you can trust the one that turns up to buy it. The retailer that solves verification will accept agents as customers; the one that cannot will treat every one of them as a threat, and in a market where agents are becoming the front door, a locked door is the same as a closed shop.

The robot you never see is the one already picking your order

11 August 2026

Ask people what a robot looks like and they picture a face, two legs, a hand that waves. The robot that actually touches your life has none of those. It is a squat orange trolley in a warehouse in eastern China, and it has probably already handled something you ordered this week.

The BBC went inside a facility run by Geek+, which it describes as the world’s largest supplier of autonomous mobile warehouse robots. The pictures are undramatic on purpose: fleets of low, flat machines gliding under shelves, lifting them, carrying the whole rack to a human who picks the item and sends it on. A company executive put the honest part plainly. The early challenge, he said, was getting customers to believe such robots could create real value. That belief problem is now solved. The market has moved from proving the idea to buying it at scale.

Here is why that matters more than any humanoid demo you saw this month. The debate about robots and work keeps staging itself as a confrontation: the machine that walks in and takes the job. That is the wrong picture. The real displacement does not arrive on two legs and announce itself. It arrives as a floor plan. It arrives as a warehouse redesigned around the machine, where the human is no longer the picker but the exception the machine defers to, the pair of hands that handles what the shelf-carrier cannot. The work does not vanish. It is quietly rewritten, and the terms of the rewrite are set by whoever supplies the robots.

Right now, increasingly, that is China. Not because of some sudden leap in cleverness, but for reasons that are structural and dull and therefore durable. China builds the motors, the batteries and the chassis at a cost and speed no one else matches, and it deploys at a scale that turns every warehouse into a live test bed. Geek+ did not win the global warehouse by inventing a wheel. It won by iterating faster, shipping cheaper, and running more robots in more buildings than anyone else, until the learning compounded. While the West argued about whether automation was ethical, the fulfilment centre behind your Saturday delivery was quietly being run from Suzhou.

For anyone who runs a retail operation, this is the uncomfortable truth beneath the humanoid theatre. The efficiency that lets a rival undercut you on delivery speed and price is not visible on the shop floor and not printed on the box. It is upstream, in a building you will never tour, powered by machines you did not choose and cannot easily match. Your customer feels only the outcome: it came faster, it cost less. They will never know a robot did it, and they will not care. That is precisely the point. The most consequential robot is the one that has been designed to disappear.

And the jobs question deserves better than the two lazy answers. It is not the robot apocalypse, and it is not the comforting line that new work always appears. It is a redistribution of who holds the skill and who holds the leverage. The warehouse worker becomes a supervisor of throughput, faster to train and easier to replace, while the value migrates to the software and the supplier. A society that wants good work out of this has to fight for it deliberately. It will not fall out of the machine on its own.

What to watch. Watch the gap between the robots we photograph and the robots we buy. The humanoids get the headlines and the funding rounds; the wheeled workhorses get the contracts. When a Western retailer announces a fulfilment upgrade this year, read the fine print for whose robots are inside. The name on the invoice is the real story.

The Roth Read. Stop watching the robot that waves. Watch the one that hides. If the efficiency that beats you on price and speed is built into a warehouse you have never seen, running on machines from a supplier you never chose, then your competitive edge is already being set by someone else’s floor plan, and you should decide today whether you are going to own that layer or rent it.

The robot can jump. The question is who owns the ground it lands on.

7 August 2026

A humanoid robot leapt, wobbled, and stayed on its feet. That is the clip going round this week. The real story is not in the air. It is in who built the thing, and where.

The AGIBOT A3 Ultra, from the Shanghai firm AgiBot, has been shown clearing jumps, recovering its balance in a heartbeat, and holding its footing on uneven ground. The demonstration is genuinely impressive: controlled landings, smooth gait, fast recovery. It arrives the same week Google DeepMind detailed Gemini Robotics 2, a model that claims whole-body control from feet to fingertips and the ability to adapt to any two-armed robot in hours, and Xiaomi published Xiaomi-Robotics-1, trained on 100,000 hours of data across more than 1,700 scenarios, from homes to industrial sites. Three signals, one week. The brain and the body are both improving fast, and two of the three names are Chinese.

We have been trained to watch the acrobatics. A robot that can jump feels like a milestone because a jump is legible: we know what it costs a human body to do it well. But balance recovery is a solved-enough problem to be a demo reel. The harder, quieter breakthroughs are the ones you cannot film in a single dramatic take. A policy model that generalises to a task it was never shown. A data pipeline that turns 100,000 hours of raw motion into something a machine can learn from. Those do not trend. They compound.

Here is why a retailer or a brand owner should read past the highlight. The value in the next decade of robotics does not sit in the leg that jumps. It sits in the stack beneath it: the batteries, the motors, the rare earths, the manufacturing lines that turn a prototype into ten thousand units at a price a warehouse operator will actually pay. That stack is, today, disproportionately Chinese. Which is why the most telling story in robotics this week was not the jump at all. It was the quieter line from Washington: apparently roughly 90 per cent of US robotics research is now done using Chinese-made robots, and the US government is weighing a ban.

Sit with that number. The country that wants to lead this field is running its own experiments on hardware it does not make and may soon forbid. You cannot legislate a supply chain into existence overnight. China did not arrive here by luck or by copying. It arrived by controlling the boring parts: the components, the assembly, the willingness to put machines into hotels and restaurants and logistics floors and learn from the mess of the real world while others wrote white papers. AgiBot jumps because the ecosystem around AgiBot lets it iterate cheaply and fast.

So the correct reaction to the A3 Ultra is not awe, and not fear. It is a question about dependency. If your operation is planning to deploy service or fulfilment robots in the next three years, the machine in your building will very likely have been born in a Chinese supply chain, whatever badge is on the chassis. That is a commercial fact before it is a political one, and it will shape your costs, your options, and your resilience.

What to watch. Not the next jump. Watch whether the US ban moves from proposal to policy, and what it does to the price and availability of research-grade humanoids in the West. A ban that removes the cheapest hardware without replacing it does not protect an industry. It grounds it.

The Roth Read. Stop scoring these robots on what they can do and start asking who you will depend on to buy one. The clip you shared this week showed a machine that can jump; the balance sheet you sign in three years will show who controls the parts. If your robotics strategy has a hardware plan but no supply-chain plan, you do not have a strategy. You have a highlight reel.

Forget the backflips. China is teaching robots to clock in.

6 August 2026

For years the story from China’s robotics labs came with a soundtrack: a whir of servos, a crowd gasping, a humanoid landing a backflip. Impressive. Also beside the point. The signal this week is quieter and far more consequential. In an underground lab in Beijing, and on a training floor in Hefei, China has stopped asking whether its robots can dance. It is asking whether they can work.

A Chinese robotics firm, Gaobot, put the case plainly to camera this week: for decades industrial robots have done one thing, thousands of times, on a fixed program. Bolt here. Weld there. Repeat. What China now wants is a machine that can handle the mess of a real factory, the odd angle, the dropped part, the job nobody bothered to write a routine for. On 6 August, at a pre-training ground for embodied intelligence in Hefei, 83 robots from different companies were put through more than thirty replicated real-world scenes: the home, the shop floor, the warehouse. Not a demo. A rehearsal for employment.

The numbers behind this are not modest. IDC expects China’s spending on embodied intelligence to climb from 1.4 billion US dollars to 77 billion over five years, a compound growth rate near 94 per cent. Embodied AI has, for the first time, been written into the national government work report. Unitree, which shipped 5,500 humanoids last year, more than anyone on earth, has filed to go public. The language coming out of the sector is telling: 2026 is being called the year of mass-production commercialisation, the year the work leaves the lab.

Here is why a retailer should read this over their coffee, not skim past it. The West has spent this year debating the humanoid as spectacle and as threat: will it take my job, can it fold my laundry, is it safe. China has quietly reframed the question as a supply-chain one. A machine that follows a fixed program is a tool. A machine that learns a new task from watching, that adapts to a scene it has not seen, is closer to labour. And labour, unlike tooling, scales into every corner of an economy: the stockroom, the loading bay, the shop floor at closing time.

Notice, too, where these robots are being sold. Unitree and AgiBot are not just filing IPOs; they are opening shops. A flagship store in Beijing. An Agibot deployment inside a JD MALL in Shanghai, fitted out as a retail complex, around five million yuan of investment in a single store. The West imagines robots arriving through the factory door. China is building the retail entrance first, letting the public meet the machine over the counter, where familiarity, and demand, are made. Dobot has gone further still, launching a humanoid pitched at the young family and the home.

The mechanism matters, and it is not magic. China’s edge is structural: the batteries, the motors, the rare earths, the assembly lines sit inside the same borders as the labs. When the New Yorker’s Kai-Fu Lee says the two countries are now “two different universes,” this is the concrete meaning of it. One universe is arguing about what the robot might mean. The other is collecting the training data, thirty scenes at a time, and pricing the shelf space.

What to watch. Watch the training grounds, not the trade shows. WAIC gives you the polished demo; the Hefei data-collection floor gives you the roadmap. When a single site is running 83 robots across warehouse, shop and home scenes, the next headline is not a better backflip. It is a purchase order.

The Roth Read. Stop watching Chinese robots for the trick and start watching them for the task. If your competitor’s stockroom is being rehearsed on a training floor in Hefei this year, you do not have a technology question, you have a cost-base question, and it is already being answered without you. The West is grading these machines on whether they can amaze us. China is grading them on whether they can be hired.

China did not spend last week building video tools. It was building eyes.

5 August 2026

Every retailer who watched three Chinese labs ship video models in seven days filed the news under marketing. Cheaper ads, faster content, a problem for the agency. Wrong drawer. What landed last week was the perception layer for the machines that will one day walk your shop floor, and it landed open, and it landed cheap.

The launches came within days of each other. ByteDance’s Seedance 2.5 now generates thirty seconds of video with sound in a single pass, holding characters, scenes and camera logic together across a whole narrative rather than one lucky shot. MiniMax’s H3 does fifteen seconds with stereo audio generated jointly rather than bolted on, and on 3 August MiniMax put the weights on Hugging Face for anyone to download. Alibaba closed the week with Qwen3.8-Max, 2.4 trillion parameters, which now sits second in the world on the public leaderboard for reading images and visual material.

So run the telescope the other way. A model that keeps thirty seconds coherent, objects that persist behind an obstacle, weight that falls the way weight falls, a cup that is still on the table after the camera moves, has not learned to draw. It has learned how the world behaves. Generation is only the exam. The syllabus is physics, permanence and consequence. And the same weights that let a machine imagine a scene let it read one.

Reading a scene, fast, in bad light, with a person moving through it, is the entire job of a robot’s eyes.

That is the triangulation, and it is why this is a retail story rather than a media one. China already holds the other two legs. By industry counts it ships the overwhelming majority of the world’s humanoid robots, and TrendForce expects Chinese output to nearly double this year, with Unitree and AgiBot taking around eighty per cent of shipments. It holds the motors, the batteries, the rare earths, and the appetite to put machines in public before the ethics committee has finished its report. What it lacked was sight worth putting behind the visor. It is now building that in the open and giving it away.

Price finishes the argument. DeepSeek’s V4-Flash update, the least photogenic of the week’s launches and probably the most consequential, costs roughly three cents to run the full Artificial Analysis intelligence battery, against $3.15 for the Western frontier. A robot has a battery, not a data centre. Perception has to be almost free before it can live inside a body on a shop floor, and last week it became almost free.

A caution worth keeping. None of this means the machine understands anything. Video models still get physics wrong in ways that are amusing in a clip and unacceptable in a machine holding a bottle near a customer’s child. A convincing picture of a grasp is not a grasp, and that distance is where the next two years of the argument will be fought.

The direction, though, is not ambiguous. The robot that eventually watches your shelves, greets your customer and judges whether that customer is confused or annoyed will not be running perception you bought from a vendor you can name. It will be running weights someone downloaded, most likely trained in China, tuned by a supplier three tiers below the name above your door. And it will still be your brand doing the looking.

What to watch. Not the next video demo, and not the next leaderboard. Watch for the moment a Chinese maker ships a robot whose perception layer is one of these video models, and says so. When those two industries start sharing a checkpoint, the cost of machine sight collapses the way the cost of machine text already has, and every question retailers assumed they had until 2030 arrives early.

The Roth Read. Stop treating AI video as a marketing line item and start asking who supplies your machines’ eyes, because you are about to buy vision the way you buy electricity: from someone else, invisibly, with no say in how it was made. Put that question on your risk register this quarter. The machine watching your customer speaks for you, whoever trained it.

The engineer said ‘beyond my lifetime.’ Now he says five years. That gap is the whole story.

4 August 2026

A Google engineer sat down this week to introduce Gemini Robotics 2 and let slip something more revealing than any demo. Asked when robots would enter daily life, he gave three answers from three moments in his own career. Three years ago: beyond my lifetime. Two years ago: maybe ten years. Now: five to ten. The technology is not the headline. The collapsing of that estimate is.

Gemini Robotics 2, launched by Google DeepMind, brings what the company calls whole-body intelligence to machines: the ability to reason about a task, plan across the whole body, and fold that reasoning into physical action. In the launch film an engineer asks a robot to make a t-shirt, and everyone in the room agrees, cheerfully, that robotics is incredibly hard. What has changed is not that it got easy. It is that the curve of getting less hard has bent sharply upward, and the people building it can feel the bend under their own feet.

Hold that engineer’s three answers in your hand, because they are the argument. A serious person, close to the work, revised his forecast of a civilisational shift from never to within a decade in the span of a normal contract. That is not a prediction about robots. It is a warning about how badly humans forecast their own displacement. We assume the future arrives on a schedule we can plan around. It arrives, instead, the way this engineer’s own estimate did: quietly, then all at once.

So let us have the honest conversation about work, and let us not have the lazy one. The lazy one says robots take jobs and society collapses. The comfortable rebuttal, doing the rounds this week under the banner “when robots create jobs,” says every wave of automation has minted more work than it destroyed, so relax. Both are too neat. The loom created jobs, in aggregate, over decades. It did not create them for the weaver, in that town, in that lifetime. Aggregate comfort is cold comfort to the person standing in the gap. The question worth asking is not whether robots create jobs. It is who is in the room when they do, and who is shown the door before the new room is built.

There is a prediction circulating that work itself could become optional within ten to twenty years. Set aside who said it. The claim deserves scrutiny on its own terms, and it fails the test, because it mistakes the disappearance of tasks for the disappearance of need. A society does not become leisured because machines can fold laundry. Someone owns the machines. Someone sets the price of the labour they replace. “Optional” is a word for people who already own the robot, not for the people the robot was bought to replace.

The China lens sharpens all of this. While Western commentary debates whether work is ending, Chinese firms are answering a narrower and more useful question: what, precisely, can a machine do reliably enough to deploy in public tomorrow. Unitree drills its G1 through brutal training. Automated robot kiosks are already trading across Chinese high streets, quietly reshaping small-scale retail service. The difference is not vision. It is that one hemisphere is philosophising about a decade away, and the other is booking the shelf space now.

What to watch. Watch the forecasts of the people who build these systems, not the pundits who sell books about them. When engineers inside the labs keep shortening their own timelines, quarter after quarter, that is the signal. A pundit’s prediction costs nothing. A builder’s revised estimate is a confession that the thing is closer than they last admitted, including to themselves.

The Roth Read. Stop planning for the timeline you were given, because the people building this keep tearing theirs up. The right question for your business is not “will robots take these jobs” but “when the task goes, is my person still in the room, or already out of it.” Whoever owns that answer owns the workforce of the next decade. Make sure it is you, and make sure your people know it is you.

China is not automating the shop. It is automating the welcome.

3 August 2026

A robot that stacks a shelf is a warehouse story. A robot that greets you, checks you in, pours your coffee and remembers your name is a brand story. China has quietly stopped building the first and started shipping the second.

The signal this week is not one launch but a pattern. Reports out of Shenzhen, amplified across social feeds, describe AI-powered service robots spreading fast through Chinese hotels, restaurants, healthcare, logistics and retail, with businesses treating automation less as a cost cut and more as a growth line. It rhymes with what else crossed the wire today: a 24-hour convenience store in Hong Kong staffed by a single robot that stocks, picks and rings you up, and a state council official confirming China now builds over half the world’s humanoid robots. The context is not incidental. It is the whole point.

What happened, tightly: the machines have moved out of the loading bay and onto the shop floor, the reception desk, the ward. They are no longer hidden infrastructure. They are the face a customer meets.

Here is why that should hold a retailer’s attention longer than any spec sheet. For thirty years we have told ourselves that the human touch is the last thing automation cannot take. The smile at the door, the recommendation from someone who knows the range, the small grace of being recognised. That was the moat. China is now testing, at national scale and in public, whether the moat was ever as deep as we claimed. When a robot checks you into a Chengdu hotel and it is faster, cheaper and unfailingly polite, the shopper does not file a complaint about the death of hospitality. The shopper checks in.

That is the uncomfortable read. The threat to Western retail was never that robots would out-lift us. It is that they might out-serve us, in exactly the moments we sold as irreplaceably human. And the reason China gets to run this experiment first is structural, not magical. It controls the supply chain that makes the hardware cheap, the motors, the batteries, the sensors. It has the manufacturing density to iterate a service robot through ten generations while a Western firm is still costing the first. And it has a culture and a regulator willing to put the thing in front of a real customer and learn in daylight. While we convened panels on the ethics of the robot host, they booked ten thousand of them into hotels.

The brand question this raises is sharper than efficiency. It is about what your welcome means. If a robot can deliver competent service, then competent service is no longer a differentiator, it is table stakes, available to every rival at the price of a subscription. What remains scarce is the thing a machine cannot yet counterfeit: judgement, warmth that reads the room, the member of staff who breaks the script because they can see you are having a bad day. That is not a reason to keep humans on the floor out of sentiment. It is a reason to redeploy them to the moments that actually move a shopper, and let the machine take the rest.

What to watch. Watch whether the Chinese service robot travels. The convenience-store test in Hong Kong is the tell, because Hong Kong is where mainland deployment meets international retail standards and demanding, cosmopolitan shoppers. If it works there, the export case writes itself, and the first Western chains to license it will not announce it as automation. They will announce it as service.

The Roth Read. Stop asking whether a robot can do your staff’s job. Ask which two minutes of your customer’s visit are so human that no machine should touch them, and whether your people are spending their day there or wasting it on the work a robot should already own. Get that wrong and you will automate the wrong half of the welcome, keeping the queue and losing the smile.

WORLDPRIDE came to New York City

1 July 2019

June 2019 WORLDPRIDE came to New York City to mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.

The first Pride parade, called the “Pride March,” was held on the one year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising (June 28, 1970) and has since become an annual civil rights demonstration. The march was led by Craig Rodwell, the owner of the old Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop and drew thousands of participants. Grand Marshals have included former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Dustin Lance Black, Cyndi Lauper, Edie Windsor, Jonathan Groff, Laverne Cox and Ian McKellen.

The 2019 NYC Pride March, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, was on Sunday, June 30. The route started on 26th Street & 5th Avenue, ran  South to 8th Street, continue West along 8th Street, turning left on Christopher Street, passing Stonewall, and running back uptown along 7th Avenue, ending on 23rd Street

The 2019 March will the biggest joined by over 600 unique marching parts , representing non-profits, community organizations, corporate sponsors, small businesses, political candidates, activists and more.

See how various retailers are actively participating both in store and with unique products in this PDF.

China’s Suning Buys Carrefour China

23 June 2019

Today China’s Suning.com has announced that it will buy 80% of Carrefour China.

The deal is structured in a way that The Carrefour Group will sell 80% of its equity interest in Carrefour China to Suning.com. This is a cash transaction valuing Carrefour China at an enterprise value of €1.4 billion. The Carrefour Group will retain a 20% stake in the business and two seats out of seven on Carrefour China’s Supervisory Board. Suning has the right to buy the remaining 20% after a period.

Carrefour was a pioneer in China bring the hypermarket format to an excited Chinese Consumer in 1995.

I remember being at their first store opening and looking at the expressions of delight and amazement on the faces of Chinese consumers as they had not seen anything like this type of format or vast ranges and choice before.

Carrefour were the first western grocery and hypermarket retailer in China to realise the critical importance of trying to re-create the buzz, excitement and feeling of freshness of the Chinese wet market inside the hypermarket.

Today Carrefour has 210 hypermarkets and 24 convenience stores in China. This has generated in 2018 net sales of €3.6 billion (RMB 28.5 billion) and EBITDA of €66 million (RMB 516 million). It has had negative like for like sales – -5.9% in 2018 following -5.5 in 2017.

Other than generating needed cash for Carrefour and a China exit they were looking for, what does this transaction tell us about retail in China and globally?

Well much…

Suning.com is one of China’s leading physical and ecommerce retailers.

It has a network of over 8,881 physical stores in more than 700 cities across China from tier one’s to tier 4 and 5’s and runs the country’s 3rd largest B2C e-commerce platform.

One of the shareholder’s of Suning.com is Alibaba and this where it potentially gets really interesting…

Alibaba Group will soon have (when this deal closes after going through regulatory approval by Chinese the competition authorities (expected by December 2019) holdings in Auchan, RT-Mart and Carrefour in China as well as Suning. Alibaba invested some $4.6 Billion US Dollars for a 19.9% stake in Suning in August 2015. When Suning also agreed to invest 14 billion yuan to acquire 1.1 percent of Alibaba.

This gives Alibaba with its own growing network of physical stores called Hema / Hippo Fresh advantageous access to more physical space in China.

The first Hema store opened its physical doors in January 2016 and now has some 100+ stores across China. Consumers can buy their groceries and fresh products especially sea food both online and offline. Hema’s increasingly middle-class Chinese consumers are ordering their food for the evening on their commute home via their smart phones. Delivery is guaranteed for 30 minutes after an order has been placed if the customer lives within a 3km radius of a Hema store.

This proposition is one of the elements that Jack Mar  refers to as “New Retail”.

 

The combination of physical and virtual retailing is the key to “New Retail’s” success. Alibaba now has even move physical coverage available to rapidly accelerate its “New Retail” concepts and thinking. But whilst having physical and virtual stores is key , it’s useless unless you can digitise the entire supply chain, from growers, manufactures and every single element along the way , including the store…And that is where Alibaba “New Retail” really excels. It has a commanding lead in, thinking, technology and capability in digitising the entire supply chain and linking this to the consumer. The world outside of China should take note and learn. Whoever said physical retail is dead…

Picture of the Week

12 April 2019

A picture I took in China…Anyone hazard guess what this is?

I’ll let you know if you are correct on Monday.

Have a good weekend,

David