The document discusses the future of the retail sector and how emerging technologies will impact it. Artificial intelligence, internet of things, blockchain, and service robots will transform the customer experience and optimize retail operations. While jobs may be impacted, new opportunities will arise in IT and data analysis. Retailers will focus on building customer relationships and tailoring engaging experiences. The retail sector is poised for advanced growth and development through new technologies.

1. THE FUTURE OF WORK – RETAIL SECTOR
DONE BY
Adarsh NJ
19DM015
SUBMITTED TO
Dr. Navin Shrivastava

2. TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. Present Situation
3. Futureof retail Sector
4. Opportunities& Challenges of the Future
5. Conclusion
6. References

3. INTRODUCTION
Retail industry is the sector of business where the products/services produced by the
producers finally meet the customers. The traditional model of consumption is basically three
stages which involves a need that the consumer experiences, a shop that will satisfy this need
and then consumes the product bought. This model is changing and have expanded like never
before. This report will be discussing about the various factors that have an impact on the
retail sector in the coming future around the globe, along with the developments that have
already happened and are on the rise. This report will also be discussing the various
innovations such as Artificial Intelligence, Service robots, Internet of Things, Blockchain etc
which plays a major role in the future of retail industry.
The rise in information technology have also created many opportunities for the
retailers, but it has also created new challenges. Customers have started to compare prices
real time in their smartphones, also the retailer started getting difficulties to manage the
online and offline stores independently. From the Human Resource management perspective,
more and more new jobs were created in order to fill the need of the new IT era.
In India, there has been a boom in the retail sector and a rise in private label brands
which are becoming major competitor for the big established brands. Kirana stores or STS
(Small Traditional Stores) are predominant in India. They are usually owned and run by the
lower class, the lower middle-class or the middle-class sections of the community. Even
though many modern self-service retail outlets are emerging in India, most of the people

4. including the people who have easy access to modern self-service outlets shops from these
STS dominantly.
PRESENT SITUATION
Before analysing future technologies and innovations that will change the working of
the retail industry, we must first look into the present developments as far as retail industry is
concerned. With the advent of online shopping, the consumers got many alternatives by
which they can compare the product pricing and its features quickly and easily. Hence for
effectively maintaining and understanding the online data that are left behind by online
interaction, there came different developments in the field of work. Some of those
developments include:
Retail Analytics: This is a form of analysis that retailers use in order to understand the
customer behaviour by understanding various forms of data such as purchase, location and
social media data. Retail analytics can give serious insights about the market, store, firm and
the customer.
Big Data: Organisations collects huge amount of data of each and every purchases and sales
that they have made such as the demographic data, date and time of purchase, components of
shopping cart, etc. Since the date storage costs have reduced significantly over time, firms
collect all these data in huge numbers and store them. This will later be analysed to get
various insights such as the ongoing trend and demand.
These are just some of the many innovations that are happening in the present retail
scenario. All this have created huge demand for jobs involving these innovations,

5. subsequently retailers who adopts these new technologies will be able to provide for huge
number of customers without worrying about high cost of retail building such as renting more
space, hiring workers (offline store workers) and inventory increase.
FUTURE OF RETAIL SECTOR
Various emerging technologies are on the rise which will expand the retail sector
from its current state to something which is ever more customer friendly and easy to work
with. Some of the technological innovations that can help bring about a change are:
1. Artificial Intelligence (AI): AI Technology has been starting to get widely recognised
in every field. During its inception, Apple launched its Siri, Microsoft its Cortana,
Amazon its Alexa. In Retail sector also the concept of Artificial Intelligence has
started developing in wide scale. In this new age, customers typically prefer to use
their phones to interact rather than a salesperson. By understanding this various big
retailers will soon start adopting AI technology into their retail business. By using AI
technology retailers can program it in such a way that it can speak in different
languages, avoid giving misinformation, help customers in navigating their stores by
locating the products they need, answering any kind of questions, optimise their
supply chain as a result etc.
2. Internet of Things (IoT): In 2009, when smartphones penetrated the markets and lots
of mobile websites and applications started popping up, it opened up a lot of scope in
improving the various businesses. The internet and technology now a days are way
cheaper and easy to access than in the previous times. IoT is the interconnection of
every day things that are in our daily life to the Internet and hence making them send
and receive data. With the rise of this technology, most of the basic appliances of our

6. day to day life such as Washers, ovens, doorbells, GPS, etc. In retail sector, IoT is
being adopted in improving self-checkout, good service, quick delivery etc. When
data from huge number of sensors from all the appliances come together, then IoT
emerges and improves the quality of service. With the decrease in storage cost,
advance visualisations, retail analytics, IoT provides a huge amount of data to the
retailers who will ultimately optimise their process.
3. Blockchain Technology (Distributed Ledger): It is predicted that a Blockchain
technology will be worth around $8 billion in the coming years. Blockchain is a
ledger or spreadsheet that are stored in hundreds and thousands of computers which
can be accessed to anyone. And even though they are accessible to anyone, that
doesn’t mean that it can be hacked easily, in fact it is impossible for it to be hacked
and altered because the data is so widely spread that it cannot be altered. By adopting
Blockchain, the advantages that the retailers will be gaining are the guarantee of the
traded goods being produced from a trusted source as the customers can see the entire
journey of the product right from the source to their hands, the intermediaries between
the producers and the consumers can dramatically be reduced and the transaction
costs of the product will also become cheaper than normal. Blockchain works better
when it is integrated with Internet of Things. Adopting Blockchain is a very
compelling opportunity to increase the profitability of the organisations, so it is very
likely to see this being adopted in most of the bigger retailers in the coming future.
4. Frontline service robots: Robots are yet another huge technological advancement that
can possibly replace human labour even in the retail sector for example in the
frontline service. Customers will soon be interacting with an actual robot instead of
humans. This can significantly reduce the labour costs. Retailers have also started to
experiment with driverless cars and drones for delivering purposes. One of such
organisations is our very own McDonald’s.
OPPORTUNITIES & CHALLENGES OF THE
FUTURE

7. Even though we see a significant amount of challenges for the work in future, the
opportunities also play a major part in it. The advent of technology taking over the retail
sector have obviously made an impression that many jobs will be taken over by technology
but there are opportunities in disguise. There will be a huge amount of work that will be in
demand mainly in the IT sector of the retail field. This will eventually force into a more
advanced retail sector and ultimately a better growth. Relating to this growth, the customers
will be wanting more value based, more curated and more engaging shopping experience than
ever before. This will give rise to quality-oriented retail experience, and hence the employees
will be more skilled and ease to work with than ever before.
The retailers will shift from transaction oriented to building a long-lasting relationship
with the customers. But this is not always true because the customers will even tend to lean
towards the retailers offering better offer than others. Hence the customers of the future will
be of two extremes, either extremely loyal or extremely shifting with their needs. This have
its opportunity in its own as retailers can now focus on the group they want to target and with
the availability of all the technological innovations in hand they are better equipped in
analysing and providing the customers according to their needs.
In the case of India, certain geodemographic sectors of the country may observe the
shrinking of the STS/Kirana stores because of the adoption of the modern retailers. This can
cause a rise in unemployment in the country, but this soon will be likely to change as more
and more sections of the country starts developing with the rise in education.
CONCLUSION
To conclude, the famous Moore’s Law by Intel’s Co-Founder Gordon Moore states
that “the computing technology will double with every 24 months”, and this have proved to
be very accurate considering what we are seeing in the modern world. The information
technology has taken over in every sector there is, and the retail sector doesn’t seem to be an
exception either. It has significantly altered the way that the modern-day retailers work. It is

8. making it a compulsion to update all the retailing curriculum to be updated regularly with
each and every advances in technology
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