This is an excellent book on how technology advancement is changing the Retail industry and how retailers can keep up with the rapid pace of change. Bionic Retail refers to the retail business model built on the backbone of a digital nervous system.

Gary Hawkins ran a family store many years back. He mentions how he always kept abreast of the latest practices; for instance, he started a customer loyalty program, home delivered items etc. Retail is a complex business with several parts needing to come together. Some of these became evident during the pandemic with supply chain issues and shortages.

A considerable portion of the book is devoted to technology advancement in general, as well as how it impacts retail. For instance, he quotes Ray Kurzweil, that a $1,000 computer in 2001 was equivalent to an insect brain, in 2015 to a mouse brain, and now a human brain. In 20 years, it will have the power of all human brains. This is how exponentially technology is progressing. There are references to Moore's law, Quantum computing, AR/VR, Computer vision, Digital Twins, Video analytics, and especially AI. Technology has always been at the forefront of retail industry change – be it barcodes many years back to accelerate check-outs, later personalized offers and now Retail Media Networks. Amazon has been the leader in technology innovation in the recent past, with Just Walk Out stores, palm checkout & robotics being the latest. It is investing more including in food retail.

A lot is happening in the industry and retailers are investing to keep up – Retail Media Networks. Hyper-Personalization, Smart-checkout, Omi-channel, AI based customer support etc. Walmart, for instance has a bot for vendor negotiations and it has turned out to be win-win with fast closures. A number of new technology companies find brief mention including Trigo, AiFi, Grabango, Augmodo, Instacart, Refinition, Birdzi, Symbotic systems, HuLoop, Blutag, Sifter Solutions, ScriptSave.

This is a very well written book with a call for retailers to transform leveraging technology. This transformation requires big picture strategic thinking and openness to change. Each retailer has its own strengths and need to fuse innovation with that. For instance, Walmart is now the largest grocery retailer in US with 90% Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart store and this provides it certain advantages. There are other retailers very strong in certain areas etc. There is a lot of good information on upcoming areas, aspects important for retailers to keep in and prepare for the future. Most of the high-level business & technology information is provided in the book itself and there is no specific prerequisite to reading this book.

My rating: 4.5 / 5.