We can argue endlessly about what exactly Artificial Intelligence means; it’s become one of those terms that is bandied-about so much that it can now almost legitimately be applied to any piece of code. But one thing I think we can all agree on is that “things” are getting “clever”.

I read with interest two news articles today that seem to combine into a bigger picture; one in the UK’s Daily Mail (yes, I know, the Daily Mail) confidently asserting that AI will be “billions of times smarter than humans” and one right on my doorstep in the NZ Herald that rather appropriately heralds the world’s first intelligent shopping trolley which is able to scan items as they are put into the cart and by linking an app direct to your rapidly-shrinking bank account avoid the need for the checkout process. If this doesn’t sound familiar then you obviously haven’t read my previous post referencing Amazon Go.

But despite what the prevailing media is claiming, AI in grocery shopping is nothing new. In fact if you go all the way back to 2011 again in the Daily Mail you can read about an amazing piece of innovation that allowed shoppers to enter their shopping list into the cart and then enjoy the luxury of sat-nav style instructions directing you to the items entered around the store “turn left at the potatoes; your muesli is three metres on the right; at the end of the aisle, perform a u-turn but only if safe to do so”. I can’t understand why this never caught on, but Tesco has now moved onto the Scan as You Shop solution whereby shoppers get their own laser gun to scan items on the way into their cart and then pay at a pay station without having to unload and reload the whole cart. The obvious room for error and omissions is politely catered-for by the euphemistically named “Service Checks” which amounts to a “stop-and-search” of your cart items – no such intrusions with Amazon Go or Foodstuff’s Smartcart where AI (there’s that term again) makes sure everything in your cart is paid for – whether you like it or not.

Which nicely brings me on to the point of this article – things are getting clever and its changing the way we shop.

From a technology perspective, I believe we are at something of a crossroads. This applies to all business sectors, not just retail, but I will use the shop as a handy analogy to illustrate my point.

Go into any modern retail outlet and you will find a plethora of digitally enabled devices and systems; mobile POS, EFTPOS pay systems, digital signage, e-labels, beacons, touchscreen windows, cameras and alarms. Over the past decade or so, these solutions have been incrementally added to the physical shop environment without a great deal of planning or foresight. Increasingly, these solutions are mobile enabled and process in real-time. Many retail chains are starting to find that they are running digitally-enabled retail outlets on what amounts to home wifi, with a standard ethernet connection via a landline and an equally standard wifi router.

So at this crossroads, we can either continue down the route of incremental additions of new applications/systems, with their own data repository requirements, point-to-point integrations with any other systems and proprietary comms “black boxes”. Or we can look to do something different.

Applying Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) principles by introducing an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) software solution such as Mulesoft, it is now technically possible and economically viable to completely change the way applications and data endpoints are integrated – even in shops.

With a little bit of planning and forethought and the inevitable re-plumbing of point-to-point solutions, it is now possible to leverage modern API- driven technologies that enable rapid introduction of new applications or data sources, real-time communications and the removal of the need for data replication. Add to this a data/comms appliance device that not only replaces your home wifi router but can cache data in transit, beef up your firewall security and provide greater resilience to hardware or network failure, then you have a future-proofed digital architecture that is fast, flexible and cost-effective.

The advent of wifi Halow (low frequency wifi) will dramatically reduce the cost of implementing and running IoT devices – if you haven’t come across wifi Halow yet this is a good article to read – and with the above architecture in place, the fragmented, incrementally-changing approach to new technologies will truly be replaced by the one-stop-shop.