Smart Stores Get Real as Carrefour Teams with Vusion | Fast Five Shorts
This Omni Talk Retail Fast Five segment, sponsored by the A&M Consumer and Retail Group, Mirakl, Ocampo Capital, Infios, Quorso, and Veloq, looks at Carrefour’s major partnership to digitize stores across France as part of its 2030 strategy.
Chris and Anne discuss whether smart stores are finally becoming reality and what US retailers should be doing to keep pace.
⏩ Watch the full episode here.
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Transcript
So excited to share this great news about this partnership.
Speaker A: and supermarkets in France by: Speaker A:The deployment covers three core technology layers, the Vusion IoT infrastructure for real time price updates and light guided pick to light employee assistance, Edge Sense, Bluetooth Connected Smart Rails for automatic product geolocation to optimize e commerce order prep and shelf restocking and Captana AI Micro cameras that continuously detect out of stocks, price discrepancies and planogram errors.
Speaker A:Carrefour will join Vusion Group's international Advisory board helping to define future technology standards for the sector.
Speaker A:The two companies will also co develop a quote Next Retail Experience center and quote focus on AI agentic commerce and in store data activation.
Speaker A:This follows Vision Group's large scale deployment with Walmart in the US making Carrefour the first major European retailer to commit to the full Vusion platform at scale.
Speaker A:Chris, I have to know what does the Carrefour Fusion Partnership mean for the global trajectory of smart store technology?
Speaker A:And what should US retailers be taking away from this?
Speaker B:Oh man, that's a really great question.
Speaker B:Really heady question to start off the podcast.
Speaker B:I mean to me, you know, it shows that we are very, very close to, you know, the dream, which is why we actually started Omnitalk back in the day was like talking about the dream of a smart store becoming a reality.
Speaker B:That's what this, this announcement tells me.
Speaker B:That's why we're leading with this announcement in my opinion, because it's big and the best analogy I can use to describe how I'm thinking about this is it's like a cocktail.
Speaker B:Anne, you and I like a good cocktail.
Speaker B:We know the ingredients of said cocktail, we know what the ingredients are at least Walmart and care for.
Speaker B:Do you know they have a good idea of what how they're going to mix the cocktail.
Speaker B:But now it's all about finding that right mixture of the cocktail for each individual retailer's to tolerance.
Speaker B:Because as we all know, we all have different tolerances for cocktails.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:So with that said, I think smart stores are definitely coming.
Speaker B:This is the signal to that.
Speaker B:And setting up Your operations atop a smart store platform is going to become a major point of differentiation and therefore US retailers need to be experimenting with their own version of this type of thing faster than they probably are.
Speaker B:That's my take.
Speaker A:Yeah, I mean I think it's, it goes back to what have we been hearing time after time from retailers.
Speaker A:It's in order to adopt any of this new technology to see the value of it, they have to focus on retail fundamentals from which to build off that, build that technology off of.
Speaker A:And I think with this fusion deployment they have better inventory visibility right away.
Speaker A:It allows them to have more efficient operations processes and there then become more revenue opportunities with some of the in store media that they talked about like the shelf, shelf rails from this deployment.
Speaker A:I think once that's set in motion, you hopefully have more revenue then to invest in the technology that you want to roll out in other areas of the store.
Speaker A:More time, most importantly for your associates to be able to learn how to use this new technology and then how that will help them be more efficient and that all trickles down to how it helps the customer.
Speaker A:So my question for us retailers is who is the next one that we're going to be able to see starting to adopt this technology store w after Walmart.
Speaker A:What does that look like in the US market?
Speaker A:So I don't know if you have any bets but.
Speaker B:No bets right now.
Speaker B:No bets right now.
