In retail parlance, the expression “everything must go” has always been enough to work shoppers into a frenzy. Now it’s time for the retailers to turn breathless, as the expression for these wondrous high-tech times might as well be “everything must go now.” 

 “I’ve been in the retail space since the mid-1990s, and I’ve never seen innovation this fast before—the pace and the adoption,” says Stacey Shulman, chief innovation officer of Intel’s retail solutions division. “Heat mapping, dwell analysis and computer vision have been around since 2014, so it’s not new, but adopting the tech is more of the standard, and we see object detection on the shelves, with flying drones that scan shelves to see which items are on or not on them, and whether they’re stocked correctly.” 

The marvels hardly stop there. Working hand in hand with revolutionized retail is a new paradigm for marketing that marks a major, historical shift in reaching and engaging the potential customer.