Takeaways from this year’s NRF Conference

The word cloud for NRF 2023 captured a really wide spectrum of what the retail industry and those adjacent to it are experiencing and feeling. The cloud included words like pandemic, inflation, macro environment, war, omni-channel, sustainability, personalization, supply chain and more – each one playing an important role in shaping reality for one of the largest sectors of employment. The one word that stood out to become its own theme at this year’s NRF was data. While that wasn’t the official conference theme, it was a clear takeaway for me from the three-day retail event in New York.

Although this may feel like deja-vu – because data has driven business for years now– what’s different today are the implications, interconnectedness and applications. From omnichannel experiences to personalization, custom support to machine learning, data is foundational to power advanced experiences. As the leading search and discovery platform, we rely on the quality of data to quickly deliver hyper-personalized experiences at scale. After all, speed at scale is crucial to transforming the way consumers and businesses shop, purchase and procure goods and services.

Other strong themes discussed and debated at the conference include:

1. The evolving role of a physical store – blending online and in-store experiences in the post-pandemic era
2. Nailing down customer centricity at every touch point
3. Amount of data collected is one thing, but the value and usability of data superlative
4. Hyper-personalized experiences are more important than ever before; they continue to evolve, nobody has fully cracked this and it looks different for each brand
5. AI, Metaverse, automation – everyone wants a piece of this, just unsure how and how much

Making a big splash at Retail’s Big Show

As a Gold Sponsor of NRF 2023, Retail’s BIG Show, we had hundreds of conversations with brands looking to drive similar experiences. The repetitive question was – how does one lower the barriers to drive this level of personalization, at scale? Over the course of the conference –through a series of presentations at our booth– brands caught a glimpse of what sets us apart as an API-first solution made for composable commerce. The topics we covered included:

• The value of search and search innovation
• A day in the life of a merchandiser
• Optimizing CX at the speed of MACH
• Integrating Algolia with Adobe, SFCC, Shopify, commercetools, and BigCommerce

Build business resilience using data

More than 17,000 customers rely on us to deliver exceptional search and discovery experiences. In fact, during BFCM 2022, Algolia processed 98,000+ search queries per second! We believe that the future of taking this to the next level is the non-negotiable combination of data and AI. Data gives you the right signals, AI helps you implement and take action at scale. And let’s not forget, this is a loop. Insights fed back into the AI model train it to respond accordingly. As the leaders in delivering personalized Search and Discovery experiences, what truly sets us apart, is the ability to process ‘keywords’ and ‘natural human expressions’ to yield maximum conversions – the only platform to be able to ‘really’ do this.