By Jonathan Allmayer, Senior Account Executive, Dell Technologies South Africa
Retail organisations around the globe continuously evaluate ways to best maximise operations and profitability. As they consider the role technology plays in these pursuits, Dell Technologies can help retailers plan for the road ahead and understand both the known and unknown challenges they face.
In South Africa, retailers are constantly striving to create better customer and employee experiences and are concerned with how to deliver more capabilities inside their stores while consolidating technology, resources and expenses. Increasingly, AI is being used for personalised recommendations, improved customer service and more efficient operations. Ultimately, this will lead to greater customer satisfaction and potentially to increased sales.
Dell Technologies and its vast partner ecosystem provide the opportunity to address existing and new technology pursuits that can create value.
David Dobson, Global Industry Director and Retail COE Lead at Intel Corporation, believes that: “When considering technology projects like artificial intelligence programmes, retailers should evaluate what they need to implement to get short-term and long-term value.”
Leveraging technology to deliver value
Local retailers can leverage the Dell NativeEdge platform, powered by Intel, to centralise and streamline edge operations at scale across the edge estate. This is achieved through infrastructure management, using Zero Trust security capabilities and zero-touch provisioning.
With the industry’s broadest portfolio of edge infrastructure hardware and its industry-leading, secure supply chain, Dell Technologies can digitally sign and certify hardware in the factory. This enables automated deployment and configuration of the edge infrastructure managed by NativeEdge while ensuring a Zero Trust chain of custody.
Built on an open design, Dell NativeEdge offers retailers the flexibility to select Independent Software Vendor (ISV) applications and multicloud environments for their chosen edge application workloads.
Organisations can centrally and consistently deploy containerised and virtual applications anywhere, using blueprints to work with choices of IoT frameworks and Operational Technology (OT) vendors.
These days, it’s hard to talk about retail without addressing loss prevention. Local retailers face a constant barrage of illegal activities from in-store loss prevention to organised crime pursuits. Dell Technologies offers AI-enabled loss prevention capabilities, and our experts help retailers navigate general theft and shoplifting, employee theft, return fraud, people flow, safety analytics and many other use cases.
“Clara”, our generative AI digital concierge, allows customers to experience a ‘real’ conversation to learn more about Dell Technologies in retail. This GenAI capability can be deployed in multiple retail use cases, including front-of-store concierge assistance as well as answering questions about a store and its services and products. Retailers can train the necessary language models to support ‘conversations’ they would like to have with their customers and employees.
Empowering retail evolution with Dell Technologies
No matter where South African retailers are on their digital transformation journeys, Dell Technologies has the technology and resources to help achieve that strategic goal of creating better customer and employee experiences with digital intelligence.
