As technology advances and customer expectations evolve, stores are faced with two choices: innovate and thrive, or continue business as usual and fade into irrelevance. Presenting to a full room at a recent conference, Scott Emmons, head of the Neiman Marcus Innovation Lab, made it clear during his keynote that the retailer would not be passive. Instead, with Emmon’s guidance, Neiman Marcus is making strides to be a role model for the store of the future through forward-thinking technology initiatives. As Scott demonstrated throughout his presentation at the conference, his vision boils down to one key goal; exploring different ways to deliver great customer experiences using new digital methods throughout the retailer’s channels.

Retail as we know it is back to the wild west. Over the past 12-18 months, and even moreso over the last 6, tech giants such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon have made significant strides to revamp the E-Commerce world that we know. There has been a huge paradigm shift; from Facebook Messenger opening up their API’s for developers to build chatbots that shoppers can use to directly message with retailers, to devices like Google Home and Amazon Alexa bringing voice assistants into your shoppers’ day-to-day lives. We are finally seeing the reality behind what has been referenced for years now as “Conversational Commerce” come to life.