Acknowledging the pandemic in the UK is presenting some unique challenges. Andrew Busby, founder of Retail Reflections and co-founder of SafePrem, talks about how is the pandemic is impacting retail in the UK and across the world and the digital technologies and trends retailers are specifically using that are really making a difference right now.
Acknowledging the pandemic in the UK is presenting some unique challenges. Andrew Busby, the founder of Retail Reflections and co-founder of SafePrem, talks about how is the pandemic is impacting retail in the UK and across the world and the digital technologies and trends retailers are specifically using that are really making a difference right now.
We also discuss how Microsoft is taking part in some of the technologies or trends Andrew describes, and what Microsoft and other retailers are seeing in the retail space in response to COVID challenges.
Episode Links
Retail Trends Playbook for 2021
Guest
Andrew Busby is the founder of Retail Reflections and co-founder of SafePrem. Andrew is a Top 20 global retail influencer, Forbes contributor, IBM Futurist, keynote speaker, retail writer & analyst.
Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Host
David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft.
Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.
DAVID STARR: Welcome to the Azure for Industry Podcast. We're your hosts, David Starr and Paul Maher. In this podcast, you hear from thought leaders across various industries, discussing technology trends and innovation sharing how Azure is helping transform business. You'll also hear directly from Microsoft thought leaders on how our products and services are meeting industries' continually evolving needs.
Andrew Busby is the founder of Retail Reflections and co-founder of SafePrem. Andrew is a Top 20 global retail influencer, a Forbes contributor, an IBM futurist, a keynote speaker, and a writer and analyst on the retail industry. Welcome, Andrew, to the show.
ANDREW BUSBY: Thanks so much, David. It's great to be here.
DAVID: You know, when I was reading your bio, one of the things that really stood out to me is something that I just have to ask you about right off the bat: What does it mean to be an IBM futurist? How did that come about in your life?
ANDREW: [Laughs] Yeah, it doesn't mean that my crystal ball is bigger and better than yours. It's quite interesting. So I was approached probably four or five years ago and what IBM was doing was they collected influencers who they had identified primarily through social media content and presence and so forth, and I guess the bottom line of it was about promoting Watson at the time. So the activity there and of course because of the COVID pandemic, that has curtailed it a little bit, but I used to, along with a group of others, go to a lot of IBM and non-IBM conferences and speak and write about trends as they related to what they were then doing with Watson.
DAVID: That is not at all what I expected to hear behind that story.
[Laughter]
ANDREW: If you're expecting that I'm looking 10, 20 years into the future and so forth, then no, it is not quite that. And I always say that if you look far enough into the future, then you can say whatever you like because nobody can really disagree with you. Less than 18 months ago, who could have predicted the world that we're now living in? Probably nobody. In that sense, futurist is quite an interesting concept if you like.
DAVID: Well, speaking of interesting times, I want to talk about the fact that the pandemic has had a different experience in the UK than in many places in the rest of the world and is kind of presenting some unique challenges across the UK. So, how has it been different in the UK from other parts of the world?
ANDREW: Well, I'll try not to be political although I guess it's difficult to avoid crossing that line when we talk about these things because obviously, different governments have handled it in different ways. We've seen, for example, what New Zealand and Australia have done with their borders, and it seems particularly in the case of New Zealand to have paid off. I was seeing images I think it was just the other day of a concert there, and it all looked pretty normal. And for us here in the UK, I think we're a long, long way off that. So it is interesting, and it's not as simple. And this is the problem: you get the media and that does include social media, and it all gets distilled down to sound bites, and it's a complex issue. So as an example of that, in the UK, it's a fact that we have an aging and in many, many cases an obese population, that's just a fact; it's not a judgment on anybody, and that has quite a profound impact. We're also multicultural like a lot of other countries but probably more so in our major cities. For example, the BAME community for reasons that people are still not quite sure of, appear to be more susceptible to this. So you kind of put it in that context.
And then we do have a government who rightly or wrongly -- as I said, I'll try not to get too political with this. We have a government that’s fairly libertarian, and they've tried to avoid some of the more extreme lockdowns that other countries have employed. And now, again, for example, where supposedly this all started in Wuhan, they look to be from the images I've seen in the last few days, getting back to near normality but then they had some severe lockdowns where they just could not go out or if they did, they had to have a certificate. Well, again, in France, they had to show documentation as to why they were out on the streets, and of course, that's never happened here. And we're relatively a small island. We never closed our borders; we're looking at doing that now. Nobody really knows was that the right or the wrong thing because it is, as I said, just such a complex issue.
But I think that the thing that I would add to that is one thing is for sure that it has changed our behavior and our attitudes in profound ways, which I tend to think will never really be reversed in many cases. And what I mean by that is we're all wearing masks, face coverings, just like the majority of countries. I don't see at the moment a scenario that would allow us to not wear them. In London, we have the underground system and at rush hour, like a lot of other major cities around the world, it's cramped, it's absolutely packed. I just can't see people ever returning to that way of life. And if that's true, and perhaps this does go back to the futurist part, if that is true, then that has some really profound implications for not just society, but consumerism, retail, businesses, transport, travel, all these sorts of things. All aspects of society will be impacted by it.
DAVID: Given your retail focus, I wonder what you've seen with regard to the pandemic's impact in retail in the UK and across the world.
ANDREW: For years, we've been talking about certain trends and at the start of 2020, I, in my capacity as a retail analyst, and a retail commentator was being asked as I am at the start of every year what were my predictions for not just a year but for the decade.
DAVID: That's a much better question than I could come up with.
[Chuckles]
ANDREW: And I was being asked just like many of my fellow retail analysts and commentators what did I think was going to happen. And it was really within the context of actually the decade, and we all came to some similar conclusions. The proliferation of the percentage if you like of the total online sales here in the UK at the start of 2020 was around 18.5% of total sales. Now, the latest figures up to December are hovering around 35%. It had taken years and years and years to get to that level of 18%. And suddenly within the space of a few months, I mean, growth in December was over 40%. So what that's doing to retail is mainly that new online spend -- And this is the real challenge and the trick for retail is to try to work out: what percentage of that new retail spend is going to remain there? Because there are a lot of people who said, "No, no, no, I want to go into the store. I want to feel and touch," and et cetera, et cetera. During the first lockdown that we had back in March last year, they suddenly discovered the ease and convenience of online and might not ever go back. What I believe will happen is that more and more of us will shop more for our repeat purchases or our commodity purchases online. And it'll be for the more personal things that we will want to go back to the store at some point in the future. And when that will be, at the moment, to be honest, it's probably anyone's guess. What we do know is that it certainly isn't going to be any time between now and when the summer approaches because we're still going to be in lockdown we're told until potentially after Easter and Easter falls for us this year I think it's the weekend of the fourth of April. So that says that we're not going to be coming out of this, and we could go into another tiered system where restrictions are just gradually eased. Now that's going to take us to the summer. So realistically, it's not going to be until the autumn of this year at least that we will start to return to and shop in stores as we did before this. So there are some huge, huge challenges.
And one of the things that we've seen, one of the results of this -- The two businesses in question were struggling before this pandemic, but it really finished them off. The two are very well-known in the UK and also well-known in the U.S. in the case of one of them so Arcadia the owner of Topshop. And Topshop had a number of stores in the U.S. in pretty much all the major cities on the East and West Coast up until quite recently when they closed them, that's been bought by a per-play online player called Asos who have done extremely well out of this pandemic. So that's the case of an online per-play player buying up a very well-established physical retailer if you like. And the other one that’s not so well-known in the U.S. is Debenhams which is over 240 years old. They've been purchased for £55 a million, the brand name and the customer data, not the stores, and Debenhams, by the way, are a department store chain. They've been purchased by again, another online per-play fashion retailer, Boohoo. So that is really, really a mark of the changing of the guard. And I think we're going to see more of that in the coming months and in the next year or so.
DAVID: That's really interesting that an acquisition took place like that and they're shuttering the brick and mortar stores that came potentially with that acquisition, and they're just choosing to step out of that business. That's a major change.
ANDREW: It is a major change. I know that in the U.S. there have been a number of department stores who really struggled and have store closures and that impacts shopping centers, shopping malls, main street, high street, as we call it here, and we're really going to see that. Debenhams were big department stores and they had just under 120 of them. So there are going to be some really big gaps in our town centers. And I think the significance of that goes way, way beyond the Debenhams business and the people who -- sadly, it's 10,000 people who lost their jobs because of this, which is very sad. But it goes way beyond that in many ways because this is going right into the heart of our communities, to our town centers, and probably more so in the UK, retail has played a huge part of that. If we look across other parts of Europe, particularly Southern Europe, then because of the climate, there's more and more that is perhaps on a social and a hospitality level. And you can spend more time outdoors because of the more favorable climate. Here it's slightly different and our town centers have been built around retail so to lose both of these in very quick succession is significant. But I'm an eternal optimist, and I think that if we look back, there have been so many retail brands that have disappeared over the years and always it's quite sad but new ones come along. It might take some time, but new ones do come along. And I think this is all part of the evolution of the retail industry.
DAVID: I'm sure listeners have the same experience. But to acknowledge what you're saying, recognizing my own purchase habits and behaviors, I think most transactions that come out of my home are online transactions unless it's putting fuel in the vehicle or something like that. But even ordering from a restaurant, I'm going to do that ahead of time online before I go down. So any given seller needs to be doing business online because that's where your customers are right now and to your point probably going into the future as well.
ANDREW: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, David. And this is one of the interesting new trends which has been accelerated because before this, we weren't really talking about that leveling up of physical in a digital way in the way that you've just quite rightly described. I think we're going to see far less contact, and we are seeing more and more apps that do this. So you're absolutely right you can order your meal, or you can order your drink from your table, or you can purchase in-store but using an app, so there isn't any contact. I think we're going to see more concierge-style retailing, so I think luxury is going to be for the masses as we move forward. And they're all quite exciting actually, so it's not all doom and gloom.
DAVID: No, it's definitely a pivot point though, and that's very interesting, your observations on it. I would like to turn our conversation to focus a little bit on what SafePrem does, your company. And the self-description that SafePrem has out on your website is we are the go-to service for all public placeholders to make their destination Covid secure. And as I delve into your site and your company a little bit more, what I came to understand is you're actually in the business of helping people secure their physical spaces and giving pointers to organizations that have technologies in this area. So I'm very curious about what technologies you're seeing in solutions that are provided by some of your partners with regards to securing physical space.
ANDREW: So very briefly, last year we saw a gap in the market and a lot of feedback that we received was that people were looking to make their premises -- and we have focused so far on retail because for me and my co-founder that's our background. But it applies to any indoor physical space. What we were hearing was that people didn't know where to go. They knew where to go to get PPE and perspex screens and this sort of thing but for some of the more sophisticated solutions, they just didn't know where to go. So that's why we created SafePrem really to act as that connector between, as I say, placeholders, any premises owners, and some of these amazing solutions, which we've curated if you like from around the world.
So just some examples of that, which goes back to the kind of concierge type of service, one in the UK which works with the likes of Tesco and Asda, a company called Qudini they're a partner of ours. They use artificial intelligence, and they provide queuing and booking appointment apps. And they're also moving into the -- which there are a lot of people out there who are moving into the whole area of looking at people flow and occupancy within a particular space because we know, of course, social distancing now is very important. Another company that’s based in California who again is a partner of ours is one called The Indoor Lab. And they use something called LiDAR technology. So it's not simply cameras; it uses a laser as well as a camera and machine learning to look at typically a larger public space. In December, they went live at Orlando Airport. And what they do is that they can very accurately down to three centimeters track people's movements, and they look a bit like a radar when you view this. It's tiny, small blobs, so it's all anonymized. And the technology primarily was originally for airports to use to track that flow so that they could work out the best ways to lay the airport out to encourage people to go near the retail outlets and et cetera, et cetera. Now it's being used for a completely different source. And one of the interesting things actually that they can do which they are talking to one or two very large retailers in the U.S. is because of the accuracy of it, they can use this to track to see the extent or the level of store colleague and customer engagement which is quite fascinating when you think about it. Because they can see through RFID or similar, they can tag the store colleagues so they know who the member of staff is and they know who the customer is. And it can be used to see, as I said, the level of engagement, physical engagement with the customer. So there's a lot of applications for it. Hotel chains are interested in it because one of the things was hotels that are allowed to remain open saw their cleaning bills went through the roof because they are having to clean everywhere all the time, using this, they can target that, so they know exactly where people have been and where people have congregated. And looking across the directory that we have, which at the moment is around about 120, it will grow. But for the applications-based solutions, as you might imagine, I don't think the last time I looked there are any which aren't SaaS which aren't in the cloud. A SaaS subscription model is the default now. And I mentioned that because I used to work in the software industry and five, six, seven years ago that might have been the exception rather than the rule. But of course, it's a far easier way to consume some of these things so there's a lot of really, really interesting, technology solutions out there.
DAVID: I'm very curious with regard to Microsoft's own Azure marketplace, one of the things that is compelling to me about the story you just told is with the LiDAR solution, maybe that's offered as a SaaS application, but there's more to it than that. There is physical hardware that goes along with a system like that. Is that also something that gets licensed for use and is made part of that SaaS solution?
ANDREW: Yeah, you're absolutely right. There are various models, but yes, typically, that's the way that it works. And one of the quite interesting things that the founders of the Indoor Lab told me was that -- for those listeners who have been through Orlando Airport, you would know what it's like; it's a very good airport. It's generally held to be one of the best. And what they found was from a cosmetic point of view, the airport owners were very, very demanding, so this had to be quite unobtrusive hardware that was installed there. But yeah, you're absolutely right that that is included in part of the deal.
DAVID: So I'm also thinking about other technologies that go along with that real-time data analytics. You've got a data stream then, many of them, that you're marrying together and putting into a cohesive report and that report it sounds like actually is a visual that shows flow through a given physical presence or a physical space so, in this case, the Orlando Airport. Is that an accurate way to talk about the visualization of this data? Is it by actually seeing it flow through a physical space, a map?
ANDREW: You're absolutely right, and it's quite fascinating to watch it. I've seen this live in real-time, and so the example that I was given was of one of the terminals and from memory, it was about half a dozen gates. And you could see on this when a plane arrived and people disembarked because you could see them all coming through the terminal, and then you can see when people were leaving it, so it was quite fascinating. And another partner of ours, a company that’s probably well-known to many of your listeners, RetailNext, who of course are based in the U.S. and they, for years, were known for store analytics; they're doing similar things. Of course, that's another area where it's very interesting where perhaps the budget for the investment is signed off for a different reason, but the technology can still do the same thing. So I think that after years, store analytics, understanding your customer flow in-store, and your customer behavior in your physical space I think because of the pandemic, that will see a huge uptake in interest but probably not driven necessarily by the original purpose for the solutions. But I think that's what retailers will very quickly realize that for their physical spaces, they're going to have to, as I mentioned earlier, they're going to have to level up digitally with their online competition if you like. And they're going to have to become much, much smarter to be able to compete.
DAVID: It's a fascinating story that you're telling and a picture that I can see in my head based on what you're saying. And I'm curious, as I look at a map like that, am I looking for clustering points? If we talk specifically about Covid, are we looking to change traffic flow and maybe put kiosks and things in certain strategic places to change that flow? Is that the idea?
ANDREW: Yeah, that's very definitely part of the idea. I gave the example of the cleaning, but yeah, absolutely it's the spot where there's clustering in a store environment it's the spot dwell time, how people navigate the store. And I always felt for a good number of years that this is something that retailers, where they have physical space, ought to be able to understand quite intimately. Because when you think about it, if you know how shoppers shop your store, you've got huge intel into how to use your discretionary space to talk to your suppliers about promotions, adjacency, all sorts of things, and it affects pretty much every part of a retail business. You can imagine that marketers are going to be wanting to understand that information, the commercial department is going to want to, visual merchandising are going to want to, retail operations. It cuts right across the retail business. And the exciting thing I guess is that if all this begins to filter through as an outcome of the pandemic, it can only be good news for all of us as consumers. You said, David, that most of the goods that come into your house come through the online channel, but equally there are still, as we know, many, many people who love to go to a physical store, and I think for them, the news is good because those physical stores are going to have to get better and better and better. So it's going to be more exciting. We're going to get more inspiration I think from going to stores because the general standard can only go in one direction.
DAVID: That makes sense. You used the term dwell time. I wasn't going to bring this up but since you used that term, I'll throw this out there. [Laughter] It sounds like, with regard to combating Covid in a physical space, it is almost like trying to lean out a system by applying lean practices to it, getting rid of dwell time or shortening it and getting rid of queues, getting rid of slack in the system, that sort of thing and then applying that to a physical space.
ANDREW: That's a good point. Queues is an interesting one, isn't it? We Brits, if there was an Olympic sport for queuing, we would have got a gold medal at every Olympics; we're good at it. But of course, queuing is going to be seen as not a good thing because generally when you're queuing, you're in fairly close proximity to your fellow man, who now we know can spread all sorts of nasty diseases that we don't want to catch. So queuing and avoiding having queues will become almost a sector in its own right. But again, that's also a good thing because none of us really enjoy queuing. So we can see that it's not just retail but pretty much all consumer-facing industries. If we go back to the airport, think of your typical experience when you fly it involves a lot of queuing at either end, which again, isn't that pleasant; none of us really relish that. So I can only hope that some of these experiences, because of whatever way of living and working, we're going to adopt when we all start to, at different periods, different times, come out of this grip of the pandemic. I can only hope that it will be for the better ultimately.
DAVID: And now let's take a moment out to listen to this very important message.
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DAVID: So I want to acknowledge, too, just a few technologies that support some of the scenarios that you're talking about, and to do that from an Azure standpoint; we can talk about these things on any cloud but Azure from Microsoft of course. In particular, some of the things you've mentioned, artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions, Azure has machine learning capabilities, AI cognitive services capabilities, right out of the box you can talk to. And those have been very helpful in building initial forays into AI and machine learning and people getting started. Data analytics solutions especially Azure Synapse, which is a product that allows you to glean deep insights from data that you might already have is something that a lot of retailers, in particular, find valuable is to look at my point of sale data, look at other data that I have in databases already, pull that all together into a data lake or a data estate and then report out of that and be able to see things that we weren't necessarily able to see before by bringing together disparate data.
And the last thing I'll mention here is Digital Twins and Power BI. Digital Twins in particular being a technology that allows us to model physical space. Andrew, you and I were talking a little bit about this before the show, and it allows us to model a physical space and then to run experiments on that model like any given autonomous system. It might be a physical space on modeling in terms of manufacturing or in terms of retail, but it could be any autonomous system really. And then finally, Power BI to visualize all of this in the ways that you were talking about. So that's just a quick trip through some of the Azure services that are applicable to some of the conversations that it sounds like you're having.
I want to go back if we could just a little bit and talk about the role of mobile right now. And what I can tell from my experience as well is when we do shop online and when we do order from a restaurant, I'm going to place my order on a mobile device almost always even though I'm at home and I have access to a laptop, it's probably sitting right next to me, but I'm still using my phone. I don't quite know why, but that's what we tend to do. [Laughter] Are you seeing the role of mobile change the face of retail?
ANDREW: Yeah, absolutely. Of course with 5G pretty much upon us now, that is set to move up several gears. There'll be a huge step-change in that because we'll have fantastic connectivity pretty much wherever we are. It's interesting if we're doing whatever it happens to be if we're working on a PowerPoint or a spreadsheet or this or that, or whatever, we're going to be on our laptop, our desktop device, whatever that may be and pretty much any other time, we're probably going to be on our smartphone. And I think we sometimes forget the power that we have that we're carrying around in our pocket whether it be through social media but more through apps and consuming things whether it be consuming content, or whether it be purchasing, or whether it be ordering food, whether it be purchasing tickets; we can do pretty much all we want through that. And we've been saying for a few years that it's mobile-first. An app is a mobile app by the very definition of it whatever you are designing online if you want a website, well, it has to be designed first and foremost for mobile because of the huge prevalence of that. I hear stories of people that are putting good video content up online. And you ask them "Well, what did you use for your camera to create this?" They say, "Well, I just used my smartphone, and it's so easy." We've got AI built into whichever brands you care to mention. We've got some amazing cameras that are built into them now. I'm old enough to remember growing up with obviously non-digital SLR cameras, and you had a roll of film and so on and so forth. When you're old enough to look back, you can occasionally stop yourself and realize obviously somebody who's 17 or 18 doesn't think in that way because they'd never know what it was like before. But for us who can, sometimes you have to kind of pinch yourself that we've got all of this technology which is just in our back pocket
DAVID: Indeed. And let's shift gears just a little bit because we've been already talking about this, but I want to acknowledge that we're kind of moving away from the SafePrem conversation about securing physical spaces and going more toward your specialty which is retail. And so just to dive in on that a little deeper, you've mentioned AI a couple of times, and I'm wondering about the applicability of AI for retailers in general. What are you seeing with regard to AI and its applicability?
ANDREW: I think there as a general comment on that, I think it's something which all retailers really ought to be paying attention to, and this is certainly where AI and machine learning come in. We all know that retail is driven by a set of long-standing KPIs so for example, sales per square foot is an often quoted one. Well, sales per square foot today is I would argue pretty much meaningless apart from the obvious that your business is probably going to be both physical and online. The customer journey now is so complex, and the way that you sell through your store is completely different. So my point being, that I think one of the most critical KPIs for any retailer now to understand is how is my customer feeling? What's their sentiment? What's their propensity to convert? And so this is where data analytics, data science, and so on and so forth -- and really, really understanding your customer through the data. I use social media a fair amount on a daily basis, some means more than others. But I always say to people look, if you were to troll back over the last 24 months, let's say of my social media activity, you could then analyze and then interpret it and that's the key here. You would probably know everything there is to know about me: my thoughts, my feelings, my persona, the way I interact, my purchasing patterns. And this is what I think people have been wanting from not just retail, all consumer-facing industries. We all talk about personalization. Frankly, if you were to say to me, David, well, "Who's doing it really well?" I would say, "Nobody," because what we're seeing at the moment is still, and I find this hard to believe, it's still pretty bland and it's pretty basic. And I don't mind this kind of unwritten contract whereby I'll give you more of my own data. I'll allow you access to more of my own data in return for a better, more personalized experience; I don't mind that, obviously putting for one-second security issues real or perceived to one side, but I really don't mind that at all if that adds value to my life. But what I see at the moment is what I call retrospective, and it's ambulance-chasing more than anything else. We'll do a search, or we purchase something online and then what you get for days, maybe, you know, whatever afterward -- I always give the example of somebody -- This is a couple of years ago, and you may have heard about this. She posted something on Twitter, and it happened to be that she purchased a very basic item. She needed a new toilet seat, and so she purchased it from a very well-known, very large online retailer so that was delivered all fine, and she was happy she got that. But then she was inundated with emails about did she want to purchase another one? And so the tweet that she put went along the lines of, "No, I don't have a toilet seat fetish. I don't collect them. I really don't need another one. One was enough. Thank you very much." [Chuckles] And for me, in a humorous way, that kind of encapsulated all that is still immature about personalization. So if you were to ask me if you've got one wish as to how retail will improve, not as a result of the pandemic, but just the next 12 months, it would be in that area.
DAVID: I would imagine so as I've looked at those solutions myself, the personalization of retail is interesting because I will talk about things on Twitter, Facebook, what have you, Instagram, et cetera and those things are clearly being watched for personalization of my experience because I get ads for things that are particular to those conversations that I have out there in public. But the fail, and I've even talked about this on Twitter; I threw it out there, is when I've already purchased something and you're offering me another one rather than something that goes along with that purchase to make it an even better buy for me, something complementary. And I think that's pretty obvious for all of us that that needs to get better. It's just a bad implementation of AI for that not to be more predictive given that it's clearly got the data.
ANDREW: Yeah. And that's what I mean about adding value to our lives. And that's why I said, look, I'm quite happy with this contract that I got with you, Mr. Retailer, or consumer-facing, that's great. But take that data and use it intelligently, make an effort to interpret it. And I don't see very many examples.
DAVID: Yeah, make an effort. Yeah, I like that. I think it's probably time for us to button up and in doing so, I'm going to mention just a few things that we'll have posted in the show notes, for you, Andrew, and for SafePrem, social handles of course. I will include links to your LinkedIn articles, your Twitter account, we were mentioning that. And SafePrem has a podcast of its own, Behind The Mask.
ANDREW: We do, yes.
DAVID: So that's really neat. We will link to that and the SafePrem blog as well. And then with regard to Microsoft properties in this space, we'll put a link up from Microsoft in Retail and a link to a Playbook that we're currently offering for retailers, The Retail Trends Playbook for 2021. That should be helpful to some listeners of the show. With that, I want to thank you, Andrew, so much for coming on the show. It's been a really great conversation we've been able to have.
ANDREW: David, it's been a real pleasure, and I thank you and Microsoft for inviting me. I always enjoy as you can probably tell. I've got plenty to talk about, and I always enjoy talking about all aspects of retail. So thank you.
DAVID: Absolutely.
Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Azure for Industry Podcast, the show that explores how industry experts are transforming our world with Azure. For show topic recommendations or other feedback, reach out to us at industrypodcast@microsoft.com.