“It’s totally real you can’t unplug it and you can’t run away with it,” Kelly Slessor, founder of The E-commerce Tribe, Shop You, and Digital Inclusion Project, said about the rise of AI. “The biggest thing AI will do for us in the next 12 months is eliminate that need for integration,” she added. “The other thing I think about constantly is the other way round, how are people going to use AI to interact with retailers. “If I could get my personal shopping assistant to chase up the big marketplace, that has my order after three months somewhere in a warehouse – that’s a perfect use case for a consumer to use AI,  I don’t think retailers have quite thought about that yet, well, most retailers,” Slessor said. Innovative e-commerce strategies Designerex is the world’s largest peer-to-peer designer dress-sharing platform and co-founder and co-CEO Kirsten Kore said that retailers would be wise to encourage staff to come to the table with ideas “because they’re the ones working day in and day out, they can see problems and bottlenecks”. One of the biggest challenges facing the fashion industry today is fast fashion.  “They’re doing a great job selling to consumers quickly and cheaply,” Kore said. To compete, platforms like Designerex need to educate consumers and make the transaction as easy and seamless as possible. However, as a first-of-its-kind business in Australia, there is no ‘plug and play’ solution provider capable of supporting the company’s business model. “It comes to the point where it’s like, ‘We can’t work with you because you’re a completely different business model. We don’t even know how to deal with this.’ So for us, it is focusing on what our customers need,” Kore added. “We went to Australian Post to develop downloadable express post labels. Shipping providers couldn’t help us because every booking on the platform is dynamic. “For us innovation is starting from the beginning.”  Also on the panel, Matthew Brovelli, CEO of Estar Online, shared how the software company fosters innovation: “We give people five days a year to either do some professional development or innovate, do whatever they want, no restrictions,” he said. Empowered employees “When we talk about personalisation and customer experience, ultimately employee experience is often overlooked, and this is a concerning area for me,” Nicholas Kontopoulos, Twilio’s VP of marketing forAsia Pacific and Japan, said in his keynote at the Online Retailer conference.  Citing data from Inside Retail’s Australian Retail Outlook 2024 report, powered by KPMG, Kontopoulos noted that margin and turnover are most retailers’ top two priorities, while “retaining and hiring staff was right at the bottom and this is a bit of a red flag”. “Margins and growth ultimately come from our people, our ability to empower people to deliver against the brand promise we’re making every day,” Kontopoulos added. Staff fulfil the frontline role of delivering against the brand promise and are ultimately responsible for creating amazing customer experiences. “We need to think about those individuals and work out how to empower them to deliver against that brand promise in a consistent scalable way. That’s where technology does play an important role,” Kontopoulos said. “It starts with the empowerment of the individuals engaging with your customers regularly, if we do this, we enable them to deliver exceptional services,”  Kontopoulos said. This leads to high levels of satisfaction and consistency. “Customer advocacy with word of mouth will start to play a big role and hopefully [bring] more and more people back to your stores,” Kontopoulos finished.