Cegid Connections Retail 2024 – Elevate your Retail Experience

Plenary sessions for total immersion in the heart of the retail sector

The pace for the two days was set by six plenary sessions for total immersion in the heart of the retail sector, beginning with an opening conference led by Nathalie Echinard, Director of the Retail Business Unit, with a reminder of Cegid’s success stories, strategy and prospects.

In two years, Cegid Retail has won 116 new customers in 24 countries , with more than 6500 stores . Four new partnerships have also been signed with retailers. Opening the event, Nathalie Echinard announced that “ for Cegid Retail Live Store, 153 new features have been launched, and 70 brands have chosen this application ” .

Involving employees

The retail landscape has changed, innovations are gathering pace and more than ever, you need to find the right levers to elevate the customer experience.

“Elevate Your RetAIl Experience is about finding new gains in productivity, involving your employees. It’s also about involving your customers. It’s about prioritising trust when it comes to legal developments and security against cyberattacks. The rate of these attacks in the retail sector reached 77%, and 43% of companies have paid a ransom”, Nathalie Echinard stated.

Providing the right tools: intuitive and multi-purpose

The retail sector must also deal with the turnover of employees in stores, which has reached almost 60% in the profession according to McKinsey. However, although they represent the third biggest cost item for companies in the Retail sector, they are also their biggest asset. They therefore need to be attracted and encouraged and retained. “In order to achieve this, we need to train them better, communicate with them more effectively and reduce the time they spend on certain time-consuming tasks. They need to be given the right tools, intuitive and multi-purpose, allowing them to dedicate more time to their customers, to help them to make the right recommendations”, believes Nathalie Echinard.

All aboard the AI train

Generative AI is opening up new retail opportunities. In two years, Generative AI has come along, bringing new weapons to the sector and revolutionising software. And Cegid encourages its customers “not to miss the AI train”. With retailers facing a considerable increase in their costs and a reduction in consumption, generative AI appears as a solution to optimise many processes such as procurement or store management, or to customise the customer experience in real time, gaining in productivity.

For this event, Generative AI was even invited to help organise the programme and took the form of a conversational tool. “I am an artificial intelligence designed to help optimise the processes and design more enriching experiences for our participants. I’ve worked with the Cegid teams to produce the Cegid Connections Retail 2024 programme, taking into account the requirements needs and trends in the sector” , it declared on stage.

The start of a great AI adventure with Cegid Pulse

The main innovations and the first use cases for generative AI embedded in Cegid Retail solutions were unveiled by Oliver Chiono, Head of Retail Product, and Laurent Terron, Head of Presales. These were primarily featured in the Cegid Retail Live Store, Cegid Retail Store Excellence or Cegid Retail Intelligence solutions. André Brunetière, Chief Product & Innovation Officer, revealed the start of Cegid’s great AI adventure with Cegid Pulse, a set of intelligent agents embedded in all Cegid solutions.

“We are convinced that Gen AI will change everything. The processes will be more automated and the value of the seller can be enhanced. From now on, we need to be quick, to become faster in the execution”, stated André Brunetière, specifying that the Cegid AI research centre in Portugal will have 200 experts on the subject in 2025.

Use cases for sellers and teams at the head office

Cegid Pulse has been designed to allow users to interact with Cegid applications in natural language, to formulate recommendations for their in-store customers in real time based on spoken exchanges or the analysis of their history, to access instant translation for smoother communication with their customer, to obtain a simple, intelligent, detailed and instant analysis of their performances, or to create relevant content…

Several use cases were revealed. Integrated into Cegid Retail Live Store, Cegid Pulse provides assistance to the seller as an instant translator. “Imagine that a French customer arrives in an Italian store and cannot make themselves understood. The seller shares their mobile phone screen with the customer, and each of them can instantly see what the other one is saying in their original language,” explains Olivier Chiono. Integrated into Cegid Retail Live Store, Cegid Pulse helps the seller to produce relevant recommendations in real time by listening to the conversation as it is taking place, with the agreement of the customer, or giving the seller the option to interact with the customer, reformulating the requirements to Cegid Pulse.

New use cases based on retailers’ requirements

With the Cegid Retail Store Excellence task management platform, it will make it easier to write engaging content for employees at different stores, also helping with coordination by detecting all languages used throughout the network and translating them automatically. Lastly, when embedded in Cegid Retail Intelligence mobile tools, it helps store managers who ask it questions in natural language, providing them with sales figures, performance figures, and all types of analyses in the formats requested by the user, along with sales forecasts, data clustering or anomaly and trend analyses. “ And this is just the beginning”, insisted Olivier Chiono, who is also awaiting feedback from retailers in order to develop new use cases to meet their requirements.

Innovations and trend analyses in the retail sector

On stage, Pippa Parker, Customer Success Director, and Tahiana Tissot, Cegid Retail Marketing Director, also took an enthusiastic look at the future of the retail sector and reported the forthcoming trends in the market. Faced with a reduction in their traffic, retailers must, more than ever, “protect their profitability by improving the customer experience and ensuring customer loyalty”. They also need to get to know generation Alpha better. Next year this will include 2 billion people worldwide, gaming fans who have grown up with AI, and who will work in jobs that don’t yet exist.

Adopting AI, exploring it, testing it to customise customer relations, as L’Oréal are doing with their “Beauty Genius” skin analysis programme, or Tiffany&Co, for trying out jewellery and obtaining recommendations, are obviously part of the challenge for the future. As Pippa Parker and Tahiana Tissot reminded us, “ in spite of this complicated backdrop, the future of the retail sector is full of opportunities”.

Inspiring themed workshops

The programme also included around a dozen themed workshops led by experts from Cegid and their well-known partners, each bringing together between 30 and 70 people and covering a specific topic. Most were accompanied by inspiring testimony from customers.

Like Courrèges or Haribo , for example, who spoke about how they were unifying and optimising their stock in store with Cegid Retail Inventory Tracking . Wavestone, Courir and L’Oréal showed how Cegid Retail solutions could make a specific contribution to their sustainable development approach. The PVH group (Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, etc.) spoke about their use of Cegid Retail Store Excellence. Gant and Palais des Thés immersed participants in the world of Cegid Retail Live Store , while Tiffany &Co showed new ways to integrate and customise Cegid Retail. Orchestra showed how to improve monitoring of store performance with Cegid Retail Intelligence. Innovations in terms of payment were also on the agenda with Salomon and Etam , who are implementing “Tap to Pay on iPhone”.

An exhibition and demonstration area also allowed those present to learn about the innovations of Cegid and its partners, with an opportunity to meet, exchange ideas and immerse themselves in a world of cutting-edge technologies. And it wasn’t all work and no play, with a memorable evening and a gala dinner on the theme of La Dolce Vita, organised in a romantic setting, offering a wonderful view of Rome and the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica.

Preparing and adapting

These two days concluded with a round-table discussion on the topic of AI, the cloud, and the new era of security in the Retail sector with Franck Deschamp, Global Retail Program Manager at L’Oréal, Howe Gu, EMEA Managing Director Retail & Cross-Industry at Microsoft, and Damien Hasse, R&D Retail Director at Cegid. “We have to ensure we don’t forget security standards and ethics with AI. AI opens up the scope of what is possible. It will replace tasks, not people. We needn’t fear the monster, but we do need to prepare and adapt”, believes Damien Hasse.