Jim Harris, one of North America's foremost thinkers on disruption and innovation, is back on the podcast sharing his experiences and insights from CES, the world's biggest technology conference, and the World Economic Forum in Davos. Jim has been attending these important events for decades and takes us inside with his informed perspective for retailers.
Jim Harris, one of North America's foremost thinkers on disruption and innovation, is back on the podcast sharing his experiences and insights from CES, the world's biggest technology conference, and the World Economic Forum in Davos. Jim has been attending these important events for decades and takes us inside with his informed perspective for retailers. Note that we had some technical glitches towards the end of the interview. I didn't get to thank Jim on the mic for being my guest. It's much appreciated, Jim!!
About Jim
Jim Harris is a one of North America’s foremost thinkers on disruption and innovation. He is one of the world’s leading keynote speakers presenting internationally at more than 70 virtual and in-person conferences a year. Association magazine ranked
him as one of North America’s top ten speakers. Jim also leads strategic planning sessions with executive
teams.
His clients include American Express, Barclays Bank, Canon, GM, IBM, SAP, Munich Re, the Top 200 CIOs of India, the UK Cabinet Office, Swiss Re, Walmart and Zurich Insurance.
Jim’s last book, Blindsided!, is published in 80 countries worldwide and is a #1 international bestseller. Soundview Executive Summaries selected Blindsided! as one of the best business books of the year sending a summary to 80,000
executives globally. The Miami Herald calls Blindsided! “Brilliant stuff!”
Michael LeBlanc 00:04
Welcome to The Voice of Retail podcast. My name is Michael LeBlanc, and I am your host. This podcast is produced in conjunction with Retail Council of Canada.
Meet Jim Harris, one of North America's foremost thinkers on disruption and innovation, is back on the podcast sharing his experiences and insights from CES, the world's biggest technology conference, and the World Economic Forum in Davos. Jim has been attending these important events for decades and takes us inside with his informed perspective for retailers.
Michael LeBlanc 00:32
Note that we had some technical glitches towards the end of the interview. I didn't get a chance to thank Jim on the mic for being my guest. Much appreciated, Jim.
Jim, welcome back to The Voice of Retail podcast, how are you?
Jim Harris 00:43
Oh, great to be on it. I am very happy to be back in Canada after being in Las Vegas for eight days and then in Davos for a week. So-
Michael LeBlanc 00:53
I was gonna say what a road warrior you are, man, like that's, uh, you know, Vegas alone will, will drag you down, but-, for that many days, but I'm so excited to get you back on the mic and, and I saw you tweeting or whatever you call it now. I guess we can still call it tweeting, X-ing, X-ing.
Jim Harris 01:10
X-ing.
Michael LeBlanc 01:12
So, I saw you were, and I know, of course, your-, your-, CES can't really happen without you. You're such an important word, but -
Jim Harris 01:20
I wouldn't say that.
Michael LeBlanc 01:23
You've been covering it for a long time now.
Jim Harris 01:24
My Account was in the 10 most influential accounts in the world for CES and when you look at personal accounts, it was in the top three this year top one last year?
Michael LeBlanc 01:35
Wow, fantastic. Well, you're-, you are definitely someone that people turn to, to try to understand what's happening to you even if-, even if they were there, but for those that weren't, so I thought I'd get you back on the mic. Now before we kind of jump into these two conferences. Tell us for those who might have missed our first Convo, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do for a living.
Jim Harris 01:56
So, I'm an author, I write business books and articles on disruption. How Technology and Innovation changes business models and of course, the biggest disruption for the last since November 30, 2022. For the last year and a couple of months has been ChatGPT and so on everyone's mind is AI, Generative AI and ChatGPT and there's this great clip summarizing the Google IO Developer Conference in 2023. It's their big get together for all their developers, and the CEOs Keynote can be summarized in the following way. AI, AI, we're embedding AI, Generative AI. In our programs, we're putting AI agents.
Michael LeBlanc 02:53
Did I mentioned-, Did I mention AI, but -
Jim Harris 02:55
AI.
Michael LeBlanc 02:56
Let me just close and say AI.
Jim Harris 02:58
So, when you actually look at these two big events, CES, and Davos, it was exactly the same. The number one trending hashtag for all these events on any social media, other than the event itself was a version of AI and so the interesting thing for me then is to look at how is this going to affect retail and I don't know if you've seen her but one of the things that blew me away is there is a 25 year old pink haired AI generated influencer called Tana Lopez she was created by an agency in Barcelona, Spain and she has 272,000 followers on Instagram. She's not a real person, but they made her up and she is-, you know, they gave her a character. She's strong and a determined woman passionate Scorpio, pink hair, and she loves fitness and brands like Victoria's Secret and guests are paying this agency $1000 euros per post on Instagram.
Michael LeBlanc 04:21
Like I guess it's-, it's certainly a safe play likely, maybe not yet. She can't go off and you know, go to a nightclub and make saucy pictures and so it's brand-, it's good brand protection, I suppose.
Jim Harris 04:33
Exactly. All the saucy pictures are on her Instagram and every-, every-, every time I go back to her Instagram, it's grown by another 20,000 followers. So, it's fascinating.
Michael LeBlanc 04:47
Bots, Jim, are they are they bots following bots? That's an interesting question. Is it-
Jim Harris 04:51
I mean, since Elon bought Twitter the number of bots has been hammered down so that's a good thing.
Jim Harris 04:57
But this-, this for me is really interesting about influence and retail and obviously, these brands like Guess, and Victoria's Secret are willing to experiment with something new and they're probably getting an amazing ROI on the posts, because it's something that's interesting and fascinating. So, you can go to Instagram and follow her. It's AITANA. So, when I go to Mobile World Congress at the end of February, March, I'm going to reach out in advance and perhaps interview the-, the team at the clueless agency that created her and just, you know, it'll be an interesting discussion.
Michael LeBlanc 04:57
Yeah.
Michael LeBlanc 05:48
You've been on the road, as you said, these two big mega conferences. I want to before we-, before we get there, I want to talk about tradecraft. So, you know, I do talk to people, maybe some younger, some not so younger, who say things like, I don't need to go to conferences anymore. There's so much content online. Listen, I can find mostly everything online. Even the conferences sometimes put stuff online, they get people like you tweeting, I feel like I'm there. Why do you go to conferences, why do you-, would you recommend people actually go get through the heavy lifting and go to these events?
Jim Harris 06:17
Well, I understand that sentiment. For instance, today, I'll talk about the keynote from the Intel CEO at CES and so some of the content you can actually get to see, but I go to these events, because the people you meet and the conversations you have that are not publicly available, are profound. So, I learned so much by going to these events. Yes, they're exhausting, but the upside I get my 10,000 steps every day in, you know, I take really comfy sneakers, or shoes with good support in soles and-
Michael LeBlanc 07:00
And not just because of the-, I mean, you have, I would say an access that few listeners would have, but I you know, my experience that I have a little bit of that access, but my experience just talking to your fellow travelers, your fellow conference goers in certain things, these, these kinds of un-incidental or incidental context, which would you agree, would you concur?
Jim Harris 07:19
Absolutely. Like you really never know who you're standing next to. So I'm in Davos, standing in a line-up to get my badge, my security badge and I'm standing next to a guy who is running to be president of Lebanon. You know, so for 20 minutes, we ended up having a fascinating discussion and there was a young consultant from Capgemini, who also the three of us were having a fascinating conversation, I ended up going to Capgemini, for a couple of things, looking at how batteries for EVs are changing, both in chemistry and price point. So, you really don't know what you're going to learn until you actually go there. A lot of it is happenstance. Sure, you pick out a program of things you're most interested in, but at least 50% of the benefit can never be anticipated.
Michael LeBlanc 08:21
Yeah, and that's hard. That's hard to replicate sitting at YouTube trying to type in what's going on at CES. Let's-, let's talk about CES. So, for those I know a lot of retailers who go some, every year, some go every second year, but for those that listeners that might not know, CES just for a few seconds talking about the scope and scale and intent of that, of that conference.
Jim Harris 08:41
So, it's the most influential tech event in the world. There were 135,000 participants this year, 4000 exhibitors, in 2.5 million square feet of show floor space, you just cannot see everything. So even though I was there for eight days, which is a heck of a long time, I only saw a tiny, tiny fraction of it all.
Michael LeBlanc 09:09
So, and part of that also is you know, there's keynotes, there's displays, there's a lot that goes on. So let's-, let's talk about CES and what your observations were. I saw I noted that CEO of Walmart, Doug McMillon, was on the stage had a special guest CEO, Microsoft came out made a bit of a splash but in general, I'm not sure if you had the chance to listen to that one, but in general, what, what are your kind of key takeaways coming out of coming out of CES this year?
Jim Harris 09:35
So, if you think way back, when-, when Bill Gates was CEO of Microsoft, he came out with a slogan, information at your fingertips. This is like '93, '95, something like that.
Jim Harris 09:50
Well now, Sacha when he was on stage. At the Walmart Keynote was saying really, it's intelligence at your fingertips, it's insight at your fingertips because Microsoft, which now owns 49% of OpenAI, which is the entity backing ChatGPT, is embedding AI called copilot in every single one of its products. So, you can, if you're a Microsoft 365 subscriber, have it, begin to analyze your data, whether it's in a spreadsheet, if you're a retailer on monthly sales, highlight trends for you. It can also help you in replying to emails, crafting emails for you, in your own voice.
Michael LeBlanc 09:50
Right.
Jim Harris 10:42
So, we're seeing applications that we've never seen before. This is a revolution that is going to be bigger than the web revolution of 1993 and it's far, far faster, it's coming at us faster. So, this, you know, the revelation wasn't in the Walmart Keynote, but it's really, this is why everyone's talking about AI. There was another keynote from the CEO of Intel, who said, we're seeing productivity gains of 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000x and I thought, oh, my God, is he you know, overstating the case a little and so I've been reflecting on this for the last few days and 10x, we're seeing Cathy Wood who's Ark Invest on Wall Street saying, companies that use AI and people for coding, like computer coding programming, are going to see a 10x increase in productivity by 2030.
Jim Harris 11:51
Okay, there's our base case 10x.
Michael LeBlanc 11:54
Yeah.
Jim Harris 11:56
Then in Davos, I put it to a panel on AI. How are these tools impacting advertising and one woman said, you know, in advertising back in the '80s, '90s, we used to spend, we used to draw ads by hand, think about, madmen, you know, we had boards and stuff. Well, now, you know, we used to take a whole week to get five different possible ads for a client sketched on boards, but now using Midjourney, and for the copy ChatGPT, or an equivalent system, we can have five of those done in two hours and when you look at that, that's a 500x increase in productivity. Okay, that's kind of a mid-use case, on productivity with AI.
Jim Harris 12:54
But then that 10,000 one seems really far out. The favorite conference for me is something called Next Med. It's all about the future of medicine and this past year, when I was at Next Med, there was a presenter, who was saying a PhD student in medicine will spend a whole year studying the interactions of a single protein with every other protein in the human body to understand potential triggers for cancer. Well, they've taken AI and done all that work and we get back 644 million years of PhD work on these protein interactions and now PhDs don't have to study that they now look at the output and say, okay, when can we identify cancer at stage zero and so there you have a 644,000,000x increase in productivity.
Jim Harris 14:00
So, the CEO of Intel, his, you know, 10, 100, 1,000 10,000 actually holds true. Now, in the advertisers’ point of view, she said, Well, you know, when you actually take something that used to take you a week, and you now do it in two hours, you're gonna give the client maybe seven choices, not five. In other words, some of that productivity that we get, we'll just reinvest back into higher quality outputs to present to the client.
Jim Harris 14:35
In other words, all the gains are not going to come back to us, and this is just one part of the value chain. In other words, we still have to book the you know, we have to have a meeting with the client we have to get approval. We still have to book the Ad space, whether it's in print radio, or, or on television or whether it's digital with, you know, ads online. So, it doesn't change the entire process, but parts of this process can have a 500x improvement in productivity. So, we're really going to see an explosion of use cases around AI in retailing and advertising and marketing.
Michael LeBlanc 15:20
And I start to think about AI these days, particularly ChatGPT and Midjourney as-, as kind of the way I was thinking about things like platforms like Shopify. In other words, when I first started doing e-commerce, it was, you know, a million dollars to take a credit card online like 20, like it was really hard to do, just put a pipe-, just it was really hard just to connect the pipes and just take a credit card.
Michael LeBlanc 15:40
Now that's-, that's a long distant memory. Now that's a snap of the finger. Anybody can do that. So, it's kind of a leveling of the playing field. Are you thinking this-, I'm thinking the same way a little bit about AI and that you don't need to be the size of a Walmart, as a as an entity to take advantage of the benefits, are you thinking of it the same way that it can be a leveling of the playing field and then who, who's fast and nimble can also win?
Jim Harris 16:05
Yes, I believe that's the case. So, I'm going to say both yes and no. So, for-, this next statistic blows me away more than 99% of Canadian companies are SMEs, small and medium sized enterprises, medium is defined under 500 people small under 100 people. So, our economy is really driven by SMEs and yet, it's the large companies that get all the focus. Large companies have the budgets to have their own AI data scientist, right? And if you look at the starting salaries of some data scientists, it's especially around AI, it's like a quarter million plus stock options, and so on. So small and medium sized businesses can afford that. But to your point, these new tools like mid journey, like chat, GPT, and others, like it lower the barriers to entry, it levels the playing field. And so, if you have a forward-looking company that you work for, you can begin using these tools, but the people in the organization need training, this was one really fascinating insight.
Jim Harris 17:25
When you talk to CEOs or C suite, they believe 40% of our people need training on these tools within five years, but when you talk to people in the organization, they say 97% of us believe we need it right now. Right? So, people tend to be scared of that, which they don't know and a little bit hesitant. People need to start playing with these tools right away. And you don't want to put your secret proprietary sauce into the public version of GPT. If you have a Microsoft 365 license, you know, you're not putting your data into the wild, like the public version of GPT. So, people need to understand these differences, which is where this training, this need for training comes in.
Michael LeBlanc 18:15
Interesting. Anything else, like around product launches that you saw, I mean, I-, I in speaking with retailers, they were kind of, you know, hoping for more innovation around the electronic products that they retail themselves, you know, electronics industry kind of went through a long COVID cycle of just catching up to demand and really wasn't focused on innovation and I think I think some of that's necessary to get to spark consumer purchases a product, anything-, anything jump out at you.
Jim Harris 18:44
Well, I-, I-, I want to talk about two things. So first off, this blows me away, office vacancy has hit the highest ever in history.
Michael LeBlanc 18:56
Yeah.
Jim Harris 18:56
So, this is commercial office real estate. In the US it's 20%, but that varies by market, right, but the average for the entire US is 20% and it's about the same in Canada. So, people are working from home. What are the implications for all those downtown retailers, who expect people to fill up downtown commercial office towers to work but they're not anymore. You know, if-, if you're a young person and you can't afford a home in Toronto, you buy something out in Whitby and where's the joy of a two-hour commute by GO Train to downtown, it's just not there so-.
Michael LeBlanc 19:41
It's a two-hour commute from Etobicoke some days so, let alone on Whitby.
Jim Harris 19:47
A commute from Toronto to Toronto is two hours.
Michael LeBlanc 19:50
Yeah.
Jim Harris 19:51
Oh my god. So, you know, I listened to one CEO said Oh, but it's fun to be in the office and I think, yeah, because you live in Rosedale, which is 15 minutes from your office, and you drive your Ferrari in. Yeah, okay, that's fun for you, but for the rest of the people who work in your 60,000-person organization, you know, the average person in North America pre pandemic spent five work weeks a year just in commuting traffic.
Michael LeBlanc 20:21
Yep.
Jim Harris 20:21
Where's the joy of that, so what are the permanent implications for 20% vacancy in commercial, you know, towers to downtown retailers?
Michael LeBlanc 20:37
Yep.
Jim Harris 20:37
So that's question number one. Question number two.
Michael LeBlanc 20:41
I'll give you, I'll give you three answers to that by the way.
Jim Harris 20:41
Okay, good.
Michael LeBlanc 20:44
So, I answer one is nothing good because you know, whether people are coming in two, three days a week, the tra-, you know, how do you make a business on three days versus five, write that just by percentage. So, there's nothing great happening now, the plus is that retailers who are big enough are seeing their volumes increase in either online or their urban stores. So, the demand is shifting, whereas the people are right, and I think the third thing that we're looking at is, is, you know, a city start to adapt to this. There are organisms as well. I mean, the cities that are doing better than others, as you say, it's not distributed equally. You know, they have more than just office space going on in their downtown's, right. So, yeah, you know, and then there's a reason to live there and so, you know, it's a very dynamic situation, but, but you call out, and we could talk, we have a whole episode on this, because I spent a lot of time thinking about this. It's a very interesting, it's probably one of the, I don't know, it's probably one of the only, I don't know, only real, long-term impacts of the COVID era, right is the way in which we work, and I think you've, you've crystallized it quite nicely.
Jim Harris 21:53
So, what I see is, you know, a company that has, you know, a huge square footage at King and Bay, is going to downsize their square footage by 80% and then have satellites. So in Whitby, there will be an office that can take 6 to 12 people and in Mississauga one, and in Brampton one, and in Pickering one and you're going to end up having people come into the office, but the office is 10 to 15 minutes from their home and so you still get this work camaraderie, and you get, you know, people hanging around the espresso machine, every office needs an espresso machine. So, you have culture, in terms of creating a work culture, but it's going to be localized, and distributed. So, this is where I think things will go and what are the implications of that for retailers, so that's my question.
Michael LeBlanc 22:58
Yeah. Yeah. Very, very good question. Well, I last thing, and then I want to get to Davos for the last couple of questions, but it's coming out very soon and it wasn't launched at CES but coming out very soon. Is Apple's version of the on-head computing Vision Pro coming out?
Jim Harris 23:16
Yes. Yes.
Michael LeBlanc 23:17
coming up very soon. I think it's 35- or $3,499 US but whatever. What do you-, what do you make of this-, this product category? I mean, they're not the first in Apple does have the reputation of if not innovating a category making it better, but do you see any future in this in this on, have you-, have you put one on, what do you think of the product and then what do you think of the category?
Jim Harris 23:40
So, I-, I have not put one on and frankly-
Michael LeBlanc 23:45
Neither has Tim Cook by the way from what I can see, what did Scott Galloway call it the perfect, perfect contraception device because nobody's gonna like-
Jim Harris 23:56
So, but-, these-, these 3D, AR, VR type devices can make me kind of dizzy. It's not the first time but gamers-
Michael LeBlanc 24:10
There's a supposed to-, they're supposed to have cured that apparently.
Jim Harris 24:13
Oh, well, good for them. I'm not gonna put a set of these on, but here's what I do know, gaming is explosive when you look at the growth for instance of Twitch and online massively parallel gaming, you know, Fortnite and other games.
Michael LeBlanc 24:30
Yeah.
Jim Harris 24:31
Explosive growth, and it's below the radar. I think what we're going to see is in gaming purchase and so this is gaming and web three point, or Web 3.0 and Ariana Grande had a concert online on Twitch maybe three years ago, something like that and imagine I'm watching this concert, whether on a 3D Oculus or the new Apple one really doesn't matter, or just watching on my two dimensional monitor sitting at my desk and I go, wow, her backup dancers have great sunglasses. I want a pair of those, and you click on them and in the metaverse, it takes you to-, to a retailer who's sponsoring the Ariana Grande concert, and you buy them. So, we're going to see in-game purchases in retailing. So how is that going to change things, so I'm talking now about the category as opposed to the sample product itself, but so we need to look at that as a trend for retailing around Twitch and it's humongous. You know, I think the average retail person doesn't look at this at all.
Michael LeBlanc 25:50
Yeah, yeah, it is. It is. It is worth noting. Alright. Last couple of quick questions. So, Davos, same thing. I mean, it really to me, what were you doing there, I mean, it's really one of these big gatherings of the intelligence AI, which of course, includes you, but what took you to Davos and what did you get out of it?
Jim Harris 26:08
So, I've been going to Davos every year for the last 15 years, except for the years that didn't happen with the pandemic. I go with Corporate Knights magazine, which is the leading magazine globally for looking at clean capitalism and every year, CK launches the global 100. It's the ranking of the 100 most responsible large cap companies. So, these are over a billion dollars publicly traded companies, and it looks at basically their environmental footprint, their energy use per dollar output, their water use. There's dozens of metrics that go into this ranking. And we launched this with a dinner at-, in Davos at the Belvedere hotel, and have leading companies there, and often a keynote speaker last year, Al Gore was the keynote speaker speaking on climate.
Jim Harris 26:09
So, it's an amazing event and people can go online to the global 100 and see this year's ranking and articles around the top companies. So, it's-, it's-, that's why I'm in Davos every year and a byproduct of it is getting to learn about all the other things we've been talking about today. There is one more thing I want to talk about that isn't related to Davos. It's not related to CES, but it is about technology, and it is about something that impacts retailers. And this is the QR code. The QR code was created more than 25 years ago, and it's taken 25 years to be an overnight success. In Canadian restaurants, 70% of restaurants have a QR code now for their menu and there are two things that really drove the incredible adoption.
Jim Harris 28:12
So, number one was the pandemic and contact was the desire for contactless processes for restaurants. So rather than have a physical menu, a QR code was put up and people could see the menu the benefit, of course for restaurants is they don't have to reprint menus when they want to change pricing or take something off or add something to the menu and the second thing was when Apple in there, iOS and Android put QR code recognition embedded directly into their camera apps, as opposed to before that you had to download a separate app and install it and configure it and get used to it, which was really a great deal of friction.
Jim Harris 29:03
So, the pandemic and embedding QR code recognition into our camera apps has exploded the use of QR codes. So, this is everywhere. So, this is something retailers need to understand. Of course, I'm sure they do, but we're seeing QR codes everywhere. Let's wrap up. how folks can get in touch with me. My email is Jim at jimharris.com. I'm on Twitter, now X. I'm on LinkedIn. If you want to follow me on LinkedIn. I have a whole series of resources about disruption and innovation on my website, which is jimharris.com. That's jimharris.com and what I really do is I speak at conferences and seminars and webinars all around the world, so if any of the listeners know of an upcoming conference or webinar or seminar where you feel I could add value, please get in touch with me. I also do strategic planning with executive teams all around the world. So, Michael, it's been so great being on the podcast today. It's strange that I can't hear you, but this is the joy of technology.
Michael LeBlanc 30:31
Thanks for tuning into this episode of The Voice of Retail. If you haven't already, follow us on your favorite podcast platform so new episodes will live automatically each week and be sure to check out my other retail industry media properties, the Remarkable Retail podcast with Steve Dennis and the Global eCommerce Leaders podcast.
I'm your host Michael LeBlanc, senior retail advisor, keynote speaker and Rethink Retail 2023: Global Top Retail Influencer. If you want more information, content or to chat, follow me on LinkedIn.
Safe travels everyone!
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
ai, people, Davos, retailers, conferences, retail, talk, CES, CEO, events, days, podcast, companies, online, year, office, Whitby, QR code, disruption, productivity