Whether it’s B2B or B2C, consumers and businesses expect to get what they want, when and how they want it, delivered faster than ever. This demand creates a ripple effect across the entire supply chain.

Imagine a retail staff clocking in for work at a store in a shopping mall, scanning his or her employee card at an ‘intelligent cabinet’ to securely retrieve a handheld scanner that would accompany the employee the rest of the workday scanning customers’ product purchases and payments, until it is returned to the secure cabinet.

Welcome to the ‘phygital’ world of retail, where consumers are no longer satisfied with either going to the mall to shop, or just doing it online. The ‘retail rebound’ means that smarter technologies have to be deployed in-store – and not just online.

And the smart technologies would include 3D scanning using computer vision, mobile devices with GenAI agents, and AI-powered surveillance cameras.

In Asia Pacific, Zebra Technologies has made such smart retail solutions available in Australia and New Zealand for now, and attendees at its APAC 2025 Kickoff event in Perth last month had a first-hand experience of how it works.

In fact, smart technologies need to be deployed throughout the entire supply chain – from manufacturing to warehousing and logistics to transportation and retail delivery. “Retailers must fulfill online orders while also serving in-store customers, and the supply chain must adapt with greater agility and speed,” said Tom Bianculli, CTO, Zebra Technologies.

“This has driven our focus on helping customers digitize and automate their frontline operations. We deliver value by boosting productivity at the point of activity, enabling digitization and automation on the frontline,” added Bianculli.

Solutions such as this are part ofZebra’s strategy, which is focused on digitizing and automating frontline businesses, with three strategic pillars:

  • Asset visibility: “You can just think about this as knowing where your people are, where your inventory is, where your capital assets are, and knowing that in real time, perpetually,” said Tom Bianculli, CTO, Zebra Technologies.
  • Connected frontline workers: Making every single worker at the frontline connected and informed, so businesses can deploy their workforce, operate and manage workflow in a much more confident way.
  • Intelligent automation: “Think about this as human-centered automation – the ability for people and robotics and decision automation to work together to get a job done,” said Bianculli.

Five market trends driving this strategy are: mobility & cloud, automation, AI, the on-demand economy, and digitalization & IoT analytics.

What business leaders are looking at in 2025

  • Reducing technical debt: Streamlining and maximizing technology use will become a top priority. “More and more of our customers are talking about moving faster – matching the speed of their business with the pace of digital transformation and evolving their operations rapidly,” said Bianculli.

    Using Shein as an example, he commented: “Shein is completely reshaping how retail commerce works, taking fast fashion to an entirely new level. This is putting significant pressure on other retailers to rethink their strategies and operate on a global scale.”

  • Embracing purpose-driven technology: Bianculli emphasized that technology adoption and deployment is becoming “less about flash, more about function”.

  • Simplifying decision-making: “We’re definitely seeing this notion of offloading disparate decision making from the frontline,” he said.

    Essentially, to automate the decision process, Bianculli offers an example in healthcare: “30% of nurses’ time is often spent just doing documentation and shift handoff. They can use technology like asset visibility to automatically collect this information. We can return that time to them to get their job done, for better quality of care to the patients.”

Key technology bets

  • Computer vision: In the next 12 to 24 months, computer vision will take the lead as a technology purchase among retailers.

    Why? “Because they want to get better perpetual visibility into the inventory, into what’s happening to the store environment in terms of their staff and their customers in the next 12 months,” said Bianculli.

  • AI: We can expect that by 2027, 25% of CIOs will leverage an automatically connected workforce to reduce the time it takes to onboard new staff by 50% for key roles. The way they see that happening is via mobile devices equipped with AI to deliver ‘next best action’ workflows.

    Computer vision and AI are also supercharging manufacturing processes, particularly in quality inspections for EV battery production. These technologies drive efficiency and ensure accuracy in manufacturing operations.

    Zebra Companions will incorporate an entire host of GenAI agents, available for frontline workers to tell whether they are getting their jobs done better and faster.

  • RFID: “The fastest-growing business is RFID, and it’s been growing at a double-digit pace for the last several years,” said Bianculli. “Now we’re really seeing it take off, due to the demands of omnichannel and e-commerce.

    “Without real-time visibility into what’s on the shelf, in the store, or on the rack, businesses risk making promises they can’t keep. When a customer places an online order, fulfilling it within the promised timeframe depends on accurate inventory tracking. Increasingly, fulfillment is happening directly from stores rather than centralized warehouses.”