The Talk From The Provided Conference Agenda aka “The Easier Talk but Not Necessarily Best Talk”
"from Siri (“Voice AI”) to TrueCar (“Online Platforms”)--using machine learning to solve impossible retail problems"
using data science for retail transformation and the opportunity for retail operations to innovate successfully
• What algorithms can see that we can’t
• A TrueCar example
• Thoughts on how retail operations can use machine learning and artificial intelligence to optimize, innovate and find new solutions
A Version of That Talk is Pretty Short
First of all Voice Agents (and anything at that level of complexity or less) are largely a commodity now.
1) Voice Recognition is off the shelf.
2) Whether the “Voice Agent” does something useful depends on how the voice agent is deployed (how many users using it) and what systems it has access to (how much data, what resources).
What algorithms can see that we can’t
A Lot, I'll show you some examples. And how this is a much bigger question than is obvious... and what we can see that algorithms can’t... also a much bigger question.
A TrueCar example
www.truecar.com, pricing/personalization for web and mobile apps, dealer systems
a previous talk is available: “Data is the only Marketplace”
show example of: TrueVision, a system for analyzing vehicles from archived or real time imaging:
Thoughts on how retail operations can use machine learning and artificial intelligence to optimize, innovate and find new solutions
Hopefully by the time we’re done this your mind will be racing
The Better Talk: What is Retail? Industry? Leaders? Association? What is a Truth-Procedure for Retail? Industry? Leaders? Association?
Russell Foltz-Smith
www.worksonbecoming.com
www.maslo.ai
www.actonvenice.org
@un1crom
The Question of RILA
What could I possibly tell a room full of bright innovators, executives and curious people...something they’d never heard before, something authentic, something engaging. what do I know about Retail? Industry? Leaders? Association?
4 years ago I gave the talk I think I could give forever but I bet this group already understands the concept “Data is the only Marketplace” While I still think it’s a useful talk I actually have advanced my thinking a bit and have decided Data actually spawns new marketplaces, infinitely so, rather than being the Only Marketplace.
So now I give part 2 of that talk only this time it’s the truth. Not The Truth - just little t truth. That is, the truth-process that justifies what happened up until something new happens. A truth-process is as much about a truth as it is about its process.
thus, we begin...
Every Thing Begins With a Question. Often it’s an old question, one that probably remains very unanswered.
what is RILA? what exactly is it and why is it?
Let us begin a truth procedure of RILA . A truth-procedure is exactly what it says it is, a procedure to establish truth. It is epistemological process that might get us to an ontological event. that is, we will DO some data philosophizing/forensics to see if we can figure out what RILA actually IS and by Being Truth we Will Create an Event.
Thought: Do we create data or discover it? Do we create an industry or discover it?
Truth-Procedure Summary
First of all:
LET THIS TALK AND THE CONTENT WASH OVER YOU
LIKE A POEM
OR
how you might take
IN A MAP
and
THE VISTA BEFORE YOU.
I AM GOING TO GO VERY QUICKLY.
Humble Beginnings
RILA is a name of a set of things. References to References.
Who/What are the characters involved?
That's Not What We Meant... obviously RILA is more than letters, it’s words and what those words refer to.
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Notice: Data is everywhere. It’s presumptively sitting there. It is descriptive, prescriptive, obstructive, instructive. In this exercise we have already done advanced natural language processing, informal programming, light infographics and data science. Which aspect is which?
Don’t Get Ahead of Ourselves... What Are We Talking About? The Nouns (Industry, Leaders, Association)
Industry is just a collection of companies. Consider the companies grouped by RILA.
GameStoll power to the pllgars~ |
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BIG LOTS |
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Lbrands | |||
NEX 519%' Elc'lgl'w |
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RUSS DRESS FOI? LESS |
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UPERMARKETS SAVE MART |
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KCI-IES | |||
RITE | |||
E TAILORED BRANDS | |||
Gap Inc. | |||
‘wg/71006’ | |||
*. . mccys |er |
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THE MICHAELS COMPANIES | |||
BEST | |||
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E TAILORED BRANDS | |||
THE MICHAELS COMPANIES | |||
Gap Inc. | |||
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GameStoll power to the pllgars~ |
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mnnnlnn TIRE |
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BIG LOTS |
Innovation alert: Just now we took the live member’s list from RILA.org, a pdf file. We then parsed it and did machine learning on it to profile the logos, detect text and predict what it might represent. While not a great outcome, it demonstrates just how messy data really is. Why do we create logos that are so obviously confused with other things?
Companies Are Made Up of People
A lot of people. and from all over the place.
Innovation x2 Alert: From the list of member companies obtained from the RILA.org website we now can start easily associating facts about the companies. From just the name of the company we have instant access to up to date company details in hundreds of facets. Additionally we can trivially do computation with other facts of the world such as country populations etc. All quite easily.... or is it easy? What in the above is programming? what is data? what is measurement? what is instrumentation?
And companies also are made up of Assets.
People and Assets somehow convert into revenue
A lot of revenue... per year... per second.
Let' s look into the future
But the industry is bigger than just RILA companies... it’s every one and thing linked to these companies.
The network is vast, maybe never ending. When does the industry end?
Awareness Break: We very quickly explode in data once even a little data becomes available. It’s going to get harder and harder to corral our forensics. We literally are going to crawl the web right here in this presentation. and now the question begs... are we getting closer to a definition of Industry? or as we go where the data leads us are we getting further away from a definition? when is a reasonable point to just cut ourselves off? Does curiosity demand we go on? does the truth generate it’s own never ending procedure?
So very simple on “wikipedia”... this is just a lightweight set of links that lead to the RILA wikipedia page.
Wikipedia isn' t just for text info... we learn a little about traffic and timing. What happens with RILA that traffic to wikipedia spikes early in the year?
EXPLOSION of Data and Ideas: launching a crawl from RILA.org reveals a bevy of information on the industry (outward expansion of epistemology) and introduces unforeseen data on a new phenomena...technical problems. the RILA.org site links to something it may not be meaning to... is a data breach possible? what implications are there for data breaches and industry? are companies responsible for data? what claims can be made about data when it should be obvious to you now that it can’t be contained?
Let' s make things a bit more beautiful. shall we? what role do aesthetics play in industry? in data? in a truth procedure?
Industry is all that it Touches
When does industry go too far? is it too far reaching? when does its truth-procedure encroach?
Class action suits: https://jnswire.s3.amazonaws.com/jns-media/fc/26/2120778/19CH10251.pdf (home depot and ...)
Laws and Legality and Ethics: All of these things are a boundary condition of an industry. in a way, the laws and ethics are codifications of well-worn truth-procedures, from within one industry and often many. Laws and ethics are rarely all encompassing and have many known and unknown gaps - often only revealed with something random or extremely unlikely happens / emerges. The legal process is a very slow moving truth-procedure, the market is much faster. what trade offs are there in speed and comprehensiveness? what trade offs are there for volatility vs stability? not all truths are scoped the same. often the market is working on trivial, repeated truths...
a good time to consider the Leaders, Leadership...
What is riLa Leading? what is RILA about? Who are the people of RILA? of RILA Companies?
Let' s Learn about Mary Dillon!
test test: b3f56663-9808-4bb9-8372-3b3814929165
Or Perhaps We Should Check in on Jill Standish’s mood.
*These wiki ones are from 2017.
Do these values and purposes give off emotion and mood?
Innovator's Dilemma version 2019: Computers at scale are effectively “infinity machines.” Almost anything you can think up can be done. From extreme personalization of the retail experience to generative, insanely captivating retail spaces, to non-human smart contracts between automated factories, to self driving cars that will deliver products to you before you even knew you wanted them. The innovation is effectively automated now. or is it? with computers at scale capable of changing so much... is change even innovative anymore? and is that change for change sake causing more risk than value?
What is Retail? It happens.
Hypothesis 0: Nothing happens, nothing exists until you sell something.
Nothing happens until someone sells something.
AN EVENT, A TRANSACTION.
Retailing - is a TRUTH PROCEDURE... just as the one we’ve been going through.
Retailing is a Truth Procedure with a Customer between The Product, The Brand, The Company, The Sales Person. But... and this is a bit heady....
The truth-procedure is a carrying out of the last event, the last sale, the last transaction. It is not a theory of the next one. This is important. Data folks, scientists, mathematicians, financial analysts often think the models, spreadsheets, data trails, etc are predictors and/or causal trains for the next n transactional events.
This is not strictly true.
Existing models (truth-procedures) are only predictive if you sell the same thing, the same way. if you are a commodity in experience and price and features and service.
Do you believe any of the stock price predictions below? Do you believe the past prices and the truth-procedures that lead to them?
So now ... we return to a previous question : is data created or discovered? do you want to discover old truths or create new ones? is innovative retailing a science of the past (an epistemology of how things happened) or creation of a new ontological event?
What is a Product? and What is Price?
this is where epistemology and ontology merge. The Product+The Transaction Price is the Event, the moment of Retail.
We don’t need to spend a lot of time going over boring product things like logos, product descriptions, value statements... those are established. What is less established is how many products are now WASTE. a large portion of them is wasted - while in use and then when no longer used.
Yes, due to climate change and the connected global economy we are now much more aware of how much waste we put out into the world. We are also much more aware of waste of utility of our time, media, behavior.
DATA permeates our lives and makes us aware of this simple fact:
Products without Data are WASTE.
Products with Data are USEFUL and/or PROFITABLE.
The data that matters most is CONSEQUENTIAL DATA. What are the consequences of a product? of using a product?
Price used to be the only data point of CONSEQUENCE - what does this cost me? Then we built up marketing/advertising into a normative thing - what is the VALUE To ME? Then we got things like health data (nutrition and some toxicity stuff). how will this hurt me or what are the delayed costs to me? Almost all the consequential data up til recently were personal and singular.
But now with social media and social awareness and much better science and mobile phones, the truth-procedure is much broader, deeper and always going. The penalty for products that don’t constantly make themselves data aware is quite high.
While many people remark at the nostalgia and retro markets of products and experiences these aren’t serious things in real economic terms. Data-generating, Data-Synthesizing objects dominate health care, transportation, food supply, education, the military and almost everything else. Inert, retro products have a place but only so much as they too announce their consequences, socially or otherwise.
A product is a nexus of truth-procedure consequences - knowable by data emissions. Price is the social evaluation of those consequences - the price is the jumping off point - the point at which buyers inform the sellers that it’s time to start over and here’s how much they are investing.
Novel truth-procedures gain more investment (higher social evaluation, higher investment). Repeated Truth Procedures lose investment. Only by becoming aware of as much of the consequences as possible can a truth-procedure find novelty reliably.
And so... we can’t just look at the old ways of viewing products (and their conditions). We have to consider them more fully. We must consider how they are wasted, lost, and affecting other things. every possible consequence known is a chance for a novel act.
In[113]:=
titanium dioxide
Incredible Really: Through a variety of computer learning techniques we can easily know instantly about the toxicology and almost any chemical effect of any product. Of course, this isn’t limited to chemistry. Computer networked data and machine learning has made it possible to know 1000x what we new about products and their consequences even 30 years ago. It’s not just that we know more it’s that this data can be available in near real time on everyone’s smart phone. Everything presented here is real code, real systems, real data, actually happening.
Now back to the main point... truth procedures. Hypotheses 1 and 2: Being (making of a new event) and Event (participant in another’s being)
Hypothesis 1: If your truth procedure generates novel transactional events for others to start novel truth procedures in response you are the market maker - you make markets. you are the market.
Hypothesis 2: If you use others truth procedures and re-create the same transactional events you are a participant - you are a buyer and seller within a market.
Do You Want To Be The Market Maker? Is there a case to be made for not being a market maker? Is there anyone who has experienced today’s truth procedure and doesn’t want to do something even greater?
Is it possible that for the most part we are all repeating old procedures but we increase our chances of success by aiming to find novelty? by being curious to find the furthest reaches of our epistemology? to try so much we succeed in creating new truths (new products, new experiences)?
Can you always stay the market maker?
What is R I L A?
Is There Any Answer? have we blown it up?
Who Am I?
I am a father, artist, mathematician, Russell, son, brother, husband, follower, leader, ginger, lover, fighter, graduate, student, educator, mentor, mentee, CTO, advisor, friend, customer, repeat customer, Angeleno, Coloradan, consumer, citizen, being, event.
The End - Except you can always feed the talk into itself... and do it again..