“The future of retail is here! And what about you?” with these words Mykhailo Merkulov, CEO of Arricano Real Estste Plc started his speech at the conference which took place on March 28-29, 2019 within the framework of the Third International Specialized Exhibition of Retail and Development Retail & Development Business Expo – 2019.
More than 200 conference participants, representatives of retail companies, developers, investors, employees of brokerage and consulting firms, companies of the b2b segment discussed the current problems of the industry and the ways of their solution, key trends and expectations for the coming years.
In his speech which took place in the panel “Sales in retail. How to sell more”, CEO Arricano, spoke about the innovations, about changes in the field of retail, about the principles, approaches and tools that are relevant in the industry in the situation of technologization and globalization.
Mykhailo Merkulov demonstrated the participants of the conference the Prospektus mobile application developed for Prospekt shopping mall as an example of solution of numerous issues actual for retail. Prospektus is a personal omni-channel shopping assistant for a buyer. Due to convenient and gamified functions, one can make shopping lists and desires, use information filters, pick up looks from the goods sold in the shopping mall. On the other hand, the application solves the majority of retail pain points: reduction of advertising costs, personalizing of micro-targeting, inventory management, collection of the abandoned baskets.
CEO Arricano drew attention to the fact that today's buyer is surrounded by an abundance of goods, information, services, and therefore it is more difficult to him/her to make a decision about a purchase. He/she has a huge choice, a lot of suppliers are fighting for him/her, he/she is subjected to information attacks, receiving about 5,000 messages per day, to attract his/her attention all channels are used, ranging from billboards, to instant messengers on social networks.
Mykhailo believes that in retail “a paradigm shift has happened - a physical store has lost its distribution monopoly: now a person can buy anything from a phone, while the physical store has become one of the media tools.” He noted that the modern customer is spoiled by technologies, the consumers are already omnichannel, they want to get offline, everything which is offered online. 
Among the technologies available to retail today, Mykhailo noted augmented and virtual reality, XR, chat bots, voice assistants, big data and small data, DPM, digital media, QR codes, beacons, computer vision, omnichannel ERP, CRM, IMS system.
Prospektus robot, which walked around the exhibition, communicating with visitors of the event and inviting them to get acquainted with the application, became a vivid confirmation of the fan-tech future.
 A video of M.Merkulov’s speech will be available on Arricano Live.