Shownotes
In this Omni Talk Retail episode recorded live from NRF in the Vusion podcast studio, Mark Propes, Chief Business Development Officer at Vusion, and Julian Mills, CEO of Quorso, break down what the connected store actually means beyond the buzzwords and why 2026 is the year retailers risk creating a permanent gap if they don't operationalize this technology.
From digitizing the shelf as a data platform to intelligent task management that tells associates exactly what to do at 9 AM Monday morning, Mark and Julian reveal how the connected store eliminates wasted labor spent finding problems. They share insights on exception-based work, the Circle K global rollout across 14 countries and thousands of stores, and why retailers need to stop misallocating labor on tasks nobody knows add value.
If you've wondered how connected store technology actually works in practice, this conversation delivers the blueprint.
🔑 Topics covered:
-What "connected store" really means: the shelf as a data platform
-Live spatial and static data replacing the retail "black box"
-Task Delight, Stock Delight, Pick Delight technologies with light-based guidance
-How Quorso triages signals to prioritize the five things associates should do now
-Circle K announcement: 14 countries, 12,000 stores going live with intelligent management
-Why retailers misallocate labor to problem-finding instead of problem-solving
-Exception-based work vs. walking around checking planograms five times
-The permanent gap risk for retailers who only experiment vs. operationalize
-New connected store report collaboration (Vusion, Quorso, Relex, Microsoft)
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#connectedstore #retailtech #vusion #quorso #taskmanagement #retailinnovation #omnitalk #circlek #retailautomation #smartstores #retailoperations #retailpodcast
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Transcripts
Welcome back, everyone.
Speaker A: This is NRF: Speaker A:I'm Ann Mazinga.
Speaker B:And I'm Chris Walton.
Speaker A:And standing between us, we have a dynamic duo that we'd love to introduce you to today.
Speaker A:First, next to me we have Mark Propst, the Chief Business Development Officer.
Speaker A:And next to him we have Julian Mills, the CEO of Corso, Bugen Corso.
Speaker A:We're omnitoc Retail.
Speaker A:We're all excited to be here.
Speaker A:Mark, I'd love to start with you first and give our audience a little bit of information on you since this is your first time on Omnitok.
Speaker C:Absolutely, yes.
Speaker C:So I worked for Walmart for about 36 years, ran product teams for sweet and great time.
Speaker C:But you know, working for Fusion is an opportunity to put our technology in the hands of all retailers.
Speaker C:And I'm really excited to be doing that.
Speaker A:All right.
Speaker D:And Julian, so it's great to be back on London Talk.
Speaker D:I think, I think.
Speaker B:God, how many times is this for you?
Speaker D:I think it's about six or seven.
Speaker B:Oh, wow.
Speaker D:But it's great.
Speaker B:Six or seven.
Speaker B:No, just kidding.
Speaker D:Always having a great conversation with you guys and very excited back.
Speaker A:All right.
Speaker B:Since we've interviewed Julian six or seven times, Mark, today we're going to start with you.
Speaker B:And my question for you is connected store.
Speaker B:It's a concept that we all believe in in omnitalk.
Speaker B:I'm sure you do as well, but there's a lot of misnomers about it.
Speaker B:So how would you sum up how people should think about the term connected store in practicality?
Speaker C:Yeah, I think if you go back 10 years, there was in retail, in a physical store you had a metal shelf.
Speaker C:And in today's world you've got a metal shelf.
Speaker C:With technology that can sit on that shelf is a platform.
Speaker C:The Edge Sense by Vuzion.
Speaker C:That is a platform.
Speaker C:In that platform, on that shelf, it digitizes the shelf.
Speaker C:And so that digitized shelf can provide data.
Speaker C:And so instead of having a data free environment in a store or a physical store where sometimes it's a bit of a black box to get data out of, you can have rich data that's coming directly from the shelf, items that are out of stock, whether your pricing is set right, whether your planogram is set right, and a bonus is tasks need to be executed in stores.
Speaker C:Julian knows all about that.
Speaker C:Then you can have technologies with light flashing Stock delight, pick delight, task delight.
Speaker C:To be able to actually let people be able to go in, the associates of the store and perform those tasks.
Speaker C:So the connected store is possible today and you're tying together live spatial and static data to be able to make that happen.
Speaker C:And I think when we do that, we make retailers, stores thrive.
Speaker B:Got it.
Speaker B:So, Mark, if I play back what you said then, is the shelf an essential ingredient for the connected store?
Speaker B:Can you have a connected store without the shelf?
Speaker C:Yeah, I think you can't really have a shelf without a gondola and you have to have something to put the merchandise on.
Speaker C:So you got a gondola, you got a shelf and you put the shelf there and you're selling products off of it.
Speaker C:But why not put the physical retailer in the center of the value chain so all the different data that you can get from store rather than having to, you know, pull people in to go check to see if stocks there the.
Speaker C:Or go in and understand how we can make things faster.
Speaker C:Because in the future, and we're actually in the future right now.
Speaker C:And so I would say that the choices that fiscal retailers make about their stores today, they've got to leverage their most important asset.
Speaker C:And if they do that and they're not experimenting with this year or next year, which if they're just experimenting, meaning and not operationalizing technology, there's going to be a permanent gap potentially in where they're at in the future.
Speaker C:So, yeah, super important.
Speaker B:Well said.
Speaker A:Julian.
Speaker A:How do you think about that in terms of what Mark was just talking about?
Speaker A:Especially when I love how you said Mark to operationalize the store.
Speaker A: of the new plans you have in: Speaker D:Yeah, sure.
Speaker D:So I think the connected store is very exciting.
Speaker D:The shelf is one bit of it.
Speaker D:But there's obviously also, you know, intelligent IoT alerts from coolers.
Speaker D:There's stuff coming from labor management systems.
Speaker D:There's, you know, dozens and dozens of different signals.
Speaker B:What you do with the data?
Speaker B:Yeah, essentially.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker D:That's it.
Speaker D:So we describe what Corso is.
Speaker D:It's an intelligent management platform.
Speaker D:We think it's the missing bit of the tech stack for the connected store because it triages all of the signals and says to the poor store manager or the store associate, Here are the five things for you to do at 9 o' clock on Monday morning.
Speaker D:Okay.
Speaker D:And it intelligently prioritizes for you as an individual between them and Julian, big.
Speaker B:Big announcement from you guys.
Speaker B:I want to make sure the audience hears about this big announcement from you on the Circle K front.
Speaker B:Why don't you tell the audience about that?
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker D:So super excited.
Speaker D:So Circle K been a great partner.
Speaker D:We've been working with them some time, initially in North America, then in Europe, across the whole of Europe, and now they're rolling out across the rest of North America.
Speaker D:So I think it's 14 countries, 12,000 stores.
Speaker D:You know, great partner, and I'm just thrilled to be working with them.
Speaker D:So thank you.
Speaker B:Yeah, congrats on that.
Speaker B:I want to make sure we let everyone know about that because that's huge news.
Speaker B:It just happened like what, like last couple days it was announced.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:All right, so Mark, back to you then.
Speaker B:You know, Julian mentions his angles to connect the store.
Speaker B:You mentioned the shelf.
Speaker B:The one part that sometimes gets overlooked when people start talking about the connective store, too, is also the.
Speaker B:The role of labor and how the retailer should be thinking about labor, both financially, both emotionally.
Speaker B:So how do you think about that?
Speaker C:Hey, great question.
Speaker C: So we're in: Speaker C:Happy New Year, everyone.
Speaker C:This is the year that, if you think about labor, I believe that retailers will begin to think about labor is not being a problem to solve in any other way than how they have structurally misallocated labor in the past.
Speaker C:There's too much time spent in stores by store associates and employees actually trying to find the problems so that they can fix them.
Speaker C:So in today's world, fortunately, we have at Fusion a variety of products, starting with digitizing the shelf with the rail.
Speaker C:We have camera CVAI with cameras that can plug into those shelves.
Speaker C:We have so many things that can generate, create data because we operate on Bluetooth signal so we can understand shoppers devices, phones, and we can connect and detect.
Speaker C:And so I think this will be the year, and I hope it's the year where people lean in and don't create a permanent gap on what they're doing, because they need to leverage this technology in the next year or two to stay ahead.
Speaker C:But this will be a gap that can be fixed.
Speaker C:And if you think about all those data signals they can feed right into.
Speaker C:If you think about Julian's work, how do those tasks get completed?
Speaker C:But we don't want to spend time trying to find the problems.
Speaker A:That makes sense.
Speaker A:Well, Julian, you just put out a report as well on what's happening in the stores.
Speaker A:Tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker A: t and put them into action in: Speaker D:Can I come in just on the labor thing?
Speaker D:Actually just.
Speaker B:You sure can.
Speaker D:So I think every retailer I speak to at the moment is trying to kind of.
Speaker D:It's got a problem with labor.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker D:And they're trying to kind of reduce labor, etc.
Speaker D:And we think that there's a big opportunity to kind of detask the store.
Speaker D:So if you think today we typically manage stores by walking around and visually checking things and actually things like planograms might get checked five times by five different people.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker D:So I think the beauty of Vuzion's technology linked to what we're doing at Corso is you can actually generate specific kind of almost like exception based work for people and prioritize it to solve that specific issue once it's done.
Speaker D:Their technology tells you that it's done and we can show that it's done in Corso.
Speaker D:So we think there is a big opportunity to take labor out of stores by linking these together, if that makes sense.
Speaker B:And the way I think about what both you guys just said too is having been in retail for 20 plus years as well, almost 30 now, too similar to you.
Speaker B:Mark is like, Mark, I like what you said.
Speaker B:Oftentimes in the store you're going around looking for things to fix.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Because you're trying to stay active, you're trying to stay busy, especially if you're a good employee.
Speaker B:But then to your point, Julian, oftentimes the headquarters or the operators are directing them to do things that we don't actually know whether or not there's value in doing that work.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So going back to Ann's question, the report, I know you guys put out a report that kind of synthesizes all that.
Speaker B:So why don't you talk about that?
Speaker D:Yeah, great.
Speaker D:So yes, we've just published a report.
Speaker D:You can get it on our website, corso.com or on LinkedIn.
Speaker D:And it's a collaboration with Vuzion, with Relex, with some contributors from Microsoft and from Connor's group.
Speaker D:And it's basically talking about the connected store and how we think you, how we think it's going to be possible to bring it together and create personally prioritized work for people using this kind of intelligent management approach.
Speaker D:I think it's a great read.
Speaker D:So if you've got five minutes, do check it out.
Speaker A:Or even better, five minutes.
Speaker D:Five minutes, even better.
Speaker D:Come and pick it up from our booth.
Speaker D:2312 at NRF.
Speaker B:A hard copy.
Speaker D:A hard copy.
Speaker B:They are copy at the booth.
Speaker D:And.
Speaker D:And they.
Speaker D:They are even signed.
Speaker B:Wow.
Speaker B:Wow.
Speaker D:Exactly.
Speaker B:I gotta get one of those.
Speaker D:They're limited.
Speaker B:I mean, I hope I get some preference.
Speaker B:You've been on the show six or seven times, so, you know.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker B:While supplies last.
Speaker B:Get them while they're hot.
Speaker B:All right, well, thank you so much, Julian, Mark, for joining us today.
Speaker B:Thanks to the Viewsion for supporting our work here at the show.
Speaker B:If you want to stop on by, you can see them.
Speaker B:You can see us.
Speaker B: We're at booth: Speaker B: Right in: Speaker B:Is that the right number?
Speaker B:Yes, it is.
Speaker B:And until next time.
Speaker A:Ann, be careful out there.