SVP Innovation and Incubation at Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions, Yevgeni drives innovation and delivers cutting-edge retail technologies.
Retail innovation is not in short supply. Retailers are experimenting with AI in nearly every corner of the business, including computer vision trials on the sales floor and conversational chatbots online. While AI opens the door to endless possibilities, scaling obstacles are often why retailers face innovation challenges. Many retailers find that their innovation initiatives remain trapped in pilot mode, unable to expand beyond isolated use cases. Without a connected foundation, promising technology innovations and enhancements remain siloed. This limits retailers from driving meaningful and system-wide impact or measurable improvements.
Analyzing this industry challenge, IDC identified a super platform framework as an innovation scale solution for retailers. Rather than layering AI features on top of fragmented systems, a super platform framework establishes the underlying conditions for innovation to scale by creating a foundation where data points and insights can flow across the store, chain and entire enterprise.
The Super Platform Framework Defined
The super platform framework is emerging as the new architectural approach and operating system for modern retail. A recent IDC Spotlight Report outlines the three defining layers of the super platform framework: A composable platform for flexibility, a unified data layer for visibility across the enterprise and AI services for decision support and automation. More than just technology innovation, it allows retailers to experiment safely, deploy quickly and innovate continuously. This can all be achieved while delivering the seamless, trusted experiences that shoppers now expect.
The super platform framework relies on two pillars to successfully and securely optimize innovation. First is a data plane that provides a holistic and cohesive view of operational insights like transactions, inventory, loyalty and behavioral signals. Instead of relying on fragmented reports that lag behind what is currently happening across the store, retailers gain live insights where consistent, real-time data informs every technology experiment and decision.
The control plane is the second pillar that runs alongside the data plane. The control plane manages governance, security and transparency. It ensures that new capabilities scale safely, meet compliance requirements and system performance remains visible across the enterprise. The data and control planes create the foundation that allows innovation without compromising stability.
Why Edge-First And Cloud-Smart Matter
A super platform framework is dynamic with an edge-first, cloud-smart framework. Retail is physical, and many of the most critical workloads must run at the edge and connect in the store, on devices, sometimes even inside a camera. Latency-sensitive and privacy-sensitive processes—like real-time product recognition or risk-based checkout verification—must execute instantly, even if the network is slow or offline.
The cloud brings big advantages that edge systems alone can’t provide. For example, the cloud makes it easier to manage many stores and devices from one place, quickly scale up or down as needed, stay reliable and connect smoothly with other business systems and partners.
In practice, companies use a mix of edge and cloud. Services requiring fast, local decisions run close to the action at the edge, while others, like pricing tools or large-scale analytics, are better suited for the cloud. AI ties it all together, with models trained centrally, deployed locally and continuously monitored to keep the whole system running smarter.
AI For Speed And Stability
AI also plays an important role in scaling innovations. By accelerating code generation, testing and deployment, AI compresses development cycles from months into days. At the same time, it strengthens supportability by monitoring system health, detecting issues early and recommending or even triggering fixes before disruptions occur. On the retail floor, AI-powered agents tap into real-time data to manage risk and optimize labor, creating more resilient operations and responsive customer experiences.
A Practical Path From Pilots
Many retailers find it challenging to expand successful pilot projects across all stores. Rollouts feel like one-off efforts, making it hard to build momentum. A super platform framework solves this challenge by making scalability part of the plan from the very beginning.
Here’s a three-step approach that retailers can use:
• Build with what is already there. Integrate new solutions alongside existing systems without disruption.
• Prove value with high-impact use cases. Focus first on areas that deliver measurable returns.
• Scale with structure. Maintain controlled visibility to make each new rollout faster, safer and more predictable.
To reduce risk along the way, composable services let retailers test and launch features in small steps rather than all at once. Tester deployments allow old and new versions to run side by side, so teams can confirm stability before switching over completely. Retailers can confidently scale innovation by combining pilot rollouts and AI-powered monitoring to create a smoother and safer path to take updates from concept to full production.
Measuring What Matters
To prove value, retailers must identify their most pressing pain points, including shrink, long checkout lines, inconsistent pricing or rising operating costs. After identifying those challenges, retailers can begin to shape a clear measurement plan for ROI. Once priorities are established, retailers can focus on tracking the outcomes. Some valued data points retailers can measure include:
• Shrink data highlights opportunities to cut losses without making shopping harder for customers.
• Attach and conversion rates reveal how effectively targeted upselling and cross-selling offers translate into sales.
• Time-to-value demonstrates how quickly new ideas deliver results, while supportability metrics capture how fast issues are identified, resolved and prevented in the future.
Retailers can ensure their innovation investments deliver meaningful and measurable business impact by starting with pain points and aligning metrics to them.
Conclusion
Retailers are under constant pressure thanks to evolving expectations, high performance demands and relentless competition. With AI, innovation is moving at lightspeed. Retailers need a unified approach to bring that innovation from idea to test to full-scale execution. That’s where a super platform framework shines to remove scaling issues and disconnected innovation execution. It creates a single foundation that brings data together, spreads intelligence across both the edge and the cloud and continuously adapts to consumer expectations.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?