EP112 - Annual Predictions for 2018 2017 Recap – Predictions made on episode 64 Jason Retailers truly embrace Omni-channel (Attribution/Inventory/promotion/pricing – YES A/I – Bots for Customer Service but probably not for transactions, lots of buzz on big data AI but no game changing new experience – No Personalization – to eliminate friction, not drive new demand. Data integration not some new product or touchpoint –No Laggard categories will discover digital (Grocery, Luxury, QSR) – Yes Microservices – 50% of new platform implementations will be cloud, and Micro-service based solutions will start to emerge – Partial Jason 2017 Score 2.5/5 Scot The IPO market is going to be open, but the e-commerce companies will get crowded out by the big tech unicorns like Uber, Snap, pinterest, airbnb, spotify and the like – Partial Amazon will start to chip away at the Fedex and UPS's of the world with a service like this in the US. – No Machine learning is the new 'network effect' – everyone has caught onto the power and competitive moats available from ML and that's going to be a big theme. Every vendor you work with from carts to images to upsells to recommendations to search engine results to whatever is going to HAVE to have a ML capability to stay current and keep YOU competitive. – Yes We're going to see e-commerce growth accelerate pretty materially in 2017. We've been in this 15% band and I think we will see there was a move up in 2H16 to high teens and we could see 20's in 2017 – Yes eBay – it's a do