Why Agility is Your Greatest Business Survival Skill with Robert Parsons, VP of Hardware Portfolio at TOSHIBA

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Robert Parsons, VP of Hardware Portfolio at Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions, about why you should make agility your greatest business survival skill. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:19) I was excited when I saw the title for the episode, "Agility Being Your Greatest Business Survival Skill." That's interesting because it's like, how? Why is that the greatest survival skill?

(Robert Parsons at 00:00:32) Yeah. I mean, I think that's funny because my responsibility is for our infrastructure portfolio. So that's our hardware, operating systems, a lot of the devices. And if there's a word out there that's less associated to agility than infrastructure, I don't know what it is. We think about infrastructure for different reasons here.

(Robert Parsons at 00:00:52) But in retail, we serve retail primarily in this space, and really, retail is a business that's got a lot of constraints around it. And so when they're making their investments, particularly those capital investments around equipment, it becomes one of those impediments to them for how they move forward as a business. And so being able to provide, think about agility, think about agility first and foremost, to me is one of those areas where we can provide differentiation, particularly to our types of customers that have to think, how do I make an investment for ten-plus years but be able to accommodate changing workloads, changes to retail that I don't even know what might be happening in the next ten years in my stores? So being able to provide that kind of change is important. I mean, you just think for us in the last ten years, what's changed in retail has been significant. Just before COVID, during COVID, after COVID, the stores have dramatically changed overall, and they've had to adjust their spending in their business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:57) Now?

(Robert Parsons at 00:01:58) Yeah. Self-checkout, curbside. I joke, I do more shopping in parking lots than I've ever done before. I'm a retail guy, so that's a different thing for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:11) I'm like my wife's delivery driver. Right? She'll punch it in the app, and she'll be like, "Stall 18."

(Robert Parsons at 00:02:16) Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I joke about it all the time. I tell her what lane I'm in, and somebody comes out and serves me. And, you know, some of the times, it's a great experience. I find that to be the right combination of great satisfaction feedback and yet not having to take the time to go in stores when I'm not actually making selections.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:40) We had a big issue at Walmart about two years ago. My wife's like, "Hey, go pick this up." And she, in her app, she typed that she's like, "I'm there." But they were using geolocation. And so even though she said that she was there, it wasn't issuing the order because it knew she physically wasn't there. But I was there. And after like forty-five minutes, I just got in touch with the manager and they explained to me that's how the system works. And I was like, somebody needs to—I actually DMed like the senior vice president of Walmart. I was like, "Hey, look, not to tech-support you, but this is going on." Yeah. So tell me, let's bring it home a little bit closer for people, because we started off just, you know, basic agility and then you start talking, you do some retail stuff. What is it exactly that you do?

(Robert Parsons at 00:03:26) So my responsibility is over, like I said, in our retail business. We think about from Toshiba Global Commerce, we serve a lot of the larger retailers. We have our hardware business, which is what I run generally, so that's our hardware infrastructure. I get to pick the product definitions, requirements, and that includes our self-checkout, obviously, our core point of sale, a lot of the peripherals that go with it, and all the pieces that tie together with that, whether it's operating systems and the like. My peers do application software, so very, very focused on how that overall software experience works with the associate and even down into some cases where the consumer is running some of those in-store shopping apps. And then we also have the services team that services all of the equipment that's in the store, the software, and again, outside that, even not our equipment. So my responsibility is primarily in that infrastructure space, and what I focus on is making sure I deliver products that have a long life. Really, that's where I get back to my total cost of ownership promise to the customers, and that is highly available because we see that as a big friction driver for their customers. You know, no one wants to be in line any longer than they have to be. And so that's really what I'm responsible for, what I'm focused on from a delivery of products. Right? How do you get something that's really good return on your investment as a retailer, tight margins, that's really, really available and meets all your needs?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:55) Well, and then like, there's the consumer functionality, like ease of use for the consumer. I've used one of those Amazon stores, the contactless checkout situation.

(Robert Parsons at 00:05:06) Checkout. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:07) I don't know how they scale it up or what they're doing, but it works well for the airport.

(Robert Parsons at 00:05:12) Yeah. Yeah. And Hudson News has done a couple of those as well, similar to the Amazon approach. Yeah. I think that's scale is obviously the big challenge, but I definitely think anywhere where we can take friction out and get the feeling of going to a store, being able to get that instant gratification, find the selection, and take away the friction of standing in line and be able to move out of the store, just like we talked before. Anything I could take out of the frustration of the store brings customers in and makes shopping the experience, the preferred experience that you or I want to do versus the competition of e-commerce, right, which is I stay home and have it delivered to my front porch.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:55) So that's actually an interesting point. So you had mentioned earlier that ten years, people are making decisions on buying equipment for ten years. Workloads are gonna change. Things are gonna change. Walk me through what happens when a new technology like DoorDash emerges. You got all these different clients. They're gonna adopt it at different times. You're gonna have to work with them probably on the software side more than maybe a little hardware. I don't know. But tell me, like, you've been at this job long enough to see DoorDash come about, right? So how do you handle a big technology shift like that?

(Robert Parsons at 00:06:28) I mean, for the retailers, particularly, I think DoorDash, in particular, you think about that from your hospitality going into your restaurants, picking up food, you know, the GrubHubs and those likes. I mean, you think about from their challenges, they've got a process today for how they order and fulfill food, and now they've got to think about how that process integrates with their labor and their equipment. And I'm primarily focused on equipment. But for them, the bigger impact is how they manage labor. I've been to a couple restaurants now, and they have machines set up almost in banks. You know, this is for this type of online processing. This is for a different set of online processing. I have a separate checkout process. I have to have staff that is potentially helping in the store or the restaurant normally, but then also monitoring these orders and packing up orders and then preparing for one of those DoorDashes to come through. I've never worked specifically in a restaurant or environment to actually have to manage that, but you can clearly see the effort involved and the processing that goes into how do I maintain a really high level of service in my store, and also make sure that food is on time and ready to be picked up and sent home to the online consumer. So it's definitely a huge challenge. I mean, just like we talked about curbside, that's a huge challenge. Buy online, pick up in store. Some of these places like Costco and others that are doing returns for equipment that's significant size, they have to add new processes. You can go to your store. All that is new processes in the last ten years that just may have happened at small degree, but never happened to the level that it's today. It's just normal process.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:13) Help me understand modular systems. So my background is not super hardware. Very brief experience, you know, with those systems I just discussed. But what does modular systems mean to you?

(Robert Parsons at 00:08:26) Yeah. For us, I mean, that's really what I get back to this. How do we make systems that need to last ten to fifteen years in a retail environment that's asking for that kind of life cycle return on investment when they're asking for ability to flex around new workloads, new demands? And so for us, we've really moved into, I'm still building a computer, I'm still building system units that support these environments, but I have to be able to make them upgradable, flexible, redeployable. And so modularity is really the focus for us is how do I go build a system that's not throwaway, that's not going to be in a position where it's obsolete because you're building that product around that reliability, availability, but it can adjust to that new workload. So modularity for us is, you know, we just talked about payment options, right? We used to sell everything with an MSR, but no one's using MSRs for payment, but they may be still using it for employee login until they move to facial recognition. They may have fingerprint readers today. They may have key locks today for management overrides, the old manager key. They have a need for other types of peripherals. I need to be able to upgrade compute, and I want to be able to do that without doing what the consumer industry expects, which is buy everything you need, and then in two to three years throw it away and buy something else that you need. For most of our customers, that just isn't a sustainable model. So how do I build products that say, let's take the most of your cost and be able to build it in such a way that if you move from a manned lane to a self-checkout, most of that investment can be redeployed? If I decide to change my payment from what today is an MSR or a pin pad and turn it into an NFC, a tap to pay, I can add that functionality without having to overbuild, overbuy upfront, and without having to risk throwing away product prematurely because it didn't flex to your needs. That's what modularity does.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:33) So if I'm building a brand new grocery store, do they have hybrid? Like, it can be manned or unmanned in the same physical space? Oh, they do.

(Robert Parsons at 00:10:41) Yeah. A couple of our customers have that today, so you can do that. Now, just like any hybrid, you take, you don't necessarily get the best of either world, right? So if you build hybrid, it's not necessarily as fast as a manned lane or as optimized for a consumer because you have to try to do both. You have to be able to make it mechanically change. But that's one of the examples we have today. In fact, actually, some of the convenience markets we've served, they've worked out how to do something like that so I can—we have a kiosk machine that actually rotates completely around. So now it faces the customer, and they can go into a full checkout if they choose to check out that way. Not great for grocery, but great for convenience where you don't have weight scales and all that kind of produce type of recognition typically.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:32) Nice. And then soon, we're all just gonna send Optimus robots to the grocery store for us, right?

(Robert Parsons at 00:11:39) Well, I, you know, again, I'm always amazed. I walk into my, you know, you see like a Target or a BJ's or any of those stores, you know, you kind of look at the side and they have all this staging area for the buy online and pick up in store, the lockers that are set up at your local Lowe's or Home Depot. That's becoming a whole process where the store personnel aren't just stocking the shelves, but they're picking and placing orders and having that. And that, you know, that was none of that was there before 2020 that I ever saw. It's almost all new workload.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:14) So you've been in this hardware space for a long time. There's been a lot of engineers, software engineers that only have like SaaS type software experience where there's not really hardware involved in the sense, like, a deep integration with the hardware. It's just normal web servers and things like that. So for the people that have that experience, do you ever see them coming in and then starting to work on hardware? Have you ever brought people without hardware experience, but with software experience into the fold? Or is that completely outside of what you do?

(Robert Parsons at 00:12:45) Oh, man. It's funny, especially lately. And one of the folks on the team here at Toshiba, we've been very focused on IoT. And, you know, IoT, especially in cameras and machine learning and all the AI workloads that are happening here. So a lot of those teams actually start as software. So you'll meet a lot of folks that are, their whole background was really around software, SaaS. And as these machine learning algorithms get better and they start to make sense to be placed on endpoints like the near-edge devices that we use today, you see a lot of software engineers becoming involved in the hardware. And so I find it somewhat interesting is that we have a lot of folks in the team today that would probably say to you that they started their careers, but 90% of their career as software engineers, but are spending much more of their time working on these endpoints to be able to really get these insights and really get fast turnaround. This, I think, honestly, machine learning will try to drive some of this change and approach, merging of these two different workspaces. So, yeah, we have a lot of software guys working on hardware today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:57) Nice. And so that transition happens pretty well probably because, like, we're nerds and we're really curious on how things work, right? If you've never gotten to work really closely with hardware and then that opportunity presents itself, you're probably gonna, you know, learn that pretty quick.

(Robert Parsons at 00:14:11) Yeah. It's funny. It's not the technology so much and, you know, we talk about this sometimes even for retail, is it's often the life cycle. I mean, that's a big difference between what software thinks about and what hardware spends a lot of time thinking about. If you come up through hardware, you're thinking about upgradability and modularity, and I've got to make this product and it's got to make sure that if I deploy it and I need to know how it's performing at five and ten years from now, because that's just as important as having the right function at the GA. You know, software often comes to the mindset of saying, I really want to get to market very, very quickly, and then I can upgrade and migrate. And so that difference in time frame is often one of those stress points that we run into when a software guy versus a hardware guy. We don't move as fast as they think we should, and they probably don't think about the elements of what's going to be, what do we do that needs to be adaptable in five years after we put the product into the market and the needs have changed, and suddenly, the choices that we made five years ago don't allow us to adjust. So that's probably one of those flexibility elements.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:20) Yeah. And backwards compatibility. Like, if you're all feeding off the same server, it just, it's whatever is happening in that instance in real time. But if you have your rolling patches and their optional installations, then you have to look at it entirely differently.

(Robert Parsons at 00:15:34) Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And hardware life cycles, I mean, that's another funny thing that you think about stuff that says I may no longer be in production. I mean, that's a challenge for us in the embedded space that's different from the consumer space.

(Robert Parsons at 00:15:47) So consumer space, we never really think about that I need this to be in production for more than a year, you know, sometimes more than five years. So sometimes you have to be able to pick different, make different choices because of production cycles that are critical when you're even in the hardware space, but a different segment of the hardware space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:08) That makes complete sense. And then, you know, to the theme of agility, you also mentioned some machine learning, some LLM type technology. So we can look at agility on a number of different layers. Right? I'm curious to know how you've rolled out with your teams this idea of how they can experiment with LLMs, how they can experiment with these new technologies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:32) Have you or is it like a peer at the company put some sort of guardrail saying, hey, this new technology exists and we can't just ignore it. We have to use it, but it also can't be the Wild West. You can't be plugging our code into GPT. Right? So how have you found that balance with your teams?

(Robert Parsons at 00:16:48) I've got to write two pieces. One is we are pushing everybody to use AI in every part of their job. Right? In fact, this agility statement of there is so much opportunity out here, even in our interactions with customers. Right?

(Robert Parsons at 00:17:04) We have tools in place here today that we try to encourage our customers to use that, you know, leverages a lot of the information that is in documents and pubs that we know no one actually goes to read. So how can we make it easy to make it available to them? But also using it for ourselves. I joke I'm one of the biggest users of our own support tools because, you know, I'm curious, and it's amazing how much and how available that information is. So driving teams to use AI as an accelerator for them is important for us inside our product side where we actually have an innovation team, and they really do drive this.

(Robert Parsons at 00:17:43) I mean, that's their product, the large language models and the like, trying to get to that point where we're actually getting AI models that do things like loss prevention as a great example, watching behaviors, watching cameras to see if what looks to be normal behavior in self-checkout or it looks like it's meant to steal, also being used in even fixed lanes where we have manned lanes, but still watching behavior around it. So that's becoming a pretty important piece of the product engineering side. In addition to just everybody on the team, I think this is probably across the technology world, find out ways where you can advance your knowledge, your capabilities with the tools that we have available.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:30) Those loss prevention people, I don't think they realize they'd be labeling data and because that's I'm assuming that's what they do. Like, the humans watch and when they confirm a loss, they can take that snippet and then you can train the model on all that?

(Robert Parsons at 00:18:42) They're maybe a little bit beyond what I know from how the model works, but we're training the model beforehand. So it's building the model in advance to watching for certain types of activity. So, you know, just really looking for particularly, I use the self-checkout. We all see the YouTube videos of somebody...

(Robert Parsons at 00:19:02) Unstacking products and figuring out how to fake out the system. So you're looking for some of those types of behaviors and then building the model to say, I can detect the guy who's scanning cereal, but putting steaks in the basket. Right? That kind of mix and match.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:20) Oh, that's rough. I'm glad I'm not at a position in life where that's a thing I'm doing. Oh, I haven't seen those videos. I'm gonna look them up after the show.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:30) YouTube videos. People hacking the self-checkouts with the... because they're hacking the most basic functionality of watching your body put it in. And so the systems are really new. Right? And that's how they're set up. But then they have figured out ways to make it look like that, but still... Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense.

(Robert Parsons at 00:19:50) Well, traditional self-checkout that we have today, loss prevention, is primarily based on weight. So we're using scanning of the product and then weight-based securities. That's what you see in many of these cases is how... As long I'm checking what you scan, I'm checking against what was put into the basket from a weight perspective. But if you've used a lot of self-checkout, you know that generates a lot of—we use the term friction.

(Robert Parsons at 00:20:16) It, you know, I put the thing in before it scanned. My son came by. He dropped the thing into the basket and or took it back out before the weight had settled and suddenly it's waiting for somebody to come over. I mean, that's one of the frustrations. No one's trying to steal anything. It's just that the system is too sensitive, and that creates friction. The opposite side is you're trying to build a system that is foolproof, and people are pretty clever if they choose to apply themselves to avoiding those security systems. So that's really what a lot of our loss prevention models are based around.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:55) Nice. Dave Ramsey would not approve. That's not a way to save money, people. Let's talk about agility test real world scenarios.

(Robert Parsons at 00:21:05) We have a number of customers in convenience market, and so there are definitely customers out there in convenience where that is actually an area that you can almost imagine. They're actually being pushed quite a bit to satisfy a lot of these labor demands in the space. They're heavily used in the sense of a fuel and product, and they're looking for ways to modify their footprint, their stores, just like anybody in the convenience space. So what I see in convenience today as a good example is a set of customers that are looking for how they can provide service when folks are going into the store, be able to still provide most of their fuel support overall, but be able to also offer self-service so that they can get a fast level of service in times when that low labor is not able to satisfy everybody in the store at the same time. So they really are looking at—and so them or other customers, how do they do more hybrid type of checkout where I can be manned or self-service depending on my labor availability at the time?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:11) I've been seeing that split. I see it pretty much everywhere, actually. Yeah. I actually can't think of the store. Like, there's very few stores that have full self-checkout. They're almost always... a lot of them are like fifty-fifty splits right now.

(Robert Parsons at 00:22:26) Yeah. It depends on the model, but for sure, you need to... I mean, I think the answer we've come at after a lot of these changes is you need to provide choice. You need to be able to provide the right experience that each of the customers are looking for. I mean, during COVID, I think we learned that there were people who preferred self-checkout. I mean, maybe at the time, it was more about exposure, but over time that's their preference.

(Robert Parsons at 00:22:51) There are others that prefer the personal experience. Right? They wanna be able to go to a manned checkout. They have that experience. And so I think most retail today is offering that choice.

(Robert Parsons at 00:23:02) You and I talked before, there are also other areas. I wanna come in and pick up one item. It may be a complex item, and I wanna be checked out by that person right there, wherever I'm at in the store. I don't wanna go back to the front end. I wanna be able to check out at the parking lot. I don't wanna come in the store at all. So being able to provide all of that service requires some amount of flexibility on the part of the retailer. And I think self-checkout is a key component of being able to provide that flexibility.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:34) And so how does the life cycle work right now, like, real world? Like, let's say, one of your customers wants to make this change. How does that go from them having a desire to make this change, or do you come to them and suggest it? How does it work?

(Robert Parsons at 00:23:48) Most of our customers, we've been working with for a long time, and so they're part of this journey. We know that the needs in the space are evolving for them. So we're always in a lot of dialogue with some of these customers, and they're talking about their needs, and we're working with them on trying to how we can best serve them. But, generally, over time, most of our customers in some way or another are talking about how do I provide some level of self-service in their stores just as you talked about or either adapting it to be more hybrid. I wanna be able to make it more manned in certain times and more dedicated self-checkout other times.

(Robert Parsons at 00:24:29) How do I add more workloads? We talked about mobile workloads in the store. So we start a discussion about what's the right technology. I think for me, when I think about agility on hardware, that's one of those key things is how do you make choices about what you invest in so that if you make changes today, you said fifty-fifty. Maybe tomorrow, it's gonna be sixty-forty. How do I make sure that the investments I make today can still be utilized even if I change some of my workloads over time?

(Robert Parsons at 00:25:02) And that's what's important about hardware because you need to make that value return on that investment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:09) It's also, I think, specifically with the checkout, there's one reason why I'll use the... I'll call old school checkout, like, the the people checkout. And it's when my three kids are with me and we're in the grocery store, and we've got two carts full of stuff. And I need people to help me so I can be watching them and they can scan and get us out to the car. Every other time, you know, just by myself or one kid or something, I'm just doing the self-checkout really quick, grabbing something quick. So that's the times I use it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:40) I also think, you know, and I'm curious to know from your perspective, do they look at generational data? Because, like, if I had to place a bet today, Robert, I'd say that the... the people that really like it skew older. Right? Because that's what they're familiar with and people like what they're familiar with. And then as the generations progress, they'll become less of the size of the market. Right? I'm leaning towards convenience unless if it's necessary for human experience. Do you guys ever look at that? Has that data ever come up in decision making?

(Robert Parsons at 00:26:17) Oh, you know, it's funny. It does come up all the time. In fact, we just had an event the other day where we had a customer who... it was actually in Latin America. He just rolled out self-checkout. And he, like you and like a lot of us, thought it's gonna be a complete generational split.

(Robert Parsons at 00:26:34) And he found, like, we've been finding that it's not so simple. We have a lot of older people that love self-checkout. For whatever reason, they like the privacy, the sense of control, whatever else. But it's actually not as split as you might imagine. And we have other folks that say, why am I gonna check out myself? I'd rather have this full... I see it as a full service experience, not necessarily the personal experience, but it's about service and having that personal touch, and they like to talk. And so you'd find out that it's not nearly as generational as we once... when we started out, when it was new, that was definitely a sense. Younger people tried the new sooner. But now that it's been fairly established, it's almost just personal preference. What do you prefer and how you interact?

(Robert Parsons at 00:27:25) And as you said, sometimes it's the basket size. May sometimes it's the product you're buying. Sometimes it's who you're with that changes which type of pattern you use.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:35) That's interesting. Yeah. Because like I said, I use the regular people with my kids. That's really interesting. I'm gonna think a little bit more about that, but I'm glad I wasn't too far off base because that's what my thought was.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:48) Like, if you're planning and you got a budget for ten years and... and let's just... let's take age out of it. Let's just say familiarity with the technology. You have to factor that in. Right? Because when you first see something... humans, new, scary. Right? Then they get experience with it and they see other people using it and then they gradually move towards it. So you would definitely have to take that into account when making decade decisions.

(Robert Parsons at 00:28:10) Oh, yeah. For sure. And again, that's where I think we talk about agility here in the business because those transitions seem to be happening much, much faster than the past. I mean, I started in the retail technology twenty years ago, and I used to complain about the old people using checks. And we all said checks were gonna be gone in just a few years. No one's gonna take a check. And now that I approach that 50 myself, and I still deliver products that can read checks because there are still people in the industry that use it, it's the reality of retail of... of things just get added. Right? They get added to the business, but the old stuff never seems to necessarily go away completely. But what's different now is the rate of add is much faster. It's just much faster than it's ever been before.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:00) We're adding new payment methods. We got the Cash App, the all the different technologies now.

(Robert Parsons at 00:29:05) Oh, yeah. And I... a couple years ago, I moved to... I put my wallet inside my phone, so I don't carry a separate wallet. And I wanted to tap to pay, and I try to make that a goal everywhere I go. I want to tap. I don't care if I'm in a, you know, drive-through line. I wanna be able to use it. For me, personally, I wanna reduce the amount of stuff I carry. And I'm amazed that I rarely have to pull the credit card out of the back of the wallet. I mean, almost everybody has adapted to this new payment technique.

(Robert Parsons at 00:29:36) And, you know, can I talk about it while they still probably could take a check if I wrote one? They've also now found new ways to take new payments. And that's all effort on the backside of teams, making sure they've added new technology to support it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:49) I learned a new one last night actually. We went out. My wife and I, we had a date night last night. And we came back and we went to pay the babysitter. And usually, I just Cash App or Venmo or something. But she told me, like, I can just... in a direct message with her with Apple phone, I can just say $100 or whatnot and just send the... I can just send her money with Apple.

(Robert Parsons at 00:30:15) Through the text and Apple. Wow. Yeah. That's amazing. I haven't seen that yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:19) No. Neither had I. Because she was like, you just send it to me through Apple. I was like, Apple's not... I've got Venmo and Cash App. What do you want? I could go old school and do PayPal, but, you know... But she's like, no. And I gave her my phone, and she showed me how to do it. And I said, that's crazy because it had all my debit cards in there from my Apple Wallet, and it was able to just to send her the cash. Like, I thought it was brilliant.

(Robert Parsons at 00:30:42) Yeah. Yeah. That is amazing. I mean, I think that is definitely the transaction speed of a payment and how that integrates is definitely... I mean, it's fast and fast and I had it. That's not one I've used yet, so I have to go experiment with that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:55) It's out there. Yeah. Now I was curious, holidays. Right? We got the Black Fridays where we got busy concerts.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:03) We got these moments where there's just a high amount of traffic. Do you guys have to account for that at all? Is that a big topic of conversation over there?

(Robert Parsons at 00:31:12) Oh, yeah. And I mean, that's one where we think about their ability to flex labor too, right? In retail, particularly, we think about the 30 days—the straighteners of the year. There's these 30 days sprinkled throughout the year that are their peak days, that every lane, every person, every way to check out is being used. And so how do you maximize that? And again, we've talked about that on self-checkout. Sometimes self-service and that flexibility is where that plays in. I need to be able to add resources around mobility, resources around manned checkouts aligned, and I still need to be able to offer the same footprint in my store. So self-service comes into play there. We also have customers that are looking at and have used what we call hybrid checkout, which is I have a self-checkout for 300 days of the year, and for those other 60, 65 days a year, I'm turning those into manned lanes where I can really have the speed. Now, your perception—I think I saw a study a few years ago that talked about your perception of time in line is different depending on whether you're just waiting versus you feel like you're actively involved. So you may be in line the same amount of time, but if you're scanning yourself, you feel like I'm making progress. So that sometimes makes you feel that you've gotten out of line sooner. It's kind of like sometimes I'll take the right-hand turn at the stoplight even though I probably know I'm gonna spend more time driving, but I feel like I'm not just stuck at the light, you know. I think that definitely happens to all of us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:47) Oh, for sure. I do that all the time. I actually—I'll tell you what, I got real nerdy. I'm 38. When I was in my early 20s and I was just full-time software engineering, I actually—one of the first projects that wasn't just a corporate management-type system, I built this perception time calculator because I could tell that I was perceiving time differently as I started to get into my early 20s. And so I built this calculator where you could put in the age of yourself and then an age of another person, and you could see the difference in time perception. So I put it in for myself and then have like a seven-year-old, and I'm like, "Okay, well a week to me is like four weeks to her," you know, because every day is a smaller percentage of your life as a unit of day than the previous one, right? So that was the basis of the time perception calculator, and it makes sense. It's why older people drive slower, because their world's moving faster. They're going wild. They're like NASCAR drivers, but we see them and it's like, "What are you doing? Why are you going so slow?" You know? And then the new kids, they're driving real slow, confused, and yeah, it's fun. They're going real fast. It's—perception is an interesting thing, so I'm glad you brought that up.

(Robert Parsons at 00:34:07) No, it's a great point. And perception of—I think the challenge retail has sometimes, you see this feedback sometimes about level of service and whether I'm being served appropriately and how they meet that level of service expectation. And that's definitely an area that we always think about because it's important to be able to both meet the needs—time in line, frictionless—but also the perception of "I came to a store, I had choices," and I think that's what retailers need to make sure that they're retaining that loyalty and you feel like you've come into a store and you've gotten a level of service different than you would have gotten if you hadn't decided to come to the store. Everybody has choice now, and providing answers to choice is pretty critical.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:51) You guys build any of that biometric stuff? Scan my palm or my retina to check out? You do anything like that?

(Robert Parsons at 00:34:59) You know, not for the payment side. I mean, we obviously integrate some of the payment guys. We have a—actually, our Retail Vision Kiosk, we have a facial recognition that you can actually pay with your face if you're registered.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:16) Will it get my beard?

(Robert Parsons at 00:35:17) I think they're pretty good at that. I think they're—

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:20) Yeah?

(Robert Parsons at 00:35:20) I noticed my phone's gotten much better at all the facial recognition these days with changes. So yeah. So I think those are key. I mean, we will struggle always with what changes and what technologies are accepted everywhere, right? We never got as much—as, you know, we all use fingerprint personally. Fingerprint was never quite as deployed in retail like we had thought it might be. Some places did, some people went to the effort of it, but it's not as out there. Facial recognition is clearly much more convenient and easy, but legislation-wise will be challenging. And maybe palm recognition has got the answer—the convenience of fingerprint with the acceptance of regulatory bodies that will make that easy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:06) Yeah. One of the problems with fingerprint is identical twins.

(Robert Parsons at 00:36:09) Is that right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:10) Yeah, yeah, I did a whole episode on it.

(Robert Parsons at 00:36:13) Is that right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:14) Yeah, I did a whole episode on it. This is like three or four years ago. Retina is the answer. So identical twins will have slight differences in the retinas, but their fingerprints will often—not always, but—be the same.

(Robert Parsons at 00:36:26) Yeah. Oh, that's crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:28) You know what's interesting is I've really enjoyed the fingerprint. I got a new Mac. I don't upgrade my computers very often. Oddly enough, I'm in this tech world, but it was like 10 years since I got a new MacBook, and I got a new one this summer and wow, it's so much better. But it has this little fingerprint thing, so I don't have to enter in my password every time I want to open up the computer, and I really like that. But after you just brought that up, it's like why aren't they just using the camera to Face ID me? They have the technology. They can do it with my iPhone. Why aren't they just using the computer camera?

(Robert Parsons at 00:37:00) Yeah, I don't know. That's a good question. I like that you don't replace it often. You're fitting right into this embedded computing area. You're going to be right in with the retail guys.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:09) Yeah. Well, you know, in all fairness, my dad was a hardware guy. They built those screens that went inside golf carts at really fancy golf courses so you can order stuff. This was back in the '90s. And he would bring me to work and give me a small task. And so I got my start in that environment, and then I immediately, just out of necessity of doing stuff alone in my own workspace at home, I had just the computer and some web servers. And so I just went fully into that because I could complete projects. And as an 11-year-old, it's hard to get your hands on hardware stuff.

(Robert Parsons at 00:37:48) That's awesome. That's fantastic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:51) Yeah.

(Robert Parsons at 00:37:51) Doing early e-com.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:53) Yeah. Well, I thought, you know, he was trying to be a good dad and teach me. But now I have kids. He was just giving me projects to keep me busy. He's like, "I need to get some work done to feed the family, so go move these bits around." And I was like, "All right, let's do it."

(Robert Parsons at 00:38:08) That's fantastic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:10) And that's interesting too, because sometimes when I'm getting something from like Home Depot or Lowe's or one of those places, I'll go online, go on their app and then see how long the pickup time window is for them to pick it. And sometimes I just don't want to wait. So I'm like, "I don't want to wait two hours. They're backed up today. I'm just going to go in there and grab it myself," you know.

(Robert Parsons at 00:38:31) Yeah, absolutely. And again, the other areas are, "I'm going to pick something up," but I like to go to the home improvement places. So I'll almost always have it picked so I don't worry about it not being there. But I'll still like to walk around and do some shopping and then pick up and do that sort of other type of hybrid shopping. It's half picked and half self-shop, right? And I think that's—you know, for me, it fits well for the type of stores that I want to peruse.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:00) Let's cover some leadership advice. So one of my recent favorite questions for technology leaders has been, "Okay, I want you to share with me the single best piece of leadership advice that you've ever got." But here are the constraints for you: the constraints are you have to have got the advice, implemented it, and it's stuck with you for a significant period of time. Like you still do this thing today. What is that advice?

(Robert Parsons at 00:39:27) And, you know, it's funny. I just always—I say it to other people—is get the data. We said it earlier, right? For me, we do so much in business to try to explain where we're going or why we believe something. We think a lot of it is about convincing others. Ultimately, it's what I'll tell the team: get to the point where you understand the data. And it's not as easy as we think it is, but get to the most meaningful point of the data and make sure that you're collecting that consistently and using that in your discussions. I mean, getting the data still reminds—one of the most, for me, one of the most important things that I see have helped me be able to articulate what's the right strategy for us going forward and be able to have a discussion. It's probably my most meaningful point. It always comes top of mind for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:19) Yeah. You're all data-first, data-driven decisions, making it happen. Now just curious, you and your personal life outside of work, are you using any type of LLMs in your personal life, or is it—

(Robert Parsons at 00:40:32) Oh my gosh. I mean, I joke about it. My wife is better at ChatGPT. Sometimes I feel like my arguments are a three-person argument these days because I feel like I'm getting these texts sometimes that there's somebody else involved. I think it's ChatGPT that's reviewing discussions. So, um, firstly, yeah, ChatGPT has become part of the—OpenAI. I certainly use the AI tools that I use today for most of both work and just personal life. It's a great tool. I mean, I'm a data person, so, you know, whether I'm riding a bike or using a training tool, I mean, those things to plan my workouts—it's funny how many things are out there that are using some of these tools just to make recommendations on things that I enjoy to do, and I'm using it pretty regularly for myself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:24) Me too. I found out my wife knew how to use GPT on Valentine's Day. So I got this beautifully written card, and I look at her—we've been together like 11 years—and I look at her, and she looks at me. I go, "You learned GPT?" She's like, "Yeah, she's like, yes I did." I was like, "It's sweet."

(Robert Parsons at 00:41:48) That's a nicer story. Yeah. That's good. That's good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:53) Oh yeah. I use it to help translate. Like if I want to say something to my wife, I'll tell it to—I use Grok, by the way. So I'll tell Grok, and then I'll tell Grok to like translate it into something that won't get me in trouble. Like, "This is what I want to say. How do I get this message through without raising issues?" And it's actually really good.

(Robert Parsons at 00:42:15) I think I learned two things today. I might have to write both of those down: Grok and Apple Pay over text. I'm going to have to learn how to do both of those.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:23) Yeah, dude. If you don't have Grok, install that bad boy immediately. There's a free version of it. So my dad, huge nerd, right? Super late adopter. He's a super late adopter. And I've been talking with him about Grok and GPT and stuff for two years. And he finally was doing this Intuit integration from their—they have a medical clinic that was going into the cloud. And he was getting so frustrated with the people who didn't know what they were doing on the support line. He started searching for answers, came across—he's like, "Oh, Joel said Grok. Let me ask Grok." Grok walked him through the whole migration, and he's like, he's a big fan. He's a big fan now. I convinced him to pay for the super Grok, which is, you know, like the enhanced version. But yeah, it's really made a profound impact on my life and my relationship too.

(Robert Parsons at 00:43:18) Very good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:19) Yeah. I was like, what are the odds that those nerds out in Silicon Valley could build some tech that helps me keep my marriage good? It's fantastic. This is fun. This is a good time. You mentioned MXP once or twice, and we did talk a little bit about modularity. But it looks like you guys have a platform that you want to push people to, this modularity expansion platform. Tell me about what that is.

(Robert Parsons at 00:43:46) Yeah. I mean, generally, as we talked about the adaptability and modularity of our products, for us and our self-service, MXP is our answer to a modular self-service platform. And just like you and I talked about before, how do we build a product that can be used whether it's in a hybrid environment, dedicated self-checkout, something that meets the aesthetic of the store that's different than the traditional self-checkout lane? We really see self-service being something that augments the store experience, and that means maybe changing the way it is deployed and its appearance and how it matches that store. So MXP is our Modular eXpansion Platform. It really adds all that capability. And as we talked about, the AI models for our cameras—how do you add more of that capability, whether it's loss prevention or speed of checkout, like with our produce recognition, product recognition? How do you add that capability to your products in it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:44) I shared my screen. I don't know if you can see it. I didn't realize how beautiful these things were.

(Robert Parsons at 00:44:49) Yeah. Well, you know—

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:50) You guys have good designers for your hardware.

(Robert Parsons at 00:44:53) They're doing a good job. And you think about things—the ELERA on the left is the application that runs at the MXP, which is our Vision Kiosk. It really has this ability to be much more of a convenient area to check out. So a lot of capability there to sense the product. So you're not trying to scan a barcode, you're just setting it onto that sensor pad. It's able to determine even if you're stacking the product on top of each other, you have things sort of jumbled together. It can read all of that and give you your total basket. As I talked about before, it's got some vision in the front there that can actually do facial recognition and do payment. So that whole seamless idea—be able to check out. And then these things on the right, the Smart Checkout—these are primarily used in Europe, but often these are areas just—I need a much smaller footprint. I need something that really fits my store feel, especially in areas like specialty hospitality, not your larger grocers. These are capabilities to be able to be modular, add the function that you need without really bringing a lot of infrastructure that isn't added to your store—instead, isn't necessary for the products that you're selling.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:00) This one's my favorite. I like the light.

(Robert Parsons at 00:46:03) Yeah, I do a good job.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:04) Light on it. And if you're listening on audio, you should be watching on video. Head over to YouTube. It looks cool. They're building. It's beautiful, actually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:14) I didn't realize that you guys had all these different versions of it. Yeah, that's crazy. Well, Robert, before we wrapped up, I also just wanted you to... And needing a bigger bar. Is there a nerdy hardware joke for us?

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:30) I don't know if that's gonna be on the clean cut. Tell me, what's the bigger bar joke?

(Robert Parsons at 00:46:35) Yeah. So we always have, in our trade shows, particularly in our REF, we have what we call our hardware bar, which is all of the equipment that we provide. We actually have it all set up, and we always call it the bar. And we've replicated that in our studio here. So we have a sort of running joke about my hardware bar, which turns into the Roberts bar on the side.

(Robert Parsons at 00:46:58) And we've had so many products that have come out this year, particularly as we've added these modular platforms and how-to-do products. We've all had this discussion about we're gonna need a bigger bar. So we did get this year our bigger bar expansion project. And so now my little corner in the studio is expanded. And that's the... It's, you know, there's no drinks, but there is a... This is our service area.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:25) Yeah. I guess, like, some juice. Like, some just, you know, non-alcohol. Don't bring alcohol into it, but, like, you know, have something. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:31) That sounds fun, though. That sounds fun. Well, Robert, man, we made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Robert Parsons at 00:47:37) I feel fantastic. Thank you, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:39) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or a colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email: [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.