Recently, I wanted to lose a few pandemic pounds before a friend's wedding. However, my new golden retriever puppy, Lourde Winston, decided to eat my smartwatch and broke it! And yes, he is a pandemic purchase.

So, of course, I hopped on to my cell to order a new one only to find that it wouldn't be delivered till mid-December! I have zero ambition to work out if I'm not getting the credit for this activity on my smartwatch. So, needless to say, I started shopping multiple retailers and channels and finally found one. Not the color I wanted, but it'll do

With the supply chain disruption occurring, the shortage in semiconductors, and staffing, Santa's elves are going to have a very tough Christmas filling his out-of-stocks. Now more than ever, retailers need to leverage advanced analytics to help them solve these challenges. According to a Juniper Research study, artificial intelligence technology is on the cusp of huge adoption with global retail spend increasing to $7.3 billion annually by 2022 - quite a spike from the $2 billion spent in 2018. By 2024, AI investment is expected to reach $110 billion, according to an IDC forecast. Many have also started to debate whether to build or buy as more and more retailers are bringing this talent in-house. My perspective, why not have both?

Oracle's Retail Science Platform gives retailers the best of both worlds. There are built-in capabilities such as size profiling, customer segmentation, advanced and intelligent clustering, and many others that help drive the merchandise planning process. But the platform provides so much more for retailers looking to build and have their secret sauce.