The COVID-19 pandemic has caused retail giants to take an unprecedented step – consider alternatives to traditional retail models where dozens of products are stacked on shelves and arranged to entice shoppers to come in and buy.

Besieged now on all fronts with the pandemic, high commercial rents, and the meteoric rise of online shopping – physical retailers are squeezed for profits now more than ever while their digital counterparts, mostly Amazon, experience a massive growth in revenue.

The future of physical retail has been debated for years as more and more consumers become comfortable with online shopping to get their needs and their retail therapy fix, I’ve even weighed in on how retailers could leverage nascent technologies to entice buyers to physically visit stores in an attempt to help, but now is a flashpoint for the industry and one that could likely hasten their transition away from the old model forever.

Humanity is unlikely to build a future where everything is purchased online and shipped to them. While this offers great convenience, it lacks the instant satisfaction of a purchase in-store or the ability to see and touch merchandise before purchasing. There’s also the pesky issue of how such systems may add to the carbon footprint of many purchases or increase the amount of single-use plastics and packaging materials (versus a person on foot walking in to a store). While in the future many more humans will be enticed into online only shopping which can be fulfilled by massive multi-million square footage warehousing systems, there will start to be diminishing returns on this and tech-based retailers will ultimately need a physical presence to at the very least augment their online sales channel. A physical store, even if small, gives a retailer a more aesthetically pleasing presence compared to large gray warehouses. During the pandemic many stores have turned their closed-to-the-public shops into fulfillment centers, a big step away from traditional retail, and a move that makes them more competitive for online orders.

I believe the future retailer will combine a variety of services and technologies into a cybernetic, nearly alive, unit that can accommodate the few physical retail shoppers that exist which will include their own autonomous delivery network and build a way for the system to grow in terms of technology with a staff of developers and engineers constantly building new experiences for human shoppers. This new entity is too advanced to be called simply a ‘retail store’, currently I call this a Living Warehouse (definitely open to better name ideas).

The Living Warehouse will use various current technologies already available “on the shelf” such as mobile ordering and delivery apps, self-check out systems, computer vision / object recognition / visual extraction, and automated robotic inventory systems. These systems will be paired with nascent or non-existent technologies such as a fleet of four-legged drone delivery bots (i.e. Spot from Boston Dynamics), robotic assistants to carry products around, and personalized advertising messages appearing on the storefronts and aisle end caps (i.e. Minority Report). All of these will be managed by an overseeing Artificial Intelligence system that handles restocking of inventory and the facing of shelves, notifying humans when the delivery bots need repaired or have issues, sends out cleaning bots, and escalates issues human shoppers have to store staff so the humans can resolve the issues (after first trying to resolve the issue for the customer based on protocols).

These physical stores will likely harvest data much the same way social media apps and search engines do using their mobile apps and communication between the in-store system and the mobile app gathered data. This data will be used for marketing practices like suggestive selling via the in-store display systems and augmented reality system, and for advertising retargeting of customers who looked at or lingered near certain products or to send them notifications and discounts about those products and related ones.

You can see parts of this already today in instances like when an Instacart employee walks into a store to buy groceries for a customer or in the testing of autonomous delivery drone robots from Starship Robots.

The Living Warehouse combines all of these into their own seamless ecosystem and more. A mobile app and website to place orders, an army of their own delivery robot drones, computer vision / object recognition powered checkout (i.e. Amazon Go), robots that stock store shelves which look more like warehouse shelves (i.e. Amazon / Toyota warehouse robot systems), Augmented Reality stations inside to see what various clothing looks like on you (i.e. Neiman Marcus makeup AR mirror) or to show what you can do with a particular piece of equipment, etc…

In the very near future humans walking into a retail store will feel more like they are on a ship deck in Star Wars with robots zipping past them carrying out tasks such as cleaning and restocking inventory or prepping an order for delivery.

This future’s onset has been hastened and the diffusion of necessary technologies to build it has accelerated in the past few months. Globally we’ve seen many retailers call it quits and simply go bankrupt and we’ve seen others start trying to re-imagine the retail experience. That places this possible future somewhere between 5 to 10 years from now before the first such fully capable Living Warehouse is built.

Amazon could try and build this first as they have most of the underlying technologies required along with the capital and knowledgeable staff to build the rest. Walmart is close as well, though still further back. Unfortunately, such a future is out of the reach of most retailers to transition to for the time being. That is because most retail corporations would rather invest in this type of future through a third-party provider that takes on all of the risks of research and development (you can see this in commercial drone delivery currently). This may not hold back the future too long, however, as we’ve seen a great interest from both developers and investors in building future-looking technology platforms for non-Amazon retailers.

If you’re an ecommerce or brick and mortar retailer reading this and wondering how to get in front of this possible future, I would caution that you likely need to work on a few other things first. For starters if you were to be the first to invest in and build this level of technology, it would require a large capital investment. That means you’ll need a stable flow of customers and sales and not be in a battle for them like most retailers are currently. You need to build up a more steadily increasingly volume of sales. If you’re an ecommerce retailer that would mean investing in ecommerce SEO, social media marketing, and unique product development. If you’re a physical brick and mortar retailer that means finding ways to convince more humans to walk into your store and make a purchase. This is the most difficult task at the moment but may be accomplished with things like taking a social / environmental stance, having service / repair services in your shops, or by providing other physical perks.

If you have a steadily growing flow of new customers then your next step would be to build digital tech and tools consistent with what your audience wants in the current time. For ecommerce-first retailers this means building better online features and experiences, which could be harder or perhaps impossible depending on which platform your store is running on. For brick and mortar retailers this would mean building a smooth online experience with at least one good digital tool. This will give you all or most of the skilled staff / contractors you need to build such a future, provide a stepping stone in the correct direction, and help position your brand as a forward thinking tech-enabled company of the future allowing you to attract more tech savvy customers and hire better staff.

The Living Warehouse is only one possible future for physical retailers and like other predictions about the near-future there’s a chance it simply doesn’t come to pass. Many things could become barriers such as local or national laws that bar part of the implementation including the personal data gathering of shoppers or autonomous delivery robots. As always when building a future-facing technology plan for your business give yourself reasonable room for error and to scrap projects that are either too costly or won’t produce results as consumer tastes and preferences may change.