Want your business to win using the Internet of Things (IoT)? Act like an early adopter.
That's the advice from Ocado's head of technology Paul Clarke, who was speaking at the Re/Work Internet of Things conference in London – and laid out how Ocado has used automation, smart machines and cutting edge technologies to become the largest online food retailer in the world.
“This is a revolution that I firmly believe is going to favour the early adopters,” he said. “And it's also going to favour companies that are prepared to experiment and not wait until these technologies are mature.”
“I would urge you, if you're not already, that the time to act is now,” he added.
Companies looking to mimic Ocado's success at building a tech-centric firm and benefit from the first wave of IoT innovations need to make sure they have the right skills in house, he stressed.
“If you're up for building this stuff like we are, you need to go shopping for some new competencies, in areas such as data science, natural language processing, machine learning, and in particular deep neural nets.”
Indeed, Clarke said the vast majority of the technology that Ocado uses is “build not buy”, with in-house developers and engineers creating their own systems from the ground up, partially because grocery business has so many extra complications that other retailers don't face.
“We had to build it ourselves,” he said, saying there was no other option, but adding: “If you're in the platform business, you want to own the intellectual property. You want to be able to monetise that beyond your own application.”
Ocado has no plans to sell its platform to rivals, saying it's the retailer's “future secret sauce”, but it does plan to use its own work to offer online grocery sales to other food sellers. “We're trying to disrupt ourselves rather than let someone else disrupt us,” he said.
