How can retailers perform A/B testing of merchandise layouts in their stores without cost and without burdening store teams? By using Digital Twins, that’s how! So how does a retailer build a digital twin of their stores? Meet startup Site Bionics and founder and CEO, Adam Blair. It’s Part 3 of our #ShoptalkLive podcast cross-over series with This Week in Innovation and special guest host Jeff Roster, recorded live and in-person at Shoptalk! In this episode, Jeff and regular host Ricardo Belmar sit down with Site Bionics CEO, Adam Blair, to learn how they are helping retailers solve merchandising and operational challenges via digital twins, dramatically reducing the cost of testing new store layouts. Plus, we learn how Site Bionics can even help validate coverage maps of loss prevention camera systems! Yes, Jeff and Ricardo have uncovered another trend at Shoptalk – using loss prevention camera infrastructure in multiple ways that will positively impact your revenue streams and lower your costs. It’s all in this episode! We’re now standing at number 19 on the Feedspot Top 60 Best Retail podcasts list – if you enjoy our show, please consider giving us a 5-star review in Apple Podcasts! With your help, we’ll move our way up the Top 20! https://blog.feedspot.com/retail_podcasts/ Meet your regular hosts, helping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech: Ricardo Belmar, a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Influencer for 2023, 2022 & 2021, RIS News Top Movers and Shakers in Retail for 2021, advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformation, and director partner marketing advisor for retail & consumer goods at Microsoft. Casey Golden, CEO of Luxlock, and RETHINK Retail Top Retail Influencer for 2023. Obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, now slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring E-Motive, and Overclocked, from the album Beat Hype, written by Hestron Mimms, published by Imuno. The Retail Razor Show Follow us on Twitter: https://bit.ly/TwRRazor Connect with us on LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/LI-RRazor Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/RRShowYouTube Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/RetailRazorShow Retail Razor Show Episode Page: https://bit.ly/RRShowPod Host → Ricardo Belmar, Follow on Twitter - https://bit.ly/twRBelmar Connect on LinkedIn - https://bit.ly/LIRBelmar Read my comments on RetailWire - https://bit.ly/RWRBelmar Co-host → Casey Golden, Follow on Twitter - https://bit.ly/twCasey Connect on LinkedIn - https://bit.ly/LICasey Read my comments on RetailWire - https://bit.ly/RWCasey TRANSCRIPTS2E12c Digital Twins with Site Bionics [00:00:00] Show Intro [00:00:20] Casey Golden: Hello Retail Razor Show listeners and viewers, and welcome to retail's favorite podcast for product junkies, commerce technologists, and everyone else in retail and retail tech alike. I'm your host, Casey Golden. [00:00:33] Ricardo Belmar: And I'm your host, Ricardo Belmar. Welcome to part three in our Shop Top Live crossover event with Jeff Roster, and This Week In Innovation podcast. [00:00:42] Casey Golden: You guys really make me feel like I missed out on some great conversations. I think I'm getting more FOMO than our listeners here. [00:00:51] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. [00:00:52] Casey Golden: You are killing it with these amazing interviews. I have to come and join you guys next time, even though like I have no business [00:01:00] purpose to be there. [00:01:02] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it would be amazing if you could make it, Casey, we definitely missed you on this. It was lots of fun to, to capture these sessions. So on today's show, we are talking about none other than digital twins. One of my favorite probably my, the favorite metaverse topic that isn't necessarily a metaverse topic. [00:01:22] Casey Golden: Right. Well, I'm already hooked, so just tell me more. Spill it. Who did you guys chat with? [00:01:30] Ricardo Belmar: So this time Jeff and I spoke with Adam Blair, c e o, and founder of Startup Site Bionics. And in this discussion we learned just how popular it is to use those loss prevention cameras in your store for so much more than loss prevention. I mean, this was the second startup we talked to that were tapping into those cameras as a resource for analytics. [00:01:50] This time using them to help build a multi-layered digital twin of your store. [00:01:54] Casey Golden: Interesting. And you guys uncovered a trend trend there. Wow. Like [00:02:00] not many people would've said those loss prevention cameras are so popular not too long ago. [00:02:06] Ricardo Belmar: yeah. Right. Exactly. So you, you'll also want to keep track throughout this discussion with Adam of just how many different use cases and questions you can answer about your store environment using this digital twin that you build with, with their solution and, and all the loss prevention cameras plus a few extra little add-ons that that I think are pretty clever that they do. [00:02:25] Casey Golden: Well, let's not spend any more precious time talking about it. Let's get right into the discussion with you, Jeff and Adam Blair, c e o of Site Bionics, recorded live and in person at Shoptalk 2023. [00:02:40] Site Bionics Interview[00:02:40] Ricardo Belmar: hey everyone we are back at Shop Talk 2023, continuing our crossover event with This Week In Innovation. I'm Ricardo Belmar. I'm host of the Retail Razor Show and I am here with none other than the myth, the legend, Mr. Jeff Roster, [00:02:59] Jeff Roster: [00:03:00] how you, how you doing today? I don't know about you, but I am dragging. I'm possibly, I went a little hard on the, on the evening research opportunities last night. [00:03:08] Ricardo Belmar: Just a little, just a Yeah, yeah. [00:03:10] Jeff Roster: little bit hard, but it was [00:03:11] Ricardo Belmar: It's, it was, yeah. It's, it's what are we day three? Are we day three, day [00:03:14] Jeff Roster: five. I tried to, I really was planning on being done by eight, but there was an event at the What Skyfall lounge, which was started at nine 30. [00:03:24] Phenomenal. But boy, that got a little bit late Little [00:03:30] Ricardo Belmar: I hear you. I hear you. One, one more day to go. One more day. One more day to go. All right. All right. So the good news is we've got another great guest with us today. Jeff. We are here with Adam Blair and the CEO of Site Bionics, who's gonna tell us all about the cool things that he's working on over there. [00:03:47] So Adam, I'm gonna let you introduce yourself here and dive in and give us your background and what Site Bionics is all about and what you know, what challenges are you solving for retailers and, and give us the scoop. [00:03:58] Adam Blair: Sounds good. [00:04:00] Thanks for the intro. Yeah. At Site Bionics we're helping retailers make sense of their physical world. [00:04:04] And what that means particularly is we're building digital twins for retail stores. And we, we view that as, just to be clear, cuz we, we you know, one of the things that you get into with digital twins is there's a lot of different uses of it. [00:04:16] The different, it's an kind of an overloaded term. Right, right, right. We view the digital twin as a data, fundamentally a data model of the store. And it's a means of getting, taking the messy, unstructured, unstructured data that you get in a store when you have humans moving around doing what humans do. [00:04:32] And and, and you try to make sense of it all. So yeah, for us, it, it actually getting into a little bit of how we do that, we start a little, we start by getting a, a sense of the site. So we have the means of going around and getting a physical rendering. So, to be clear, it's not sort of a metaverse play in that direct sense, right? [00:04:50] Where we're just, you're not necessarily going into it. But we do have, for what it's worth, we do have a rendering that's like video game quality rendering of the space. But that's a tool it's a [00:05:00] tool that allows us to we, we can start there. We can help retailer to understand how the store is laid out whether or not their merchandising and their layout is matching what they expect from corporate and, and be able to feed that data back. [00:05:11] And that's sort of our layer. Right. Then we have the ability to layer on to use existing cameras in the store as available and be able to add sort of our video analytics piece on top of that where you can track movement through the space. Right. And then we have an iot portion that can go beyond that too, where we can leverage on my, my pack background in, in R F I D particularly and, and other iot technologies and, and be able to. [00:05:36] That and, and, and build really. So it's sort of these layers and we want to bring value to retailer to each of these layers, right? And but it's the full data source. That's really the thing. And, and, and then once you add that, you get that full system you get the learning that goes on top of it. [00:05:51] And then you have the ability to move into higher levels of analytics where you're able to get a model and understand how things are behaving, why they're, why things are happening and, [00:06:00] and then help retailers better understand how to use their space and make the most of it. [00:06:04] Building a Digital Twin[00:06:04] Jeff Roster: So a couple questions right off the bat. How do you get the, the first rendering in, in layer one? [00:06:10] Adam Blair: Yeah, we do that with it's, it's, it is using just a cell phone standard imagery. We have the ability and we, we've actually this is the piece we've built so far. We're, we're obviously ve
