The National Retail Federation’s Big Show at the Javits Center in New York, which ran Jan. 13–15, was bustling with more than 40,000 retailers and brands walking the aisles while the other prominent attendees included multiple variations of robots.

Two of the must-see areas were the NRF Innovation Lab and the Startup Zone. Gone are the days when retailers and brands wait for proven solutions as more and more seek out new and exciting technologies to provide personalized experiences and omni-channel capabilities to their customers.

The NRF Innovation Stage held panel discussions and seminars on leveraging data science and creating unique customer experiences as well as a look into the store of the future.

At the Innovation Lab, the overlying theme was “the frictionless shopping experience” for the “always-on consumer” and personalized-shopping engagement.

Companies featured at the show are using the most recent advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, image recognition, big-data analytics, robotics, conversational commerce and mobile.

42 Technologies is a cloud-based data-analytics solution that works out of the box for retail merchants, e-commerce, inventory, wholesale and third-party analytics. 42Technologies is designed for business users to easily build and run reports with images and drill-down capabilities that can consolidate big data from multiple systems for centralized views of products, sales and inventory.

Purple.ai provides a retail-hosted guest Wi-Fi that can gather customer data directly from retailers’ customers while on their shopping journey. Analytics can be collected based on social sharing or customer input to retail-designed questions. Purple.ai can also be integrated into proximity marketing, customer-relationship management and email providers.

MySizeID creates a unique sizing identification for shoppers based on their personal measurements to find items that will fit them best. Customers can easily create their own sizing ID using their mobile phone by scanning their body to record measurements. Retailers and brands use a dashboard to view sizing and sales statistics, add inventory and update siziing charts.

Perfitly is an AR/VR (augmented reality/virtual reality) platform for apparel e-commerce that creates a 3-D body image using a mobile app. Consumers can easily enter their measurements in the app and create their own personalized avatars when online shopping. Soon to be released, consumers will have the abilitiy to scan their own bodies using their mobile devices for a virtual fitting-room experience during their online shopping journey.

Radius8 is a cloud-based localization platform creating store-centric online experiences and in-store experiences based on local digital demand. The platform provides real-time data and insights to improve visual merchandising, inventory allocation and planning. Based on the location of customers relative to a store, the solution merchandises the right products based on local trends, incorporating a brand’s merchandising goals.

Trendalytics’ proprietary machine-learning and image-recognition technology provides retailers and brands with a 360-degree lens on consumer demand and market-supply inflection points by classifying and translating product and customer data across social-influencer buzz, online product searches, consumer shopping patterns and SKU data, resulting in actionable merchandise insights.

HEASE Robotics’Heasy is a mobile robot kiosk designed for public areas. Heasy is the newest form of a kiosk interacting in a fun and digital way to deliver experiences to the customer’s shopping journey. Heasy greets, informs and entertains customers and is hard to resist!