Beyond the Counter: How AI is Accelerating Self_Service

Welcome everybody. I don't want to keep everybody waiting that are here. I'm Greg Buzek. Thanks for joining us today. It's great to have you here, and we're so thankful that you joined us today. With me, I have several esteemed colleagues. We have Jennifer Gilman with us from Cox Communications, Joe Sawicki from Kiosk Information Systems, Jason Test, who's General Manager and Chief Revenue Officer for ReadyCredit. Lee Holman from IHL Group. And once again, I'm Greg Buzek. Just a little bit of housekeeping as we get started. This couldn't happen without the generosity of Intel making this research available. This is our independent research that, that we did with Chain Store Age magazine that we're now sharing with you on Kiosk Today. Also joining today, our partners Kiosk Information Systems, as well as their clients Cox Communications and ReadyCredit. So thanks for joining today. Hey, tell us where you're from. You guys have done Zoom before. You know how this works. Tell us where you're from. Where are you watching from? Hey, what was your favorite World Cup people coming to America story? I think mine was Freddy from Germany. Freddy started off, I think, going through Tennessee, then down to Atlanta, got to his first Buc-ee's, then went to Auburn for a football game and got to enjoy all that. Tell us. What your favorite experience is. So you have chat and there's also Q&A. So if you do not see Q&A at the bottom of your bar, it'll be under more. Put your questions there as we go through, but let's keep this lively, keep the chat going, and let's move forward. Hey, I want to invite everybody to join Super Saturday, which is January 9th, 2027, particularly the retailers right now. For every retailer that registers early, it basically provides clean water for 500 kids. Or education for 50 children. Huge help to us to be able to get some companies and titles listed in there for potential sponsors. So if you wouldn't mind doing that, the QR code's here or the link below as well. So let's talk what's going on in the world with inflation at the moment. And we like to use Truflation, which is much more like what we call a Nielsen ratings of inflation. The government data is on average about 45 days old. This is day to day, and this is Market Basket analysis. Where the government has us at 3.5% inflation, this is running at about 2.12% inflation. Still going up a little bit, but nowhere near the same level. And part of that is the government's data has some data that's even 6 months old that goes in there that makes up 20% of the metric. This is far more accurate in our view of what's going on. That being said, the gas prices— you can't get away from the gas prices. Here we are up 90— what is that, 92 cents a gallon on regular versus last year. Diesel also up even more than that. What that means is basically every penny change that is sustained over a year is about $2 billion a year in cost. So since the Iraq War started, my estimate is roughly between $55 and $60 billion that would be used in other aspects of retail or paying other bills is being used now to pay for added fuel costs at the moment right now. So that's the biggie. So my recommendation to you— I pulled this from our last webinar as well— whenever the government gives out money, like we had this one big beautiful bill act, whenever the government gives out money, something always happens and gas prices go up. Just count on it. The only time in this millennium that gas prices didn't go up was due to 9/11. And so next time the government says, hey, we're going to give out money, whether it's AI, universal basic income, or whatever, buy fuel stocks because something always happens. Now, that perception of inflation is much higher than the 2%, and that's because it's particular categories where we're seeing the big jumps. And because of the size of those categories in our budgets, it tends to have a major impact on our psyche and what's going on. So when it comes to gas prices or grocery prices, that's how we perceive inflation as a, a consumer. And that has direct impact on consumer confidence. When you see those numbers go down, it's usually because of this. Now, what's interesting to me here, beef prices are up. That's all over the news. Coffee prices are up. Carbonated beverage and healthy juices are down. Are flat. They're not there, but that, that'll never make the news. What's interesting to me is lettuce was already up 32% before this whole cyclospora thing happened. That, that one is really interesting from a grocery perspective. I asked ChatGPT to help me with this and putting that inflation data in on what a typical budget was. I was hoping to get the median income of a family. Instead, it said it took the typical 4-person household spending here just to get a feel for how big is the budget for that. And if we get the medium— median households, 31.5% of budget for housing, that's probably closer to 40 or 50. Groceries is more like 15 to 16% when it comes to the median household. So this is higher than what you would see with the government there, the, the numbers that typically come up. But what I also wanted to do is take a look at that grocery budget and why our perception of things is so big. So even though eggs have come down last last year it was all about the bird flu that was making egg prices go up. Even though eggs have gone down nearly 28%, it's only 1.8% of the budget, where beef is up. It's up considerably. Here we are at 3 times or more, 3.5 times the budget— percent of the budget that goes to beef. We also see it in the grocery side of things, but the key items that are driving the volume and driving the inflation are gas, beef, coffee, lettuce, and tomatoes that are really driving inflation. Beef and gas. I don't know if there's a methane thing there, but we're not talking about flatulence in this case. We're talking about what's happening with beef prices. Grocery is being impacted in a major way. So when we look at grocery, we've got sales that are up according to Nielsen IQ. Prices are up even more than sales, which means that the volume is down. People are cutting back. Due to inflation, but we cannot discount the impact of GLP-1s. GLP-1s are having a demonstrable impact not only on food, but they're having an impact on clothing and other aspects of the economy. ReturnPro has a fantastic study. If you haven't seen it, take a look at what ReturnPro has put together on GLP-1s. I think it's called the GLP-1 Effect that just came out, but it's really starting to affect different segments as we go forward. Today's initial jobless claims came out. They expected 212,000. It came in reported at 187,000 today. According to Rick Santelli this morning, this is the lowest since the 1960s initial jobless claims. Now, it's not all rosy from that because we know— because there's a disconnect still between the jobs that are being created from data centers and hyperscalers and everything related to AI as, and then there's a great deal of underemployment. So the disconnect between the jobs being created, which are in AI versus the jobs that are being lost. We've got a lot of people that are educated, overeducated for the positions that they're in. And we're also starting to see a surge in entrepreneurship with these new AI tools. There was an article yesterday about the number of new apps that have hit Apple. I created my own. It's not on the App Store for everybody else to use, but replace Notion, being able to record sessions at trade shows, capture the slides, get all that stuff into my AI second brain. And we, we're able to use that within IHL. Saves us about $135 a month subscriptions as a result of that. So people are doing that. They're selling apps. The chart on the left, we have not seen any measurable improvement in terms of hiring as a share of employment. That is a problem. So it's harder for the people that have been out of work, and that's reflected down below as well. The share of unemployed that have been out at least half a year is continuing to rise. So that's a reality of what's happening in our marketplace today. We have this K-shaped economy that continues to, to grow. It's kind of the haves and the have-nots. If you have exposure to the stock market, things have been pretty well, particularly if you own your own home with a low interest rate. It's a nuisance to have inflation, but it's not devastating.

Devastating.

If you're lower incomes, the inflation is devastating. The money that came back from the one big beautiful bill is already gone for those consumers as we head into back-to-school season. That being said, the numbers for retail are still pretty astounding. We're literally looking at— this is the NRF CNBC Retail Monitor with over 9 billion transactions from Affinity Solutions. So this is real data, not a model that somebody put together, and it shows year-to-year growth. In June, we had 9.41% growth in core retail sales. So that doesn't include the gas, auto, and restaurants. And then total retail sales there, that has the restaurants included but not the gas and the auto. So incredible gains year to year on retail. Now the categories, let's go into the categories real quick. We mentioned GLP-1s, and that's impacting the clothing there, and we're seeing a demonstrable impact in growth in clothing. And as ReturnPro shares in their study, it also was impacting returns because nobody knows what size they are. They didn't know beforehand because of what's going on, but certainly now that they're losing weight, they don't know what's going on. So that's impacting returns in a huge way. It's also driving people more to stores to try things on though, as well as people don't know what their size is anymore as they go through. So the reward to themselves for losing weight is going out and buying new outfits. They're more likely to be going to stores. That's driving up the clothing and accessories. The two points that are World Cup related are the sporting goods, hobby, music, and bookstore. So 18.5% growth there from the influx of tourists coming in, the World Cup spending huge. And so I expect that to continue into July, very strong. Also food service and drinking places, that's being impacted as well by the World Cup. I want to make a note though, you see it actually went down. Which means the American consumers have really cut back in this area as the gas prices have gone up. So I would expect to see that a little bit more challenged as we get to July and August when it comes to the restaurant spend. Walmart and Amazon— or really Amazon's continuing to take more and more of the consumer dollar here, up to 9.3%. I would add in here that Aldi is also taking share. So where the news is talking about more affluent customers shopping at Walmart with the tougher economy, you also have Aldi taking share. So it's really tough for those mainstream grocers in place. That being said, Amazon has also really increased their game and proved their game in groceries as well. So we're seeing that impact as well. Quick hack for you: don't buy bottled water anymore, just buy Amazon groceries that have to stay fresh. They throw in bottled water there to keep it cold. So frozen bottled water, you get all your, you get all your bottled water for free. So back to school shopping, just very quick. NRF had their webinar yesterday. I had hoped to steal some of their slides this morning. The early results are focusing that people are focusing more on clothes and less on technology. I think people are really concerned with the memory costs and the memory increases, and that computer can just last a little bit longer, whether it's a Mac or Chromebook or whatever, or the schools are providing the technology. Than not through back-to-school spending. Same thing's true with school supplies. More schools are having partnerships and packages, and it's just easier for parents to do that. That hurts your office supply stores the most. We're also starting to see some dollar store increases. And then Rhode Island is the first state we saw mandating minimum self-checkout staffing ratios starting in 2027. You have to have 1 person for every 3 people. That is being driven by the United Food and Commercial Workers. And we're starting to see the UFCW push back a lot more. They held back ESLs and in many ways self-checkout for 25 years. Everybody says the Teamsters is the strongest union. No, it's the UFCW is the strongest union in the country and they're pushing back on some of these narratives. I don't necessarily agree with these narratives of what they're saying here. People are putting staffing in places like BOPUS, like local delivery. They can't get enough people to work in their store. So that's the self-checkout side. ESL side is you've got to be able to compete with Amazon that's taking more and more of the market and change your prices. It's not predatory price, predatory pricing for individual consumers. That's just, that's suicide for any retailer to do that. What is happening is that people are changing their prices overnight. What's interesting is there was not a peep of this during COVID for, for almost 4 or 5 years for any of these technologies. And we saw massive adoption rates. So let's get into self-service and the impact here. There's this whole retreat out there in the mainstream press. So any, anything, if it bleeds, it leads. If it affects potential jobs, even though we can't get enough people, it leads in the mainstream press. The reality of the situation is self-service continues to grow and the leaders, the best performing retailers are deploying self-service at a much higher rate. And you'll see the data that says, What are we doing with that scarce labor? We're taking it from a cost center and moving it to a profit center within the retail environment. So 141% more likely to use self-service are the winners. The people that grew their business 10% or more in 2025 are more likely to be using self-service. So the winners position it as a labor scarcity, not a labor replacement. This goes back to really 2001 with self-checkout and self-service. Kroger put in self-checkout. They incentivized their best checkers to train customers how to use it. They immediately got about 40% of their dollar value and about 60% of their transactions through self-checkout. And they moved their people to prepared foods. Like, you had garlic mashed potatoes instead of regular potatoes. You had fresh baked bread. You had the rotisserie chicken. All of those were 3 to 4 times the margin of other items that they had as impulse there. But they had the labor to be able to do that. Now that is switched to buy online, pick up in store, click and collect, and other areas of the store that are filling the shelves there rather than just taking labor out of the store.

That—

so those staff shift to higher value work. We see QSR moving more and more to drive-through there. It's, I believe, 74% of all transactions are through drive-through today. That is the case. So why would you put all of your labor in the store? So you use the kiosk for those in-store orders. The kiosk always asks if you'd like fries with that. Do you want to supersize your order, et cetera? Always does that. It's about a 25% uplift on the standard ticket when that is used with self-service. And as I mentioned, Rhode Island, the first state to mandate the self-checkout thing. So what's happening in the P&L? And it's showing up everywhere. Those people that use self-checkout saw 63% higher sales growth. And 56% higher profit growth when it came to this year for sales. Their expectations here for profit, 69% faster expected store count growth as well here. So you see it in profit growth, you see it in sales growth, you see it in stores growth because retailers have been having to do more with less people for years and years. It's also the complexity is now turning into re— realized ROI because you're using self-service and freeing up that labor to have more items on the shelf and things are stocked. Those companies are starting to see the CPG and the retail media money come in at a much higher rate. So 51% of those using self-service report getting data monetization from their shelf data compared to those that don't. It's the stack that allows other things to happen. These retailers that use self-service are 89% more likely to be fully optimized with buy online, pick up in store, and 93% of their sales come through buy online, pick up in store, click and collect. Why this is so critical here is these different channels to reach your customers are the growth areas for retail, and retail has generally been optimized for you to walk in the store and take it off the shelf. That's no longer the case. And the smart retailers have optimized their local delivery, their buy online, pick up in store, click and collect, ship from store. Those are customer journeys and even returns that are leaking margin today. So they started in COVID in a major way. They're continuing today. And those people are more likely to have fully optimized those. So not only are 93% more of their sales through BOPUS, it's freed them up to have 114% more of their total sales in local delivery as well. So this is freeing up labor to do more things within the store and thus expect expand things. So the kiosk is really the tip of the iceberg when it comes to improving the technical technology stack within retailers and restaurants here. These folks are 9 times more likely to already be using microservices. They're 8 times more likely to be using scan and go or checkout with your own phone. As a consumer, I still— my favorite place to go is Sam's Scan Go is by far the best out there in my opinion. Scan Go, I'm just a huge fan of. Edge computing, 4 times more likely to be using edge computing. And then the big one that's really starting to enhance things is they are more than twice as likely to be using generative AI in their existing applications to take advantage of their corporate data. There's a link here when you have RFID, computer vision, self-service together. You're getting to cleaner data in many cases that's opening up the door to get better AI results of things as you go forward. So when it comes to further things, we've got robots, ESLs, ID, a single data lake. The people that are leaders aligned with self-service are also doing all of these things at a much, much higher rate than the laggards within their segment. So let's look at the elephant in the room is loss prevention when it comes to shelf checkout. That's what everybody likes to talk about. That's what gets all the news and the headlines. That is driving incredible adoption now of computer vision. And early models of computer vision were kludgy, slow, and not very good. We have seen tremendous improvements, almost like we've seen with AI models overall in the last 2, 2.5 years with computer vision. That is opening the door to start using self-checkout and self-service in different areas because of the strength of that computer vision. We're seeing now age-restricted merchandise now being handled with self-checkout with strong resolution of things there. Scan it, here's— with things. We have fruit identification from several vendors that show what happens when you can pick the right apple and get the right margin for that at the store. Being able to manage the fleet, just the enhancements that Intel has made with their vPro technology, the kiosk information systems with their Connect IoT, and then the Meld CX with their remote remediation of issues, even when the thing is dead, seems dead, being able to remotely go in with these tools and revive these kiosks that may be down, being able to do that now with some of these new technologies, which is really cool. And then things are moving more and more to the edge. We've got a webinar coming up specifically on edge coming up in the next month. We'll go into more detail on that, but as we mentioned, 4 times ahead using edge computing. So the AI stuff is coming down to the store very quickly as we go forward. So I don't want to just talk theoretical and data. I want to invite 3 people in that are already doing this stuff. So if I could ask everybody to come back on and turn your cameras on. I want to invite Jen, Joe, and Jason back on the screen and you gotta unmute your microphones and stuff. I'll take a quick drink. Fantastic. All right, Jen, you get to be first up. I'm going to—

oops.

I'm going to move you. I'm going to move you over front and center there so I can look at you. Take us back to the beginning with what you're doing. Oh, first of all, before we do that, I'm sorry. Can you guys all give a 1-minute on your organizations? Tell us who you are, organizations.

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Jen Gilman. I've been with Cox Communications for 15 years. I head the sales operations team supporting the Cox retail stores. So we currently have 132 retail stores across our footprint where customers can come in, sign up for mobile, internet, TV services, get help with their account, swap equipment, purchase wireless accessories, or pay their bill. Most of our locations include a self-serve bill payment kiosk for customers that are looking to just get in and out quickly.

Great. Joe?

Yeah. Hey everyone. My name is Joe Sawicki. I'm the Vice President of Sales and Partnerships at Kiosk Information Systems. I've been with Kiosk for 14 years now. Kiosk is the self-service leader within the market. So we manufacture, help deploy, and support self-service kiosks across a wide variety of different markets, including retail, healthcare, hospitality, mass transportation, government, you name it. And we've built and deployed a solution for various types of applications. But yeah, thanks for having me, Greg.

Yeah.

All right, Jason.

Hey everybody, I'm Jason Test and I'm the Chief Revenue Officer with ReadyCredit, and we consult with retailers and a lot of venue operators across a number of different lines of business— sports and music venues, amusement parks, movie theaters, family entertainment centers, hospitals, hotels— around payments solutions and specifically around cash management. And the big challenge that we really help a lot of these businesses with is how to eliminate the hassles of cash management from their operation, but still cater to cash customers.

Great.

All right, let's jump in. Okay, Jen, take us back to the beginning. What pain points led Cox down the kiosk path in the first place?

Yeah, so our original use case was to have the ability for customers to come in and quickly pay their bill without having to wait in line. Some of our stores, you could be standing in line 20, 30 minutes and customers would feel frustrated because they just wanted to pay their bill. It became even more valuable though during COVID when nobody wanted to touch cash. So we started to push just about all of our cash transactions in the store to the payment kiosk because the customer could just deposit it on their own. We didn't have to even touch it. We've also seen a decrease in the accuracy of cash counting with this younger generation. You think about it, everything they do is digital pay for them. And so we started processing everything through the kiosk, which led to a greater accuracy in our end-of-day reconciliation. We're currently on our second generation of kiosks with KIS, and in this model we added enhanced functionality that even allow our visually and hearing impaired customers to self-serve.

Super, super. Joe, is that normal? Was COVID a big catalyst here for you guys?

Absolutely. Yeah. We call it a connected experience from online being cell phone, laptops, PCs, and connecting it to offline, driving foot traffic back into retail. So COVID was definitely a catalyst and improve of self-service kiosk solutions, whether that be shortage of labor, looking to augment various business processes within retail. But yeah, that's something that, that we see as a major trend across all the industries that we plan.

Super. All right, Jen, back to you. What surprised you now that you've had it for a couple years? What surprised you the most about what customers will do or not do? At a kiosk?

Yeah, so we have customers that come in month after month to pay their bill, which was surprising because we have so many other ways that you can pay your bill. But what we have learned is that customers don't always trust online payments and therefore they come into the store, make their payment, get a receipt, and they feel better about it. They also don't want to talk to you though. They want to be able to come in, pay their bill, and get on with their day. And we still have a large customer base that is cash-based. So about 40 to 45% of our transactions are in cash. Wow. So the kiosk is set up for customers to self-serve on their bill pay, but we also have an agent-assisted flow that will also allow us to process new service deposits or mobile device sales.

Yeah.

And that just, that, that leads me into Jason. Jason, with ReadyCredit, you're not doing so much cash with what you're doing, but tell us about where you guys have your stuff and how the cashless piece comes into the play.

Yeah, sure. I think as, as the world moves towards self-service, naturally the number one friction point becomes how to handle cash. And a lot of retailers and other venue operators are dealing with that challenge every day. If you think about it, if you install a self-checkout flow or some sort of mobile checkout flow immediately, how do you handle cash and how do you do it without an agent? So what we're seeing and what we help thousands of businesses with is being able to go cashless. Being able to modernize into a self-service environment, but still being able to accept cash. And so what they're doing is in a lot of cases installing what's called a cash-to-card kiosk, or think of it as a reverse ATM, so that if you do have a cash customer that walks through the door, they can convert their cash into a prepaid card, a Visa or MasterCard. And it can be either a physical card or it can be a virtual card. That can be sent to their, to their phone and loaded to their wallet and then used just like any Visa or MasterCard, both in that venue or outside of that. So that's one of the things we're seeing. Other trends, I think cash is not disappearing. I think it's still a prominent payment type. It certainly has declined a lot, but it's starting to level off as we're seeing. And I think inclusion is becoming a strategic requirement for businesses. And I think they realize that they don't want to turn away cash customers. So the dilemma is how do I modernize my operation but also still serve cash customers? And I would even say that regulators are starting to catch up on the inclusion piece. So we're starting to see a lot of regulation around requiring businesses to accept cash or have a cash-to-card machine on hand so that you can serve cash customers.

Yeah, in the US I think we're still seeing about 30-32% cash overall tender there and laws, legal things in place that you can't exclude cash in your operations. Although I haven't been to an entertainment venue for a game, ball game or anything else that hasn't been cashless other than a high school game here in the last year and a half. So there's the other side of it that wants to get rid of all cash. And so you have to have the cash accepting kiosk there to turn it into that provisional credit.

And Greg, I would just say you probably haven't seen it, but we have our kiosks in those venues you're talking about to serve those cash customers.

Yeah. Interesting.

Very good.

Okay, Joe. So you sit on both sides of this.

What are you—

are you seeing a general move towards cashless here, or is it still a mix in most of your venues?

Yeah, it's definitely a mix. As Jason was alluding to, cash is a requirement in some states. So it's good to have a solution that addresses that requirement. This is the interesting part of working at Kiosk. We see the dynamics of working with enterprise-level customers like Jen and the Cox team and operator-type customers like Jason that are solving all of these unique business aspects. So how we, how we come in and consult with a lot of our clients is sharing different trends that we're seeing across various industries, especially cash management, how we implement those applications and components into our kiosk. And then obviously manage those kiosks to maximize the uptime and keep the operation rolling.

Super, super. Okay, Jen, back to you. We talked about how AI's advancing self-service as we've talked about in terms of collecting data, using data. And when people are paying in cash, obviously that, that becomes part of the known nature of that consumer within your stack. Beyond the kiosk itself, where's AI coming up for Cox today. What are you doing there?

Yeah, so our retail agents handle so many different scenarios in the stores, and when you have a customer standing right in front of you, you need answers fast. So we've trained our AI tools to use all of the content our reps need from a traditional knowledge management resource to lean into how we adapt— excuse me— and we lean into how we adapt that so that it learns faster so that we can give an overall summary as well as articles with answers very quickly so that they're not having to pivot and search through various tabs. We're also using that on our backend to edit copy and make sure that we have the most relevant content available, which will help us reduce customer wait times and build confidence.

Super.

Joe, how are you seeing all different ways that people are using AI and self-service now?

Yeah, so it starts with the application, obviously. Various self-help type applications being implemented into the user interface, connecting with a, a virtual agent for frequently asked questions, and then obviously implementing a lot of automation from a workflow perspective, not only to keep the kiosk up and running, but dragging in various applications from other aspects within a retail environment, whether that's security systems and tying that into self-service. Loyalty and driving awareness around loyalty programs and KYC aspects of people that are using the kiosk that might be very high status loyalty members.

Yeah. How about—

can you go more into the manageability of things? How's that work today?

Yeah, so it's definitely evolved. So kiosk, we have a pretty unique setup from our services product. We're utilizing vPro. From Intel, obviously at the chipset, and then with the utilization of additional hardware from a, a partner of ours called MeldCX that is also utilizing vPro and building automation functions into the management of the kiosk. So we're building out workflows utilizing AI to power cycle components if they go offline, just to maximize the uptime, limit truck rolls, and save and on services cost, and then as well as from the user perspective, keep that kiosk up and running so we're avoiding the black screen of death, if you will, on a kiosk and doing a lot of automations on the backend to keep that kiosk up and running.

Yeah, that old BSOD, man, that'll catch you every time there. So good deal. All right, Jason, how are you guys using AI in your operations there and transforming payments? My goodness, we are seeing just tremendous advancements in payments all around, whether it's crypto to just standard payments. Who was it that I was just listening to? The, oh, Stripe. Stripe trying to buy PayPal, for instance, and the impact that might have here, a private company buying a public company there to be a challenger to Visa and MasterCard. Lots of changes happening in your world.

A lot of changes.

It's funny you mentioned that. When I used to work at PayPal, I know a lot of folks who were impacted by that. Look, on the payment side, AI is a huge enabler. It's helping identify fraud and anomalous transactions in real time, optimizing payment routing and orchestration to improve authorization rates and reduce processing costs. Instead of relying on static rules, systems are continuously learning and adapting based on the transaction patterns that AI sees. On the cash management side, AI also is huge from a cash management perspective, improving forecasting and operational efficiency. These are areas that we're really leaning into rather than relying on historical schedules. AI can predict when cash is in demand at the kiosk, at the store, at the fleet level, using factors like transaction trends, seasonality, local events, weather, things of that nature. So it really enables smarter replenishment schedules, reduces cash outs and overfills, and improves working capital in the end. And it really comes down to what Joe was talking about around uptime and reducing downtime and lowering operating costs. So those are some of the things that we're leaning into pretty hard with AI. We're experimenting a lot with the user experience at our kiosks where AI can really help with the user flow, real-time analysis of what user flow is working, what's not, upsell opportunities at the kiosk. Things of that nature.

Super, thank you. Let's look into the future here, Jen. Crystal ball. I, I know you can't talk about specifics, you're in the midst of a potential merger going on that hasn't been settled, but where do you think things are going with kiosks and roadmap and all that fun stuff?

Yeah, so one of the things that we've been exploring for a little while now is the self-serve pickup lockers for equipment returns and exchanges, or buy online and pick up in store, order fulfillment. We've floated ideas about ways to pay for accessory purchase at the kiosk. So I need to purchase a cable, but I don't want to stand in line to do it. Is there a way that we could pay for that at the kiosk and get that customer in and out faster? Just ways that we can make it easier for the customers to do business with us.

Super, super. All right, let's go into some rapid fire here. We've got about 4 minutes left. Give us some advice. Just, we'll go Jen, Jason, and Joe. One piece of advice, 30 seconds for each of you. If you're starting this journey right now, what are some mistakes? What would you wish you would've done differently? What's your best advice?

I would say start by understanding your business needs. What are you trying to solve for and how will it enhance your customer's experience?

Okay, great.

Joe?

Yeah, it's one thing to build a kiosk, it's another to deploy it. That's where the operational cost in deploying a kiosk really come into play. So having a good solid partner and game plan from an implementation and ongoing support perspective, there's all kinds of aspects that kind of go into maximizing the uptime of the kiosk. So making sure that whether it's selecting a partner or having a good strong plan internally, but management and support of your fleet.

Got it. Okay, Jason.

What about you? I would say I talk with a lot of businesses that are trying to modernize and go cashless, but they still want to serve those cash customers. And oftentimes they, they start with the cashless customer in mind to orchestrate what that looks like. And my advice would be to start with your cash customer in mind and really think about what that new environment is going to be for them and how you can serve their needs going forward in an environment where you're not accepting cash in the same way that you were before.

Super, super. Well, guys, thanks so much for this. I want to invite Lee back on as we go into some Q&A. From what I understand, the Q&A is working, but the chat is not. Thank you for your patience. Somehow there's a setting somewhere where chat was disabled so that, that opening icebreaker for everybody to tell us what they liked about the year, the World Cup. It was only us that showed up in the stream there. I apologize for that. So I looked at that. I said, okay, so we got Joe talking about English, the English at the baseball stadiums, but we got nobody else. And then finally I got a text saying, hey, the Zoom chat is disabled. And I've been sitting here in the background going, how do we do this? How do we do this? How do I get this off?

So.

I apologize, everybody. All right, Lee, Q&A. We did get Q&A.

All right, this one, the first one is to you, Greg. With the K-shaped consumer you described, does self— consumer economy, does self-check, self-service investment make more sense at the value end or on the premium end of retail? It's both.

I think self-service is not only a consumer benefit to people, but it's, do you have enough people to work your stores, to operate and provide the customer service that you need to be effective and maximize things? Is more of your sales moving to the click and collect? And there, can you fulfill that? Your inventory distortion. Our next webinar is all about inventory distortion. And we want to make sure we have that covered. You have the inventory on the shelf that the customer wants to buy. But I think it depends. If you're worried about theft, of course, you're going to have different views of where you put self-checkout and self-service within your organization. You're going to have different things in terms of what happens with locking merchandise up that we see in different locations. Yeah. It's common sense in what your specific situation is.

Yeah.

This one's to all three of you, or if all four of you, if a retailer or operator is sitting on aging self-service hardware right now, What's their first move?

Oh, I would say start building that business case. Before our relationship with KIS, our previous kiosk, we're literally shredding money in front of the customer. So you don't want to get to a point where you have that situation.

Yeah, hardware is an extension of your brand, especially in retail, especially with the, the movement of driving more foot traffic back into store, having a solid plan from a replacement perspective, looking at a refresh in an eloquent way, not necessarily ripping and replacing all at once, doing it in a staggered time over time and having a good strong partner that can, that can help support that.

How about you, Jason? Anything to add there?

I think they covered it. Again, I would go back to think about your cash customer, right? They're super important. So as you modernize, How are you going to handle those cash transactions while you get the hassles of cash management out of your operation? And we can certainly help consult with that.

Okay. Joe, this next one's to you. With kiosks handling payments and nearly half of some fleets' transactions in cash, how do you keep the fleet secure and managed without an army of technicians?

Yeah, it all goes back to support and support infrastructure. Utilizing dashboards to understand cache levels, predictive analytics, and the use of AI and grabbing that telemetry data from the components so you can predict when you need to go sweep the cache. Having a solid support infrastructure in place that if components do go down, that we're either doing the power cycle utilizing the, the vPro chipset, as I mentioned, a little plug for Intel again, but having a good infrastructure to get component on site and replace in a, in an expeditious manner if that is a requirement.

Gotcha. Jen, this one's for you. How do you decide which transactions belong on the kiosk versus with an agent, and how has that line moved?

Yeah, so our customers that come in every month to pay their bill head directly to the kiosk, right? And then if the customer comes in and they want to pay a bill, we can shift them to the kiosk But our reps also work from a tablet, so they're able to intercept that transaction and offer an account review or pitch mobile while that customer is walking to the kiosk or waiting in line. And then we also have advertising built onto our kiosk that we can entice a customer to come talk to us and not miss that interaction. Okay.

Jason, for venues that want— that went fully cashless and got customer backlash Is cash-to-card a permanent bridge or is it a transition technology?

I think it remains to be seen if it's fully permanent. So I don't want folks to think that it has to be permanent. That's something that you monitor over time. So if you've gone cashless and you've gotten some backlash, or the, the hidden cost of going cashless is you're missing out on transactions that you didn't know, or you have the social media backlash, a cash-to-card kiosk can certainly bridge that gap for sure. And oftentimes ends up being in place for a long time because you want to serve those guests for a long time. And as I said earlier, cash is not going away per se. It's definitely shrinking as a percentage of total spend.

If I recall, it was in this— I don't have the updated stat, but 20% of Walmart customers were unbanked at one time. And I can imagine when you have an event like the World Cup, although that's a high-income customer that can go to that— what was it, $18,000 to get into the final or whatever?

That was ridiculous.

You've got all these different demographics coming in, in all these different places. So the variety of people coming in with cash for a variety of different reasons into a stadium venue that's cashless, did you see any bumps there? Any changes in behavior? Were you in World Cup stadiums?

Yeah, we were in the World Cup stadiums. We're in pretty much most of the major sports venues and music venues around the country. We saw a big uptick in usage during the World Cup. And the main thing I would say is foreign languages, right? So our kiosks are able to handle a variety of different foreign languages. So that was by design for a lot of the international guests that were coming. So we saw a lot of different—

we didn't even consider that as part of the webinar to talk about the multiple languages aspect of it that are key offsprings.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, fabulous. Greg, this one's for you. Does legislation like minimum staffing mandates for self-checkout change your adoption forecast?

Did you say minimum stabbing or minimum staffing?

Minimum staffing. Obviously this pertains to the Rhode Island mandate.

Yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead. Yeah, we're about to do a study with, uh, with SensorMatic on retail shrink, and one of it was retail violence, but I hadn't heard in the universe, you know, require mandated stabbing. Okay, I'm sorry, so finish the question.

Okay, does, does that legislation, the Rhode Island type legislation, does that change our adoption forecast?

No, because the What the forecast is, you've got to have one person or for every 3 self-checkouts. Okay. I know some people tried to push it to 1 per 8 at one point, but that's just not reality anymore. What we're seeing in, it's about 1 to 4 at max. So 1 to 3, yeah, that's harder to do there. There's some good aspects of it from the ADA standpoint in the lanes, but it really comes down to economics more than anything else is where is the best place to put my scarce label? Labor in the store. And if it's not the checkout lane, like the assisted selling that you would see in clothing or general merchandise or something like that, then how do I provide that customer experience? That's a solid customer experience, particularly for my honest customers, and free up labor to make sure I'm in stock for the merchandise, that I'm helping people. If I'm in a locked-up situation, that I've got situation where I got unlocked the shelves so people can get the merchandise so we can make the sales? Can we deliver the product? Can we make sure we have accurate inventory? It's those things that determine the profitability. It's not necessarily cutting labor.

Do either of the other 3 of you have any input to add there? No. Okay. Sir. All right. This is to everyone. Has there been customer pushback on the self-service or has there been more acceptance?

We've seen some on our end, right? A little bit of that is we don't give change back for cash payments to your account. And so there's been a little bit of pushback there, but I think that's where the ReadyCredit solution could potentially help with that in the future. But no, these kiosks that KIS has done for us are very easy to use and most people don't have any problem. They're good.

Yeah, I would say that the last thing you want to do when implementing a kiosk is design an application that's too cumbersome to use.

Yeah.

You don't want to insult someone when you're driving them towards self-service and then, because they'll never use the kiosk again. That's one. So getting the workflows down correctly, doing solid user acceptance testing on anything that you're rolling out just to make sure that you keep that and then watching the adoption metrics as you implement, just when you go live, that those workstreams are being effective. And then go back to AI, how we're seeing those workstreams even enhance the user experience is the implementation of cameras, you know, in vision-based self-checkout. So not only from a security perspective, but it's, it's driving faster workflows for the actual user. And making sure that objects are placed and those objects are what they are, and then speeding up that self-checkout process. We're seeing that across a few different industries right now.

I'll just dovetail off of what Joe said. I think you hit the nail on the head with the kiosk has to be super easy to use, super intuitive, available and inclusive for all audiences, including those with disabilities. And it has to be super fast. So for us, somebody is rushing to get to a movie or they're trying to get into a trampoline park or they're trying to get to a concert or check into a hotel or buy something at retail. They don't want to spend a lot of time converting their cash to a card. So we spend a lot of time and we use AI to help us optimize our user flows to make sure that it's very intuitive and very quick as a process.

So I've got a question for you guys. We're now starting to see self-service be used for locked-up merchandise type of thing in the hardware in particular. So the tools being locked up at a Home Depot or Lowe's, and now there's a tablet or some sort of self-service screen with QR code that you click with your phone that gives you a code back that you're able to, to put in, and they can now track whoever that person was that was doing it. Do you see that growing? Traditional, let's say, health and beauty retail type of thing? Or is there just too many shelves locked up in that environment, the typical inner city Walgreens where the HBC stuff is all locked up?

Yeah, it's been an ongoing conversation for the last few years. And I think just with access to labor, how you're deploying that labor is forcing a lot of these retailers to implement this kind of smart edge technology to help improve the customer experience within high shrinkage areas. Not everyone coming into a retail store is trying to rip the retailer off. So you want to implement technology that drives, it drives that solid seamless user experience for the general population, but still from a retailer, protect the assets within your environment from getting ripped off.

Got it. Got it. Lee, do we have more Q&A? I know we're at the top.

Yeah, I got that one here. This is from Eric. How do you keep the store managers from turning off the kiosks?

We don't allow that. We actually have reporting in place that tells us if it hasn't been opened or if it's been closed or—

I could say just from like a hardware perspective, universal power supplies, battery backups, and then driving that telemetry data up to the cloud. That a power event has occurred at that particular location. And then getting on the horn with Jen and saying, hey, employee X is unplugging the key. It's funny, we do see it from time to time.

Really?

Depending on where we're deploying and how it's being implemented with an order entry, insulting employees by implementing a kiosk or digital signage going into third-party locations and so forth, but there's different tools that, that we have in place to, to notify our clients when those power outages go out.

And on our side, we don't deal with it a lot. One sort of a funny one that everyone might be able to relate to is at times we'll see that a kiosk at the airport has been unplugged because we're in about 110 airports across the country. And what we found out is that people are unplugging it so that they can plug in their cell phone and charge their cell phone.

Wow.

We've all been hunting thing at the airport to try to find a place to plug it in. Yeah, so we had the airports put a little lockbox around the outlet so that they don't unplug it.

I thought it would be like maintenance coming by to vacuum the floors or something, you know, but to charge their cell phones, man, that takes some gall. That takes some gall right there to, to do that.

Wow.

Another question here: can you provide further clarification on the demographics around consumers who use self-checkout, age, US versus Europe, those, those kinds of differences. And yes, you can mention the grumpy old man, even though I'm sitting here. That was a finding that we had from a survey several years ago on self-checkout. There's a big spike of people in the age of 55 and older using self-checkout, much higher than middle-aged people and almost as high as the younger folks. And we attributed it to the grumpy old man, just didn't want to deal with somebody.

Yeah, what we found is those people that used it, because it was one of these things that was just not what we thought, and it was because it could slow down and they could check the prices on each item that was scanned. So instead of having the fast scanner where it's like beep and it's going and you don't know what the price of things being rung up is, they were able to use self-checkout and see, oh, it's exactly, that's the right price. That's the right price. So they don't get overcharged.

I would say from our perspective, we see really no clear distinction of demographics. A lot of the kiosks that we're implementing have omnichannel applications built in, and it's driving a, a connected experience, like specifically in retail as well as mass transportation and airports, taking workflows that you start on your phone or at your laptop at home or on your tablet, and then finishing that journey within the offline environment at the kiosk. So yeah, we try to collaborate with our clients and kind of understand what other means of technology they're implementing just to kind of appeal to the wide variety of customers that are being driven into those retail environments.

I want to thank you guys for being a part of it and providing such great insights for everybody today. And for those of you watching. These are our next webinars coming up. We've got one in 2 weeks where we're going to release our inventory distortion research, which is our most popular research of the year. What's happened there? How's it been impacted by tariffs, by returns, by theft, loss prevention? We'll be able to dive a lot more into the economy for that one coming up on, on the 6th. Then we're looking at edge and AI later in the month, and then come September we're going to be looking at mid-market at retail and what's happening. Hope you'll be able to join us. And certainly if you need or want to do these sort of things, reach out to myself or Jerry on the IHL team. I want to thank Joe and Jason and Jen. Thank you so much for being here and for Intel once again sponsoring. Appreciate it. Hope you guys have a great rest of July wherever it may take you. If you're going to RSPA, look me up. I'll be there at RSPA. Take care, guys.

Thank you.