The Central Asia Retail Week forum took place in Tashkent

At the Central Asia Retail Week forum, a session on IT in retail took place, during which experts from the IT departments of major retail companies shared insights into the technological innovations that help advance business processes within retail chains.

Dmitry Vypritskiy, IT Director at M Cosmetic, explained the significance of chatbots for various areas of retail operations across three key components:

— customer service
— marketing and product promotion through the company’s external channels
— efficient internal communications.

Among the notable advantages of using chatbots for handling inquiries, experts highlighted reduced equipment downtime and lower maintenance costs.

The IT Director also warned about several key steps that must be taken when implementing a chatbot system in a retail company:

— populating the chatbot with content
— maintaining and continuously monitoring chatbot systems
— promptly training employees on how to work with chatbots.

Next, Rafail Salikhov steered the discussion toward managerial decisions regarding the decentralization of the IT department in a large retail company. Two key actions taken to decentralize the IT division at Lenta were:
— restructuring teams: independent domain teams were created, given authority to make key decisions, and held accountable for business results
— shifting the focus to the customer during product development.

Rafail noted that through business decentralization, IT service efficiency increased by 25%. The session moderator then raised the topic of future IT development trends among retail companies in Uzbekistan.

Rustam Toshov, Chairman of the IT-ALLIANCE Association, pointed out key trends such as:
— omnichannel approach
— personalization
— computer vision for product recognition on shelves.

He also predicted which retail innovations will soon appear on Uzbekistan’s IT market.

At the end of the session, all experts agreed that seamless IT integration into retail must be implemented as quickly as possible.