 The COVID-19 pandemic has forced marketers and retailers to reconsider the physical retail environment and introduce new innovations that better meet the changing needs of their shoppers. Many of these technologies were on display at the All Virtual CES a little over a week ago. I sat down with three leaders in the space to discuss their visions for the future of retail and the technologies that they're working on that are going to help us get there. So when we think about 2020 and everything that happened, you know, there's a huge impact in retail and how people are interacting. The pandemic has really changed the way customers shop and what their expectations are of the businesses that they shop at. It's not that physical retail is less fun or inconvenient. It's simply that it has to change and be reinvigorated. The first of these technologies is Visa's app-based point-of-sale offering called Visa Taptophone. With Taptophone, Visa's aiming to transform payment acceptance options for the 180 million micro and small merchants around the world. What it really is Taptophone enables anyone with their Android phone to create a point of sale. So downloading an application and turning your phone into a payment acceptance device where that customer can tap to phone and conveniently pay through contact lists. I think it's a big needle mover inaccessibility for small business and with small businesses coming back, they're going to need all the flexibility that they can get. But we also see applications for larger businesses, multinational retailers who are saying, oh wait a minute, we don't want to have a lineup at the cash register. So why don't we have our employees have the application on their phone and they can allow customers to tap to phone and check out wherever in the store that they are. So the barriers to becoming a business or a seller, whether that's from a gig worker to a small business to a larger business, tremendously goes down both from a cost perspective. You're using the phone that you already have, but also from a complexity perspective. You're using an app just like you use an app every day for hundreds of other things on your phone. Taptophone is available now in 18 countries and is rolling out in the U.S. this year. The next technology that's reimagining the in-store experience for both shoppers and sellers is Live Area Scan & Go, the world's first app-free scan and go technology. So scan and go technology, it's not new and really it's all about just going in the shop, scanning what you need and go, and just being able to walk out of the store. It's been around for years from an app-based experience and I kind of joke with people that whole saying there's an app for that, that was like over a decade ago. And so one of the things we talk about is being apped out. And what we did with Live Area Scan & Go is we looked at those different behaviors. People wanted contactless payment experiences. They weren't using apps. So we kind of distilled all of that out and said, well, what about a web-based experience? It's basically extended the website experience for retailers. Scan what you want, walk out, and it's all synced to your profile. How many stores are you guys in now? We actually, since we just launched a week or so ago, right now we're in early conversations with a number of retailers because we're seeing the high growth in contactless. And as people get more adapted and needing, wanting those experiences, we certainly see more of it in the marketplace. You've undoubtedly been introduced to autonomous checkout technology through Amazon's Go stores, but other players in the autonomous checkout space like San Francisco Startup Standard Cognition are working on retrofitting existing retail locations with this high tech solution. So Standard Cognition is an autonomous checkout company that uses computer vision only. So there are no shelf sensors. It's just cameras on the ceiling with it, with compute in the back that runs our system. We want people to see these stores, physically just look at them and not have them look different. We don't want gates in front of the door. We want anyone to be able to walk in and shop. The real bread and butter of our company is retrofitting into existing stores. Taking a store that's already there, already operating, without disrupting their business, come in, put cameras on the ceiling and now they're an autonomous store and allow them to operate a little bit more efficiently and cleanly and service their communities more effectively. The way we like to say this is we're rehumanizing retail by removing the machines from between people. We want to see fewer machines inside the stores. We don't want cash registers and devices to get between human interactions. We want humans to be able to interact with one another in a more organic way. And technology ironically is the thing that allows us to do that. There's certainly no shortage of contactless technology options available for retail operators in the coming years. And though the future of physical retail is obviously still being shaped, there are some core attributes that you can count on. Well, I'll say the future of retail is open and it's going to be led by creativity. The future of retail is personalized and helpful. The future of retail is dynamic and digital.