Introduction: A What without a Why

During the summer of 2012, Sean Culey chaired a supply chain event in Madrid. Listening to speakers describe emerging technologies — warehouse robotics, big data analytics, autonomous vehicles — he sketched an end-to-end supply chain and overlaid each innovation onto it. The realisation was immediate: no one was considering what would happen when these technologies converged.

That insight sparked a five-year research project that became his book Transition Point, and a decade of keynote speaking around the world on the coming transformation of the supply chain.

Gradually, Then Suddenly

One of the central observations in that research is that waves of technological change follow the same S-shaped diffusion curve that Everett Rogers described in 1962 and Geoffrey Moore popularised in Crossing the Chasm. Adoption is slow at first — many innovations fall into Gartner's "trough of disillusionment" — but once the chasm is crossed, progress becomes exponential as competitive pressure forces mass adoption.

We are now in the early spring of the sixth technological wave since the Industrial Revolution. For years, the innovations of this wave — warehouse robotics, autonomous vehicles, drones, collaborative robots — appeared in exciting videos but showed little sign of mainstream materialisation. Then came April 2019.

Making Buying Easy

Convenience is a primary driver for consumers, and the most inconvenient part of the shopping experience has always been the checkout. In April 2019, Sainsbury's opened the UK's first checkout-free store in London, allowing customers to scan items via a smartphone app and pay electronically — a direct response to Amazon Go, which uses vision tracking, sensing technology and machine learning, and was being rolled out to 3,000 US locations.

Walmart simultaneously announced a partnership with Google to enable voice ordering through Google Assistant, allowing customers to add items to their cart simply by speaking — a competitive response to Amazon's Alexa-powered ordering capability.

Automating the Last Mile

The same month brought a series of delivery milestones. Amazon's road delivery robots — Amazon Scout — began trials in Washington State. Starship Robots announced their robots had safely completed 50,000 deliveries covering 200,000 miles. And in the most significant development for the retail industry, Google's Wing subsidiary received the FAA's first-ever certification for commercial drone deliveries, with Amazon receiving approval shortly afterwards.

These automated delivery mechanisms are being developed to cost-effectively meet the new promises being made to consumers. Amazon announced it would spend $800 million in a single quarter to halve its delivery time and offer US Prime members free one-day shipping — a move Walmart immediately matched, without requiring a membership subscription.

The Tip of the Iceberg

April 2019's milestones were not limited to retail. Verizon and South Korean carriers launched the world's first commercial 5G network — the core infrastructure behind the consumer and industrial Internet of Things. The vision of sensors capturing data across the entire end-to-end supply chain is becoming real, driving mass adoption of AI-powered analytical control tower systems capable of processing information at a scale beyond human capability. The supply chain is about to become self-aware.

Elsewhere, blockchain case studies are emerging, collaborative robots are growing rapidly in manufacturing, billions are being invested in 3D printing, RPA software is automating back-office processes, and warehouse robotics systems are being deployed across multiple industries.

Conclusion

For seven years, Sean Culey had been presenting on these technologies and the waves that drive them. April 2019 provided real evidence that many of the sixth wave's inventions are crossing the chasm into the mainstream — shifting from deceptive to disruptive, and from experimental to essential.

They will create new business models and industries. But they will also destroy old ones. And as the Q&A sessions at conferences consistently revealed, the deeper question is not about the technologies themselves — it is about what happens to those in society who are left behind.

That question, and its implications, was the most important and concerning element of all the research.

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This article was originally published on LinkedIn in June 2019. Read the full version, including detailed case studies and footnotes, at the link below.