Tech Tuesdays: PTC Debuts New App, Cisco Reveals Opinions on Data Privacy + More News
In response to customer and market demands, PTC Retail announced the availability of Flex Insights, which is a low-code platform “designed to help brands and retailers unlock the power of their data to drive faster and better decision-making during planning and product development,” the company said in a statement.
PTC said by leveraging its ThingWorx IoT technology, Flex Insights connects data across enterprise systems and applies AI capabilities to enable brands and retailers to make faster and better decisions.
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PTC said Flex Insights extends the industry-leading capabilities “and feature-rich functionality of PTC’s retail product life cycle management platform, FlexPLM, and is available through simple, visual, easy to use and intuitive apps, including, but not limited to, critical path management, compliance tracking, visual line planning and sustainability analytics.” The company said personalization features improve the user experience “and put real-time data, imagery and actionable insights at user’s fingertips.”
Corina Brügger, service transition manager at Intersport, the sporting goods retailer, said the company is “constantly striving to improve business processes to drive speed, collaboration and efficiency. The Flex Insights Critical Path Management app shows everyone the status of each product and the steps that need to be completed to get our products to market faster.”
PTC said its easy-to-deploy and configurable apps “empower brands and retailers to access actionable intelligence most important to their specific business needs and challenges.” This included the Critical Path Management app, which provides product teams and senior management “with up-to-the-minute views of the progress of each product and across the entire season’s line, enabling them to quickly address steps needed to get them to market on time.”
A Compliance Tracking app also allows product teams “to define what sustainability and social compliance documents are required for specific products, and to track and manage the data in those documents to support reporting.” Meanwhile, the sustainability app “enables rapid integration between FlexPLM and leading sustainability solutions, such as Worldly (formerly Higg) and Made2Flow.” The Visual Line Planning app automates seasonal line reviews, “making it easier to set up reviews, collaborate with remote team members, capture notes and update plans.”
Footwear News sister publication WWD reported that Amazon delivered better-than-expected quarterly sales and earnings. The gains were fueled by Amazon’s advertising unit. “A juggernaut in its own right, the ads business, which was expected to pull in $11.6 billion in revenue, reported $12.06 billion, an increase of 26 percent over this time last year,” WWD noted. “Amazon still trails Google and Meta in the online advertising arena by a sizable margin, but the platform isn’t as vulnerable to changes like Apple’s iOS privacy update — in fact, it appears to have benefitted from that, as brands rejiggered their ad budgets. In any event, Amazon advertising is obviously growing and rather quickly.”
Speaking of data privacy, Cisco, the digital communications tech company, found that younger generational cohorts are more concerned about their data privacy than other generations.
In its consumer survey, “Generation Privacy: Young Consumers Leading the Way,” researchers at Cisco said younger consumers “are taking deliberate action to protect their privacy, as 42 percent of consumers aged 18 to 24 exercise their Data Subject Access Rights, compared with just 6 percent for consumers 75 and older.”
Researchers identified 33 percent of respondents who qualify as “Privacy Actives,” which means they care about privacy and “are willing to act to protect it, and have acted, for example by switching companies or providers because of their data policies or data sharing practices,” the report’s authors said, adding that younger consumers “are the most willing to take action to protect their privacy. Forty-two percent of consumers, aged 18 to 34, are Privacy Actives, a percentage that steadily decreases with age.”
The research also showed the percentage of consumers who request data deletions or changes jumped to 19 percent this year from 14 percent last year. “Again, this is highly correlated with age: thirty-two percent of consumers aged 18 to 24 make data deletion or change requests compared to only 4 percent of older consumers,” the report stated.
Regarding advanced technologies, the report’s authors said many consumers “have lost trust in organizations because of their use of artificial intelligence, and 50 percent of respondents look to the government to set rules and enforce privacy protections.” The research also revealed that 12 percent of those polled identify as regular users of generative AI.
Other key findings of the report include that 48 percent of those polled said AI can help improve their lives. And 54 percent said they “are willing to share their anonymized personal data to help improve AI products and decision-making.”
Still, the research showed that 62 percent of respondents “expressed concern about how organizations are using their personal data for AI today, with 60 percent saying that they have already lost trust in organizations because of their AI use,” the report’s authors said.
Cisco said in a statement that organizations can implement measures “to (re)gain customer trust, such as auditing products and solutions for bias, being more transparent and explaining how the AI works, ensuring human involvement and instituting an AI Ethics Management Program.”
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