Zebra Technologies: Bloomberg Breakaway Tom Bianculli Interview

🎥 Jul 19, 2017 📺 ZebraTechnologies ⏱ 3m

Interviewed at the Bloomberg Breakaway Summit, Tom Bianculli, Zebra’s Chief Technology Officer, discusses the role Enterprise Asset Intelligence plays in transforming businesses and how the growth of IoT, mobility, and cloud computing will continue to push digital transformation forward to improve employee productivity and enhance the customer experience. To learn more, go to: https://goo.gl/GMGMGq

Watch on YouTube

About Tom Bianculli

Tom Bianculli, Chief Technology Officer at Zebra Technologies, discussed the company's role in retail and supply chain technology during a January 2025 interview at the New York Stock Exchange for theCUBE + NYSE Wired's NRF Media Week. He described Zebra as "hidden in plain sight," noting that its devices are used in checkout lanes, retail stores, and package delivery. Bianculli highlighted a demonstration with Qualcomm, Google, and a major North American retailer in which a picture of a shelf could identify 70 products within a second, with generative AI then determining next-best actions and orchestrating workflows. He also announced Zebra Companion, an agentic AI offering for frontline workers that includes knowledge, sales, merchandising, and device agents. Bianculli cited a Korn Ferry estimate of a shortage of 85 million workers by the end of the decade, leading to $8 trillion in unrealized economic output, and predicted a trillion-dollar shift in data center and edge deployments over the next 24 months. In a 2017 interview at the Bloomberg Breakaway Summit, Bianculli described Zebra's focus on providing visibility and services across retail, transportation logistics, manufacturing, and healthcare through barcode printing, barcode reading, RFID, and mobile computing technologies. He evangelized a category called "Enterprise Asset Intelligence," which he said intersects with data-driven strategies, the Internet of Things, and cloud computing. Bianculli emphasized the importance of personalization in brick-and-mortar retail and noted that the same data can be sliced differently for store managers, workers, and shoppers. He stated that consumers demand instant fulfillment and that ubiquitous connectivity—machines talking to machines and humans—will change how businesses interact with customers and manage their own assets.

Source: AI-verified profile updated from Tom Bianculli's recent appearances. Browse all interviews →

Transcript (4 segments)

Tom Bianculli0:11

Verticals: retail, transportation logistics, manufacturing, and healthcare. We do that through a product portfolio set of solutions that use barcode printing, as well as barcode reading, RFID, and mobile computing technologies. This whole notion of digital disruption and the digitization of industry has been something that we've seen as a great opportunity for us. So, we've started to now evangelize what we consider to be a new category in enterprise space, something we call Enterprise Asset Intelligence. Evangelizing our message around Enterprise Asset Intelligence and how that intersects data-driven strategies, Internet of Things, Cloud, a lot of the topics that have been talked about at the conference is one. And the second is being able to get kind of an outside end view. So, being able to meet with peers across industry, executives at other...

The Internet, Cloud and data-driven solutions. Connectivity and the Internet have gotten us to where we are today, but now we're entering this ubiquitous connectivity where everything is becoming connected. Everyone is obviously already connected, and we're going to have machines talking to machines, machines talking to humans, and that's going to really change the way that brands and businesses have a conversation with their customers, have a conversation, if you will, with their own assets. You know, where is my inventory, where are my capital assets, and how do I deploy them optimally to fulfill the expectations of their customers. And I think that's just gotten to a whole new level expectation-wise.

Transportation, healthcare, but particularly around, as you said, increased customer satisfaction or customer engagement. Retail is the one that just jumps right out. And if you had to pick out one word in retail that's going to be crucial to brick-and-mortar retail operations, surviving and competing and growing in the current climate, it really comes down to that word of personalization, or that notion of personalization. So how do I have a personalized experience curated, if you will, for that customer when they come into my store? Now you look at digital and you talk about using data, and there's multiple constituents, there's multiple stakeholders, there's a whole field emerging around what's called service design, which looks at how do you take this data and apply it, same data, but cut and slice different ways...

To still make use of that exact same data set, but in a way that's presented to them.