Tom Bianculli on IT budgets
From Tom Bianculli, Zebra Technologies | theCUBE + NYSE Wired: NRF Media Week - AI Retail Leaders · · SiliconANGLEtheCUBE
“We predict in our research a trillion dollar shift is going to happen over the next 24 months around data center and edge deployments ... the money has to come from somewhere — it's got to come from the old stuff, so stuff will be killed to feed the new stuff.”
On , Tom Bianculli, Chief Technology Officer at Zebra Technologies, spoke about IT budgets during Tom Bianculli, Zebra Technologies | theCUBE + NYSE Wired: NRF Media Week - AI Retail Leaders on SiliconANGLEtheCUBE.
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.