Retail Destination Live returned to Old Trafford Cricket Ground in Manchester for what has become an essential industry event, uniquely dedicated to discovery and connection for the retail destination community. JLL’s Neil Churchill, Destination Director at Brent Cross, hosted the Revo conference, which engaged many of the industry’s trends and topics under the overarching theme of people and technology.
JLL’s Neil Churchill, Destination Director at Brent Cross, hosted the Revo conference at RD 2025
The Evolution and Future of Retail Destinations
A central theme of the conference was the evolution of retail destinations and how technology is shaping the future. Gareth Jordan, Director at ART Software Group and Retail Advantage, led an engaging panel discussion examining how technology has influenced retail destinations and what the future holds. The panel also explored cutting-edge innovations like artificial intelligence (AI), an exciting feature that forms part of ART’s newly released enterprise software Retail Advantage Insights.
PANEL DISCUSSION – The Evolution and Future of Retail Destinations
Gareth Jordan introduced the panellists, each offering a unique perspective on the changing retail landscape: Alasdair McClimont, Customer Manager at The Crown Estate – overseeing performance analysis and support for retail and hospitality, nationally; Anand Basu-Attwood, Commercial Operations Manager for Multi-Realm based at Resorts World Birmingham – supporting Brand Partners to unlock their full potential by being commercially ready for what 2025 holds in store; and Glynn Edwards, Trading Director at Landsec – leading sales collation and commercial analysis backed by experience on the retail side, previously running UK Retail for Ted Baker.
The term “destination” now transcends traditional divisions between retail parks, shopping centres, and high streets. Gareth asked Alasdair McClimont to set the scene and reflect on the shift in how retail destinations are perceived and with The Crown Estate’s wide variety of locations. “The Crown Estate has some fantastic locations that really focus on their own USP.” Alasdair highlighted the diversity of their destinations and experiences, ranging from iconic global flagships and first-to-market brands in central London. “Think of a retail street and Regent Street is up there in your mind, and then switch all the way across to somewhere like Rushton Lakes, where we integrate massively with the local wildlife reserve.” Here, beavers got their second shout-out of the day, following the ESG presentation by Anastasia Petrova of Deepki for their benefits in fixing ecosystems and supporting biodiversity. “Channelling what makes distinct destinations will define best in class in the long term,”Alasdair noted.
Anand Basu-Attwood – Commercial Operations Manager for Multi-Realm, shared his perspective on the post-Covid era
Gareth delved into the changes that have occurred and operational impact for managers of diversifying destinations, and asked Anand Basu-Attwood to give a picture of the post-Covid era at Multi Realm. Anand explained the pattern of social changes and intensified footfall with the evolution of places, customer behaviour and use of space with the introduction of big leisure operators. He also shared the unexpected but real opportunities for retail with the introduction of events around Esports at Resorts World Birmingham: “We’ve got an arena directly opposite us, and it’s not a huge event; Esports brings in between 1,500 to 2,000 people, but the net worth of these individuals…one of these teams spent £50,000 in three days in one retailer.”
Evolving Landlord-Tenant Relationships
“It has been a tough climate for brands, so tapping into different customer bases is important”, said Gareth, exploring the evolving interaction between landlords and tenants. He asked Alasdair his thoughts on this, and how technology is helping brands navigate the current conditions.
“I think the historic cautiousness in the relationship between landlords and tenants is further down the road in shopping centres than it is in retail parks and on the high streets, but in essence, there’s always a cautiousness with margins being squeezed for the retailers and the hospitality industry,” commented Alasdair. However, a shift away from selectively sharing of data toward a more transparent approach is changing the traditional dynamic: “A big part of what I do is around gathering sales information, and I think the question that needs to be asked is why do you really want to know the sales information? Are you gathering it so that you have a better insight into your leasing and can inform your asset management of risks? So is it to fit your benefit? Or do you want to understand that for the benefit of your customers? We’ve worked really hard to move away from the idea that we’re collecting your information, and we’ll cherrypick what we give back to you, and we’re not going to necessarily leverage that for your support. Instead, we’re trying to really focus on this idea of gathering the information that will provide as much back to you as possible.” Technology is helping “through dashboards, through data, providing it much quicker, much sharper for all the brands in situ.” With margins being squeezed and pressure on staffing, Alasdair concluded that “time is precious. So we need to be asking ourselves – how are we adding value for brands?”
Glynn Edwards reiterated how technology can address the pressures on brands and gave Landsec’s approach: “Operationally they’re needing to be a lot tighter on the P&L so therefore much more efficient when utilising their teams.” One of the ways in which we’re helping in this respect is through our comprehensive footfall data. This allows us to support the brands in planning their rotas more effectively. For large openings like Sephora at Bluewater we can provide them with trend analysis allowing them to plan across not just certain days but throughout the seasons. For a brand like Sephora who were relatively new, not just to our centre but to the UK, anything we can provide in this respect helps them to thrive from day one, rather than having to learn some hard lessons after opening.” Glynn also discussed the innovative use of technology in Landsec’s event spaces, such as “Under The Lights” under Piccadilly Lights, where heat mapping and flow tracking provide valuable insights on space utilisation for exceptional mixed-use concepts. He concluded, “it starts at the centre level, but it works all the way up in terms of their teams’ relationships with retailers. Collaboration and technology is the essential part.”
The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Retail
A highlight was the demonstration of AI tools that are revolutionising retail analytics. Gareth introduced Retail Advantage Insights, (an enterprise-level version of the Retail Advantage software) which uses AI to offer powerful, flexible insights.
Gareth Jordan introduced Retail Advantage Insights, an enterprise-level version of the Retail Advantage software
Gareth presented a dashboard on tourism data to show how quickly the AI tools could generate specific insights. “The answers we are after could well already be there in the dashboard – the reporting in Retail Advantage is informed by 25 years of industry experience – but using the AI, we can get an even faster answer to something specific. The AI also gives us suggested questions relative to this dashboard and data.” For example, the Retail Advantage AI quickly identified that Chinese visitors were responsible for the highest total sales at specific locations, prompting further exploration of the factors behind this trend that can improve insight and strategy.
Glynn Edwards, Trading Director at Landsec shared experience working with AI
Glynn Edwards and Anand Basu-Attwood also shared their experiences with AI, noting its role in improving efficiency and decision-making. Glynn contributed how Landsec uses AI for monthly trade reporting, combining data from Retail Advantage with Power BI and onsite experience. “We will also move towards a chatbot program to pick up some of the more basic queries from our commercial teams. The amount of requests we get through as a team that could easily be dealt with like that is extraordinary. We’re also looking at how we can use it to model footfall and provide sales forecasting so we can be more on the front foot. Eventually the property industry will need to move from traditional machine learning to real generative AI. I would say, however, that traditionally, as an industry, property hasn’t been the quickest to adopt tech” Glynn said. “Although it’s certainly an industry motivated heavily by profit, and there is no doubt that effective use of AI in the future will correlate directly with the business with the biggest returns.”
Anand – a self-proclaimed tech enthusiast – explained how AI has improved his workflow. “AI has revolutionised things for me,” giving the example of an 800-page lease that he rapidly digested in one minute. “I’m putting in the tenancy schedules and combining the data that I’m getting from Retail Advantage and generating effort rate reports within seconds…these are jobs that used to take me a period of time, whereas now they’re in the background and I can think about what am I going to do with that information rather than spending hours getting there in the first place.”
Consumer Sentiment and Profiling with AI
Alasdair brought his experience with AI back to continually asking the right questions: “What do we want to use technology for and how does it add value for our customer brands? If we want a genuinely collaborative relationship, what can we give back? What can we share?”
Alasdair McClimont, Customer Manager at The Crown Estate shared experience working with AI
Alasdair explained how technology is helping them advance their understanding of consumer sentiment and profiling, particularly for somewhere like Regent Street, which attracts 72 million visitors annually. Surveying a sample of such a highly trafficked area is impossible to get meaningful results, but by bringing together vast amounts of data, including consumer spending, movement patterns, online behaviours, and social media insights – an AI-driven approach helps identify their key consumer demographics. Additionally, Alasdair emphasised the unique contribution landlords can bring with “locally focussed insight and benchmarking.” For example, they’re exploring the impact of store windows on consumer behaviour, using AI to analyse how window displays affect customer attention and messaging. “We all know there is more to a store nowadays than the just sales that go through the door; it’s the marketing reach, it’s a billboard, particularly in places like central London, so we have run some provisional AI analysis over window schemes.” While still in its early stages, he explained that the analysis is helping to create benchmarks for the brands’ visual proposition on Regent Street.
The Future of Retail Destinations
Gareth concluded by asking the panellists to look ahead to the next 10 years for their destinations, and the answers made it clear that the future of retail lies in effective collaboration on several levels.
“I think both us and the brands are considerably stronger together – sharing that data,” which continues to be a defining change, answered Glynn before highlighting Alasdair’s earlier point about how we view our stores and their purpose now and into the future. “I think that’s really powerful. I don’t think that brands look at a shop and think the amount of money coming into the till is how important it is. We need to change our approach as well. There is no point in just looking at traditional KPIs. I think we need to think a bit broader than that,” said Glynn, looking at bigger influences and the halo effect for the rest of the centre too.
Alasdair brought in other collaborative angles including opportunities around ESG, and turning strong retail destinations back into central community hubs with the leasing and recruitment to support collective impact on the community as a whole. “We do some really positive collaboration work at The Crown Estate in central London with neighbouring landlords, so it doesn’t have to just be about you and the brands; it’s thinking more broadly about how you work together to create a strong destination,” said Alasdair.
Anand closed the discussion and highlighted changes over the last decade as a sign of the trajectory to come: “10 years ago I came to my first one of these conferences, and collaboration wasn’t a word that we were talking about between retail and landlord, and it’s now moved from being tenant versus landlord to destination with brand partners. The further that goes the more integrated we become, the more successful they become, the more successful we become. I don’t know where it’s going to go over the next ten years, but if it keeps on going along the route that we’re seeing at the moment, it’s only going to be positive.”
Whether you want to understand how to get more from the data you collect or learn more about how the industry is moving towards AI-enabled tools to simply and quickly achieve insights and collaboration, let’s discuss.
Stay tuned for next year’s line-up for Retail Destination Live