In this theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts segment, theCUBE’s Dave Vellante sits down with Jim McNiel, Chief Growth Officer at TAE Technologies, to demystify fusion vs. fission and explore how proton–boron fusion could reshape energy economics for enterprise and Wall Street alike. McNiel explains why TAE targets abundant, low-cost boron fuel and how its approach avoids long-lived radioactive waste, requires only light shielding and eliminates meltdown risk. He breaks down siting and regulation – fusion treated more like medical isotopes than fission – and outlines first-gen levelized energy costs in the 7–9¢ range with a path to sub-5¢ as the technology matures. The conversation ties these fundamentals to market dynamics: dispatchable, carbon-free baseload power for data centers, safer urban siting and a financing narrative that aligns with investor expectations and hyperscaler demand.
Listeners also get a clear milestone roadmap: Copernicus (commissioned to operate in 2028) targeting net energy out; Da Vinci as a 50-MW commercial prototype; and TAE Fusion 1 designed for 350 MW—scalable units that could colocate with gigawatt-scale AI facilities. McNiel details how AI already governs plasma stability via TAE’s “Optometrist Algorithm” developed with Google and notes strategic investors (e.g., Chevron, Sumitomo) plus near-term revenue from TAE Power Solutions and TAE Life Sciences. The discussion frames emerging trends in enterprise strategy – from energy as a core input to AI-driven productivity gains – and why the go-to-market has shifted from utility-first to hyperscaler-led demand for dispatchable, clean power.
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Rob Armstrong, Zebra
In this theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts segment, theCUBE’s Dave Vellante sits down with Jim McNiel, Chief Growth Officer at TAE Technologies, to demystify fusion vs. fission and explore how proton–boron fusion could reshape energy economics for enterprise and Wall Street alike. McNiel explains why TAE targets abundant, low-cost boron fuel and how its approach avoids long-lived radioactive waste, requires only light shielding and eliminates meltdown risk. He breaks down siting and regulation – fusion treated more like medical isotopes than fission – and outlines first-gen levelized energy costs in the 7–9¢ range with a path to sub-5¢ as the technology matures. The conversation ties these fundamentals to market dynamics: dispatchable, carbon-free baseload power for data centers, safer urban siting and a financing narrative that aligns with investor expectations and hyperscaler demand.
Listeners also get a clear milestone roadmap: Copernicus (commissioned to operate in 2028) targeting net energy out; Da Vinci as a 50-MW commercial prototype; and TAE Fusion 1 designed for 350 MW—scalable units that could colocate with gigawatt-scale AI facilities. McNiel details how AI already governs plasma stability via TAE’s “Optometrist Algorithm” developed with Google and notes strategic investors (e.g., Chevron, Sumitomo) plus near-term revenue from TAE Power Solutions and TAE Life Sciences. The discussion frames emerging trends in enterprise strategy – from energy as a core input to AI-driven productivity gains – and why the go-to-market has shifted from utility-first to hyperscaler-led demand for dispatchable, clean power.
>> Welcome back everyone. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Here in our NYSE studios of theCUBE. Of course, we have our Palo Alto Studios connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street, innovation and money meet as AI continues to take the center stage and the AI infrastructure continue to build out the impacts on the businesses that will be leveraging it are going to be retail, manufacturing, and life sciences, healthcare, all the business model innovations happening with AI. We've got Rob Armstrong here, CMO of Zebra Technologies. Rob, thanks for coming in remotely. Appreciate you taking the time.
Rob Armstrong
>> Thank you for having me, John.>> So I want get into what you guys are working on right now. Obviously the market's shifted, everyone sees that. And you're seeing two types of companies, people who are now catching up, people have been ahead. And there's a line forming where there's clearly lines of sight of where the innovation strategies are forming. You guys just had a brand refresh. Tell us what's going on with you guys and where do you see the innovation on your side? We just came back from Dreamforce last week. Agentic will have impact to the edge, which is retail and all business categories. Tell us what's new.
Rob Armstrong
>> Yeah, yeah. Well, I think it's an exciting time in technology certainly. You only have these humongous transformation opportunities within the industry really every one or two decades or so, and we're at the cusp of that opportunity. Zebra has been around for over 50 years, serving frontline workers, working across industries and across the supply chain, and we're really excited about the innovation that is happening now on the frontline of business.>> You guys are kind of meeting that AI moment. And the enterprise, we predict next year, will be one of the fastest growing segments as the AI infrastructure builds out and some of the innovations around neoclouds and some of the things that are happening. Things like Salesforce and Agentforce, it's going to enable a lot. You guys just had a brand refresh. Take us through the changes and what you guys have done on the go to market, how you guys serve customers. Again, the innovations is in workflows and data. If you have those, you can innovate on that. I think you guys represent that example. Share what's changed and how you guys are making those changes with AI and the brand in the go-to market?
Rob Armstrong
>> Yeah, it's a great question. I think there's a big difference between overall AI and specifically AI for the frontline. We've been here for 55 years. Increasingly over the last probably 18 months or so, our customers across retail, healthcare, manufacturing, logistics have been asking more about how automation and AI need to be purpose designed and purpose-built to transform their frontline workflows. Now, if you work in a headquarters office, you have a lot of time to type in a prompt. You can wait for a response. If that AI response gets you a bunch of data, maybe even in the form of a dashboard, that's okay if you're an office worker. But if you're on the frontline of business in a retail store with a customer expecting an answer, or if you're the middle of an aisle in a warehouse or a distribution center and you need to go pick the next product to fill that holiday order, you don't need a dashboard, you need actions. You need very clear prescriptive actions that you need to take. So AI for the frontline is very different than your general AI that you'll see in headquarter workflows.>> Rob, I think you point out something that's really important because if you look at what you just said, they just want answers. You look at the user behavior right now, it's not search, go to a landing page, try to find something. They just want answers. So we're kind of seeing that with the prompts you mentioned. How do you see that connected frontline? You got to have visibility into the assets. You have to see everything and then be real time. You can't just lag.
Rob Armstrong
>> Right.>> So this is a huge point. It's just we're going to a world where need an answer.
Rob Armstrong
>> Yes. Yeah, and when you think about AI for the frontline, we see it adding value to those workers, to those workflows in three key ways. First is how can you use AI to help digitize your environment because you cannot apply AI to something that is not yet digital. Here's a crazy stat. About 75% of medium sized warehouses and distribution centers across the world aren't even digitized. They're working off of pen and paper. So if you want to compete in this age of intelligence as a mid market wholesaler, first you have to have a digital record. So we can actually employ technology in our devices in the hands of frontline workers in order to make it very easy, very fast to get a digital record of your environment, the products and things that you have within your warehouse, within your hospital, within your retail store. That's number one. Number two is how do you operationalize the intelligence that you have? Retail industry has 100% turnover for employees. As you bring on seasonal staff around the holiday season, how do you ensure that that new worker is just as informed, has just as much information as the seasoned veteran that's been there for the last 10 years? So how do you operationalize your intelligence by putting in the form of standard operating procedures and having a gen AI prompt that's optimized for mobile, optimized for frontline to help that new worker get up to speed quickly? And then the third is how to you use AI to actually optimize your operations, and that could be through predictive actions and machine learning or making better decisions in terms of how you do things like quality control and inspection in your manufacturing plant. So you got to digitize your environment with AI, operationalize your intelligence, and then optimize your operations.>> Yeah. This last week at Dreamforce, Salesforce annual conference, we've been going for many, many years. I remember I think 16 years ago when I first went to it, it's always been a great event. It's always been very Salesforce specific. It's like a festival. This year, I'm like, "Okay, here comes the festival. It's a circus."
Rob Armstrong
>> Yeah.>> But I'm like, okay, there's a lot of meat on the bone. They had a lot of announcements. Agentforce has traction. They released code second year in a row before the event. They actually did it before. Most companies announce stuff and ship stuff at the conference. No, they're doing it before. There's a real active user base and customer base with Salesforce that has end customers. Like you guys. Talk about the Salesforce announcements you had at Dreamforce and the Elo acquisition. I think this highlights some of the momentum you guys have and the things you were talking about gives validation. I think this, again, points to this intelligent edge emerging. When you start to see edge and cloud work together, it's very interesting. I think this is going to be a template going forward. So talk about your Salesforce partnership announcement and then the Elo acquisition and what that means.
Rob Armstrong
>> Yeah, yeah. Well, we see these two things being very, very complimentary to one another. You talked about the intelligent edge. Zebra is the foundation for intelligent operations. By that I mean it's combining human expertise with data, AI and automation in order to improve frontline workflows. And both the Elo touch acquisition that we announced a couple of weeks back, we closed just I think two or three weeks ago, as well as the announcement last week at Dreamforce with Salesforce, point to this vision of intelligent operations. On the Salesforce side, it's an announcement of bringing together the leader in AI-powered CRM, Salesforce, with Zebra Technologies in order to enable new retail point of sale capabilities on Zebra's mobile computers for use across the retail enterprise. Some statistics that point to the value of that for retail, retailers will see about a 2% increase in revenue, 2% increase in their profitability, and about a 20% improvement in frontline worker productivity when you combine software from Salesforce, software from Zebra at our hardware products in order to connect that frontline worker. Now, where Elo fits in is Elo's less about the frontline worker. It's more about connecting the shopper or the customer in the store or in the restaurant. They're a leader in kiosks, digital displays, point of sale systems and solutions. And it's now combining the connected frontline worker enablement that we do with AI, with devices, with partners like Salesforce, now connecting that and combining that with a connected frontline experience for your shoppers coming into the store. So it's about connecting shoppers and those workers in order to accelerate workflows, improve profitability and growth for retail, but other industries as well.>> Rob, I love that example because we've been saying on theCUBE, and you mentioned earlier about dashboards, dashboards give you a snapshot of the business. Then you got to evaluate and then maybe take action, maybe do a data analysis. What was the payback? What was efficiencies? With what's going on now and the things you're talking about is there are real improvement gains on small tweaks to business, whether it's a self-driving car taking mirrors away. I just did a story on that where you take the mirrors away from a truck and a car and it changes the fuel efficiency by significant if you're at scale. So when you're at scale, these little things are real-time data points. So that movement from dashboards to really identifying the business logic is where the AI comes in. So I want to get your thoughts because we had a meeting on Friday preparing for NRF coming up, which is a few months away. We think this is going to be one of the hottest stories in retail. It's an AI story. So talk about that business model innovation around the domain-specific knowledge and how the new environment moves from dashboards, what happened to what's happening. And then how you institute change that has a real impact to the user experience, which is the benefit of the customer, but the operations,
Rob Armstrong
>> Right. Well, right now, if you think about retail, just we use that example, you talked about NRF, we're excited to be at Javits Center again in a couple months. Salesforce will be in our booth. So for those that are interested, come on by, we'll show you that new announcement we just had. But there is a huge amount of opportunity to move from dashboarding to decisioning, and we've got a DIY retailer here in North America we've worked with. About only 40% of their frontline workers' time was spent focused on serving customers, 60% focused on what's on the shelf or back office, back of store type activity. Through the use of software, mobile computing, and other technologies, we were able to work with them and increase the amount of time that they're spending focused on their shoppers, their customers, from 40% to 60%. So that's a humongous shift. It's just one example of how when you equip workers with the right technology, the right collaboration tools, the right information, whether it's through AI or other platforms, it can really unlock value. And that really is what's powering this idea behind our brand refresh and our new messaging platform, which is around better every day. A lot of time in B2B technology, every vendor always talks about two things. Number one, transformation, and number two, the future. But if you're in retail, if you're a nurse in a hospital, you need to get better right now. And if you get 1% better, 2% better, that's great. But once you do it, you got to get better again the next day. So our new message, our new platform, our go-to-market strategy is all about helping our customers across the end-to-end supply chain, their frontline workers, their customers get better every single day. And through the use of, again, AI automation, digitization combined with human expertise. When you do those things, there's significant value. And it doesn't have to be a big transformation five years in the future that's really risky. If you just get a little bit better every single day at every point of your supply chain and operations, the cumulative impact of that can be even bigger than any big single long transformation way off in the future.>> It's measurable too. We tell our kids, we tell our employees, we tell our friends, just get better every day. It's the motivational speech, and it compounds that value. So I love that getting better every day and you can start to see the results. Speaking of the future, I have to ask you to end out the segment here. Holiday season's coming. So what do you guys see there? What is Zebra doing? What are you guys advising? What's some of the best practices for folks gearing up for the holiday season, which we know is a tsunami of action and business?
Rob Armstrong
>> Yeah. Well, step number one is get ready, prepare, and get in there early. So obviously, a lot of our logistics customers, a lot of our retail customers are battening down the hatches. They're getting ready for peak season. So you just have to make sure that you start early. For us, I don't know what the economic outlook is going to be for this particular holiday shopping season. I do know that shoppers are going to be expecting a lot. If they're going to take the time to drive into the store to go pick something up, they're going to want it to be on the shelf. And I know this is stuff that you've heard in the past, so I apologize. But most warehouses and distribution centers, they're optimizing their inventory management. They're probably at like 99% inventory accuracy. So if you place an order online, it's being filled from a distribution center, you're going to get it. But more and more, retailers are leveraging their stores as mini distribution centers, but they're typically operating at like 60, 70% inventory accuracy. So for a retailer who wants to serve their customer, whether they're buying online shipped to home, or buying online and coming to pick it up in the store, number one is just make sure you have on the shelf what you're telling your customers is on the shelf within your website. And number two is how do you make sure that that customer that's coming in, they have the options to either self-serve, to be supported by a highly enabled, highly engaged associate, and ultimately get what they're looking for. And that could be more challenging this holiday season than in the last several.>> Well, Rob, really appreciate you coming in. I guess my final question to get the comment out is what does the future of retail mean to you and Zebra? And I hope by the way that all the retailers use Zebra when I'm ordering, get that fast and accurate. What's the future of retail? What's the future of business? You mentioned healthcare, too. That's retail, retail medicine and healthcare. So what's the future look like for you?
Rob Armstrong
>> Yeah, it's a great question. We've, for the last three years, talked about the modern store. We also, within the manufacturing industry, have a vision we call the connected factory. And these are just two examples of how both of these can increasingly leverage technology in order to get visibility about what's happening within their environment. A lot of times you have a digital record of what you think is happening, but number one, do you actually know what's happening every single day across your enterprise? That's step number one. And when you have that visibility, how do you then connect your workers with one another with the agents and LLMs that they need access to in order to do their jobs and to connect them with your shoppers, your customers? Number three is then how do you start to deploy automation in intelligent ways that augment that experience for that frontline worker or for that customer, be it a patient, a shopper, or someone in your home? So it's all about how do you leverage data, AI, and automation together, with that human expertise, to improve and elevate that customer experience. In the case of retail, a shopper. In the case of healthcare, a patient.>> From dashboards to decisions, and the users just want the answers. So like AI, we're seeing the future's right in front of us. We're seeing the prompts.
Rob Armstrong
>> Yeah.>> Rob, thanks so much for coming on. I really appreciate it, and congratulations on the new rebranding and the strategy and the success you guys have. And we'll see you at NRF for sure. We're doing big series around it here, so I'm sure we'll talk to each other soon.
Rob Armstrong
>> Great. See you there, John.>> Thanks for coming on. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We're here in our New York Stock Exchange CUBE Studio. Of course, we have our Palo Alto Studio connecting Wall Street and Silicon Valley as part of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE's coverage. A lot of change happening on the business model front. Retail is not just selling stuff in stores, it's healthcare, it's everything. It's an end user, end user benefit, and the technology's there, and again, the user experience just wants answers, whether you're a scientist, healthcare provider, worker, or someone in a store. Thanks for watching.
>> Welcome back everyone. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Here in our NYSE studios of theCUBE. Of course, we have our Palo Alto Studios connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street, innovation and money meet as AI continues to take the center stage and the AI infrastructure continue to build out the impacts on the businesses that will be leveraging it are going to be retail, manufacturing, and life sciences, healthcare, all the business model innovations happening with AI. We've got Rob Armstrong here, CMO of Zebra Technologies. Rob, thanks for coming in remotely. Appreciate you taking the time.
Rob Armstrong
>> Thank you for having me, John.>> So I want get into what you guys are working on right now. Obviously the market's shifted, everyone sees that. And you're seeing two types of companies, people who are now catching up, people have been ahead. And there's a line forming where there's clearly lines of sight of where the innovation strategies are forming. You guys just had a brand refresh. Tell us what's going on with you guys and where do you see the innovation on your side? We just came back from Dreamforce last week. Agentic will have impact to the edge, which is retail and all business categories. Tell us what's new.
Rob Armstrong
>> Yeah, yeah. Well, I think it's an exciting time in technology certainly. You only have these humongous transformation opportunities within the industry really every one or two decades or so, and we're at the cusp of that opportunity. Zebra has been around for over 50 years, serving frontline workers, working across industries and across the supply chain, and we're really excited about the innovation that is happening now on the frontline of business.>> You guys are kind of meeting that AI moment. And the enterprise, we predict next year, will be one of the fastest growing segments as the AI infrastructure builds out and some of the innovations around neoclouds and some of the things that are happening. Things like Salesforce and Agentforce, it's going to enable a lot. You guys just had a brand refresh. Take us through the changes and what you guys have done on the go to market, how you guys serve customers. Again, the innovations is in workflows and data. If you have those, you can innovate on that. I think you guys represent that example. Share what's changed and how you guys are making those changes with AI and the brand in the go-to market?
Rob Armstrong
>> Yeah, it's a great question. I think there's a big difference between overall AI and specifically AI for the frontline. We've been here for 55 years. Increasingly over the last probably 18 months or so, our customers across retail, healthcare, manufacturing, logistics have been asking more about how automation and AI need to be purpose designed and purpose-built to transform their frontline workflows. Now, if you work in a headquarters office, you have a lot of time to type in a prompt. You can wait for a response. If that AI response gets you a bunch of data, maybe even in the form of a dashboard, that's okay if you're an office worker. But if you're on the frontline of business in a retail store with a customer expecting an answer, or if you're the middle of an aisle in a warehouse or a distribution center and you need to go pick the next product to fill that holiday order, you don't need a dashboard, you need actions. You need very clear prescriptive actions that you need to take. So AI for the frontline is very different than your general AI that you'll see in headquarter workflows.>> Rob, I think you point out something that's really important because if you look at what you just said, they just want answers. You look at the user behavior right now, it's not search, go to a landing page, try to find something. They just want answers. So we're kind of seeing that with the prompts you mentioned. How do you see that connected frontline? You got to have visibility into the assets. You have to see everything and then be real time. You can't just lag.
Rob Armstrong
>> Right.>> So this is a huge point. It's just we're going to a world where need an answer.
Rob Armstrong
>> Yes. Yeah, and when you think about AI for the frontline, we see it adding value to those workers, to those workflows in three key ways. First is how can you use AI to help digitize your environment because you cannot apply AI to something that is not yet digital. Here's a crazy stat. About 75% of medium sized warehouses and distribution centers across the world aren't even digitized. They're working off of pen and paper. So if you want to compete in this age of intelligence as a mid market wholesaler, first you have to have a digital record. So we can actually employ technology in our devices in the hands of frontline workers in order to make it very easy, very fast to get a digital record of your environment, the products and things that you have within your warehouse, within your hospital, within your retail store. That's number one. Number two is how do you operationalize the intelligence that you have? Retail industry has 100% turnover for employees. As you bring on seasonal staff around the holiday season, how do you ensure that that new worker is just as informed, has just as much information as the seasoned veteran that's been there for the last 10 years? So how do you operationalize your intelligence by putting in the form of standard operating procedures and having a gen AI prompt that's optimized for mobile, optimized for frontline to help that new worker get up to speed quickly? And then the third is how to you use AI to actually optimize your operations, and that could be through predictive actions and machine learning or making better decisions in terms of how you do things like quality control and inspection in your manufacturing plant. So you got to digitize your environment with AI, operationalize your intelligence, and then optimize your operations.>> Yeah. This last week at Dreamforce, Salesforce annual conference, we've been going for many, many years. I remember I think 16 years ago when I first went to it, it's always been a great event. It's always been very Salesforce specific. It's like a festival. This year, I'm like, "Okay, here comes the festival. It's a circus."
Rob Armstrong
>> Yeah.>> But I'm like, okay, there's a lot of meat on the bone. They had a lot of announcements. Agentforce has traction. They released code second year in a row before the event. They actually did it before. Most companies announce stuff and ship stuff at the conference. No, they're doing it before. There's a real active user base and customer base with Salesforce that has end customers. Like you guys. Talk about the Salesforce announcements you had at Dreamforce and the Elo acquisition. I think this highlights some of the momentum you guys have and the things you were talking about gives validation. I think this, again, points to this intelligent edge emerging. When you start to see edge and cloud work together, it's very interesting. I think this is going to be a template going forward. So talk about your Salesforce partnership announcement and then the Elo acquisition and what that means.
Rob Armstrong
>> Yeah, yeah. Well, we see these two things being very, very complimentary to one another. You talked about the intelligent edge. Zebra is the foundation for intelligent operations. By that I mean it's combining human expertise with data, AI and automation in order to improve frontline workflows. And both the Elo touch acquisition that we announced a couple of weeks back, we closed just I think two or three weeks ago, as well as the announcement last week at Dreamforce with Salesforce, point to this vision of intelligent operations. On the Salesforce side, it's an announcement of bringing together the leader in AI-powered CRM, Salesforce, with Zebra Technologies in order to enable new retail point of sale capabilities on Zebra's mobile computers for use across the retail enterprise. Some statistics that point to the value of that for retail, retailers will see about a 2% increase in revenue, 2% increase in their profitability, and about a 20% improvement in frontline worker productivity when you combine software from Salesforce, software from Zebra at our hardware products in order to connect that frontline worker. Now, where Elo fits in is Elo's less about the frontline worker. It's more about connecting the shopper or the customer in the store or in the restaurant. They're a leader in kiosks, digital displays, point of sale systems and solutions. And it's now combining the connected frontline worker enablement that we do with AI, with devices, with partners like Salesforce, now connecting that and combining that with a connected frontline experience for your shoppers coming into the store. So it's about connecting shoppers and those workers in order to accelerate workflows, improve profitability and growth for retail, but other industries as well.>> Rob, I love that example because we've been saying on theCUBE, and you mentioned earlier about dashboards, dashboards give you a snapshot of the business. Then you got to evaluate and then maybe take action, maybe do a data analysis. What was the payback? What was efficiencies? With what's going on now and the things you're talking about is there are real improvement gains on small tweaks to business, whether it's a self-driving car taking mirrors away. I just did a story on that where you take the mirrors away from a truck and a car and it changes the fuel efficiency by significant if you're at scale. So when you're at scale, these little things are real-time data points. So that movement from dashboards to really identifying the business logic is where the AI comes in. So I want to get your thoughts because we had a meeting on Friday preparing for NRF coming up, which is a few months away. We think this is going to be one of the hottest stories in retail. It's an AI story. So talk about that business model innovation around the domain-specific knowledge and how the new environment moves from dashboards, what happened to what's happening. And then how you institute change that has a real impact to the user experience, which is the benefit of the customer, but the operations,
Rob Armstrong
>> Right. Well, right now, if you think about retail, just we use that example, you talked about NRF, we're excited to be at Javits Center again in a couple months. Salesforce will be in our booth. So for those that are interested, come on by, we'll show you that new announcement we just had. But there is a huge amount of opportunity to move from dashboarding to decisioning, and we've got a DIY retailer here in North America we've worked with. About only 40% of their frontline workers' time was spent focused on serving customers, 60% focused on what's on the shelf or back office, back of store type activity. Through the use of software, mobile computing, and other technologies, we were able to work with them and increase the amount of time that they're spending focused on their shoppers, their customers, from 40% to 60%. So that's a humongous shift. It's just one example of how when you equip workers with the right technology, the right collaboration tools, the right information, whether it's through AI or other platforms, it can really unlock value. And that really is what's powering this idea behind our brand refresh and our new messaging platform, which is around better every day. A lot of time in B2B technology, every vendor always talks about two things. Number one, transformation, and number two, the future. But if you're in retail, if you're a nurse in a hospital, you need to get better right now. And if you get 1% better, 2% better, that's great. But once you do it, you got to get better again the next day. So our new message, our new platform, our go-to-market strategy is all about helping our customers across the end-to-end supply chain, their frontline workers, their customers get better every single day. And through the use of, again, AI automation, digitization combined with human expertise. When you do those things, there's significant value. And it doesn't have to be a big transformation five years in the future that's really risky. If you just get a little bit better every single day at every point of your supply chain and operations, the cumulative impact of that can be even bigger than any big single long transformation way off in the future.>> It's measurable too. We tell our kids, we tell our employees, we tell our friends, just get better every day. It's the motivational speech, and it compounds that value. So I love that getting better every day and you can start to see the results. Speaking of the future, I have to ask you to end out the segment here. Holiday season's coming. So what do you guys see there? What is Zebra doing? What are you guys advising? What's some of the best practices for folks gearing up for the holiday season, which we know is a tsunami of action and business?
Rob Armstrong
>> Yeah. Well, step number one is get ready, prepare, and get in there early. So obviously, a lot of our logistics customers, a lot of our retail customers are battening down the hatches. They're getting ready for peak season. So you just have to make sure that you start early. For us, I don't know what the economic outlook is going to be for this particular holiday shopping season. I do know that shoppers are going to be expecting a lot. If they're going to take the time to drive into the store to go pick something up, they're going to want it to be on the shelf. And I know this is stuff that you've heard in the past, so I apologize. But most warehouses and distribution centers, they're optimizing their inventory management. They're probably at like 99% inventory accuracy. So if you place an order online, it's being filled from a distribution center, you're going to get it. But more and more, retailers are leveraging their stores as mini distribution centers, but they're typically operating at like 60, 70% inventory accuracy. So for a retailer who wants to serve their customer, whether they're buying online shipped to home, or buying online and coming to pick it up in the store, number one is just make sure you have on the shelf what you're telling your customers is on the shelf within your website. And number two is how do you make sure that that customer that's coming in, they have the options to either self-serve, to be supported by a highly enabled, highly engaged associate, and ultimately get what they're looking for. And that could be more challenging this holiday season than in the last several.>> Well, Rob, really appreciate you coming in. I guess my final question to get the comment out is what does the future of retail mean to you and Zebra? And I hope by the way that all the retailers use Zebra when I'm ordering, get that fast and accurate. What's the future of retail? What's the future of business? You mentioned healthcare, too. That's retail, retail medicine and healthcare. So what's the future look like for you?
Rob Armstrong
>> Yeah, it's a great question. We've, for the last three years, talked about the modern store. We also, within the manufacturing industry, have a vision we call the connected factory. And these are just two examples of how both of these can increasingly leverage technology in order to get visibility about what's happening within their environment. A lot of times you have a digital record of what you think is happening, but number one, do you actually know what's happening every single day across your enterprise? That's step number one. And when you have that visibility, how do you then connect your workers with one another with the agents and LLMs that they need access to in order to do their jobs and to connect them with your shoppers, your customers? Number three is then how do you start to deploy automation in intelligent ways that augment that experience for that frontline worker or for that customer, be it a patient, a shopper, or someone in your home? So it's all about how do you leverage data, AI, and automation together, with that human expertise, to improve and elevate that customer experience. In the case of retail, a shopper. In the case of healthcare, a patient.>> From dashboards to decisions, and the users just want the answers. So like AI, we're seeing the future's right in front of us. We're seeing the prompts.
Rob Armstrong
>> Yeah.>> Rob, thanks so much for coming on. I really appreciate it, and congratulations on the new rebranding and the strategy and the success you guys have. And we'll see you at NRF for sure. We're doing big series around it here, so I'm sure we'll talk to each other soon.
Rob Armstrong
>> Great. See you there, John.>> Thanks for coming on. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We're here in our New York Stock Exchange CUBE Studio. Of course, we have our Palo Alto Studio connecting Wall Street and Silicon Valley as part of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE's coverage. A lot of change happening on the business model front. Retail is not just selling stuff in stores, it's healthcare, it's everything. It's an end user, end user benefit, and the technology's there, and again, the user experience just wants answers, whether you're a scientist, healthcare provider, worker, or someone in a store. Thanks for watching.
