Tristan LawsonChief Technology Officer · Essays & perspective

Tristan Lawson / Chief Technology Officer

Three arguments about what a retailer should keep, change and automate

Perspectives from a life in leadership.

The latest essay

Identity documents and privacy5 min read

Check the licence, then hand it back

Australian retailers built up archives of scanned licences and passports for reasons that made sense at a counter. After deleting 1.7 million of ours, I think the default should be to sight a document, record that we did, and keep nothing else.

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The archive.

Identity documents and privacy

  1. Identity documents and privacy5 min read

    Check the licence, then hand it back

    Australian retailers built up archives of scanned licences and passports for reasons that made sense at a counter. After deleting 1.7 million of ours, I think the default should be to sight a document, record that we did, and keep nothing else.

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Commerce platform modernisation

  1. Commerce platform modernisation5 min read

    Judge a replatforming by how quickly each step can be undone

    Boards are usually offered a choice between a bold replatforming and timid patching. The better question is whether each step of the change can be reversed before the next peak, and what it costs to keep that option open.

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AI in customer service

  1. AI in customer service5 min read

    Let the assistant answer the parcel, not the fault

    A customer-service assistant in electronics retail can answer delivery questions well. Questions about faulty products carry legal rights, and in our testing a fluent model got them wrong often enough that we kept them with people.

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