How Zebra is empowering frontline workers through tech

Zebra has been doing pretty well in the past few years, with its stock price rising steadily. Analysts have attributed the company’s performance to its ability to adapt to changes in the market. How are you evolving the company moving forward?

Bill Burns: If you wind back the clock to around 2014, Zebra was a specialty printing business that printed hospital wristbands, e-commerce labels, barcode labels, and anything involving thermal transfer printing.

Then, we acquired the Motorola assets and became a $3.5bn company in November 2014. The scanning and mobile computing portfolios came along with that, as well as investments in RFID [radio frequency identification], automation, machine vision and others.

As those portfolios continued to grow, we saw additional opportunities as our customers looked to digitise and automate their environments. So, we came up with a framework of having every asset, person and frontline worker visible, connected and optimally utilised. The framework still exists today, where if you can sense what’s happening at the point of productivity within a business, give something a digital voice and know where a piece of inventory or tool is, then you can analyse the data in real time.

But the way we think about data and analytics and the way our customers use it is not so much about big data where you collect data then use it in the longer term. Rather, it’s about using data in real time to take the next best action. For example, with a mobile device in the hands of a worker, you’re able to tell a worker to fill the shelf or direct the forklift to pick up a piece of freight.

It’s about gaining market share in Japan, taking advantage of the manufacturing investment in India, and supporting our customers in China, Vietnam, Malaysia and others as manufacturing returns to strength

That’s how we’ve always thought about it, which is how do we continue to expand the portfolio beyond printing, scanning and mobile computing, which are our core assets, into new areas like tablets, RFID, machine vision, software and robotics that all tie into this framework?

Ultimately, we want to help customers be more effective and efficient. We look at the things adjacent to what we do by listening closely to our customers and making either organic or acquisitions that broadens our portfolio.

The company has been making significant investments in machine vision, including the recent plans to acquire Photoneo. How does machine vision plays in the broader strategy?

Burns: Think of machine vision as an extension of barcode reading. We’ve been the global leader in handheld scanning – if you’re in a supermarket, you use a handheld scanner to scan your water during checkout. Closely adjacent to that is fixed scanning that lets people do things hands-free. In a manufacturing bench in the past, you’d have a handheld scanner to scan and put parts together. Now, you can be hands-free and more efficient with fixed scanning.

As you move higher up the technology stack, you get into smart cameras and vision systems that allow you to not just read a barcode, but also tell if things are in the right place. This is important in areas like semiconductor manufacturing where small intricate connections matter.

We see both basic barcode reading and advanced vision systems as a way to enhance frontline workers through automation. They no longer need something to figure out if the parts are correct. Instead, they can focus on less mundane tasks and correct the machine if something goes wrong.

We think vision systems will become more sophisticated. We’ll move to 3D systems, where you can look at multiple dimensions. We also think robots will become smarter. Today, robots are cutting the number of steps workers take while walking, but we’ll get to a point where robotic arms will be able to pick items very selectively, which is one of the hardest things for them to do. We see this play around industrial automation and the idea that workers will be enhanced by technology. Frontline jobs will become more sophisticated and not as repetitive.

Zebra has focused a lot on the retail sector. During NRF 2025, the company announced new AI offerings to empower retail frontline operations. Other tech providers including the hyperscalers and the likes of SAP are trying to play in the retail space as well. How are you competing and cooperating with them at the same time?

Burns: I think having an open platform is key and will allow our customers and third parties to leverage, in the case of what we announced at NRF, GenAI models on the mobile device. And there are multiple applications for that.

The one I’m most excited about is the Zebra Companion, a digital assistant on your mobile device. You can use text or local language to get access to unstructured data from a GenAI model that wasn’t available before because it’s not in table format or part of standard operating procedures within our customers’ environment.

We work closely with Qualcomm and Google to make sure we have the chipset, memory and operating system to be able to support the model, along with software from Zebra that allows you to keep the model updated.

Today, there’s nothing that we feel is missing in our portfolio. We just like to do more, whether it’s in machine vision or robotics. We’re the global leader in our core market, so it’s hard to say we’d want to do more there, but if there are things adjacent to those markets, we certainly would make more investments and acquisitions

If you want to run the model on the device, then you need to scale down the model, but you don’t need as much connectivity to cloud. Some applications may need to connect back to the cloud because they’re memory intensive, but many other applications will be able to run on the mobile device.

Many retailers around the world don’t have a lot of connectivity from their locations to the cloud, and they don’t want to spend money on that. So, if you can keep the devices up to date with the model locally resident on the device along with the information of the customer, a new manager could draw information from the most experienced manager. That’s as a key element to enhancing the frontline worker and the most exciting to me.

Do you think retailers are ready to adopt the technology? There are some studies in the market suggesting that retailers tend to be laggards when it comes to AI adoption.

Burns: Retail, at least for us, was on the forefront of deploying the Android operating system. Everyone’s different, but we see retailers continuing to invest in technology. They believe they need to have to have an omni-channel experience for their customers. Some customers want to buy online. Some customers want to buy online and ship to their house or pick up in a store. Other people simply want to go to the store and buy it.

It all depends on the convenience that someone’s looking for and investment in technology, both on the e-commerce side and in-store, because expectations of consumers have never been higher.

So, if I say I have something and can ship it to you in a day or two, they expect that to happen. If the retailer has it in the store and you go pick it up, that’s great. That experience is terrific for you, because you can get it faster. The problem is, if you go to that store and it’s not there because the inventory is not accurate, they’ve lost out on that sale.

Investments in technology around inventory, having more engaged retail associates and freeing associates to do more around serving customers is what we think about in retail. And AI plays a role in all those. The associates have the tools they need to serve a customer better and have visibility into things such as inventory that they wouldn’t have otherwise through unstructured information.

Can you give me a sense of how the business is growing in the region? What are the hotspots of growth?

Burns: Asia-Pacific continues to be a growing region for us with different dynamics. We’ve seen some manufacturing move out of China to Vietnam and Malaysia, but most manufacturing still happens in China. Manufacturing is still recovering as consumers are spending more on travel and experiences after the pandemic. They’ll shift that back to goods and then manufacturing will come back stronger, both in and outside of China – and that’s important for us.

In Japan, our market share is lower than that in other places and that’s an opportunity for us. We’ve won over large retailers and the largest postal carrier in Japan. We’ve also changed our channel partner strategy to work with larger companies like Docomo and system integrators in Japan, as opposed to the partners we use in other places.

We’re also still seeing growth in India from a manufacturing perspective. India has the population, but they don’t have the infrastructure, so they’ll need to build out the infrastructure around their ports and cities to become a true manufacturing hub. Australia has been strong from a retail perspective. Over the past year or so, we’ve continued to see investments in technology in Australia.

So, we see opportunities throughout the region. I don’t think it’s centred on one area. It’s about gaining market share in Japan, taking advantage of the manufacturing investment in India, and supporting our customers in China, Vietnam, Malaysia and others as manufacturing returns to strength.

We also continue to support logistics where transportation networks overbuilt during the pandemic have come back to more normalised levels and are starting to grow again. We’re looking to support the multinationals as well as local logistics companies within the region.

We’re also making Asia-specific investments in the portfolio and using the breadth and depth of our broad portfolio to serve our global customers.

Do you see any potential gaps or opportunities in Zebra’s product portfolio that need to be addressed in the longer term?

Burns: I’d say there’s nothing in our portfolio where we need more of or there’s a gap. We’re happy with the products and solutions we sell today. We spend about 9-10% of our revenue today to keep the portfolio fresh and up to speed. That includes our core portfolio around printing, scanning and mobile computing. It includes adjacent areas like tablets and RFID, our supplies business that goes along with our printing business, and new investments around machine vision, retail software that leverages mobile devices and robotics.

We continue to invest across the portfolio to make sure that we continue to be the global leader in solutions that solve the hardest problems for our customers. That said, there are always things that are attractive from a time-to-market perspective, where someone with traction in an interesting technology that we didn’t invest in or choose not to invest in.

We invest in that in two different ways. One is, we make venture investments into smaller companies to understand the market that we’re either not ready to invest in, or we find it intriguing. Some of those companies we’ve acquired, some we haven’t.

The other area is acquiring the companies that you mentioned earlier. We generate a lot of cash, and we look at interesting technologies that are adjacent to what we do today to expand our footprint into areas that our customers are interested in and we’d acquire that company. We continue to look, but you’d never know.

Today, there’s nothing that we feel is missing in our portfolio. We just like to do more, whether it’s in machine vision or robotics. We’re the global leader in our core market, so it’s hard to say we’d want to do more there, but if there are things adjacent to those markets, we certainly would make more investments and acquisitions.