Europe needs to protect data in an aggressive, uncertain world.

The future of retail is sovereign when it comes to data, Schwarz Digits CEO Rolf Schumann warned delegates at World Retail Congress in London this morning as he stressed that European data had never been more under attack.

“What we see around the world is a loss of the rules, because it was a rules-based world,” he said, pointing to countries such as Russia and North Korea as centres of ransomware and to the impact of cyber security breaches on major retailers, most recently evidenced through the ongoing issues at UK retailer Marks & Spencer.

“Infrastructure, our digital and physical infrastructure, is under attack, just look at Spain,” he said, recalling the huge country-wide power outages that struck the Iberian peninsula recently. “We have to understand what the new currency is, which is data. Data is the oil of the 21st century.”

Highlighting the risk to retailers and therefore their relationship with their customers, he added: “Look at the aggressiveness we face every day from the US and China for our [Europe’s] data. How can we turn Europe into a data colony?”

He called on European companies to tackle their “homework in the back office”, highlighting the use of the cloud, data protection and cyber security as fundamental pillars of data strategies.

Addressing the opportunities around the adoption of AI within retail, he described data as the “fuel of the future” and said that while he predicted AI would hyper automate processes and show “unknown unknowns” to businesses as it interpretated more and more information, the value was primarily in the source information.

“Who owns the data owns the knowledge,” he said.