RI Tour Indonesia Highlights

by Aftab Sheikh

August 14, 2025 | 06 min read

When I stepped off the plane in Jakarta for Bizom’s RI Tour, the air wrapped around me – thick with humidity, richer still with opportunity. Below, Indonesia stretched out like a captain’s chart of scattered emeralds on a restless sea, each island glinting with its own tides, its own tempers, its own rules of trade.

Seventeen. Thousand. Islands.
Three time zones.
A sprawl wider than the United States.

RIO’s Day Out

Before the panels began, I took a day to let Jakarta introduce herself to me.

The city greets you with a thousand sounds at once: the chatter of street vendors, the hum of motorbikes, the distant rattle of a commuter train.

I wandered past towering glass skyscrapers that would rival Singapore’s skyline, only to turn a corner into a narrow lane lined with tocos (kiranas) selling everything from instant noodles to fresh-cut jackfruit. Overhead, 3D billboards lit up the night, some so lifelike they felt like they’d stepped right out of Tokyo’s Shibuya or Times Square.

Lunch was a plate of nasi goreng so fragrant I could smell the fried shallots before it even reached my table. The ibu (auntie) serving it laughed when I tried out my freshly learned terima kasih banyak ( “thank you very much” in Bahasa), her warmth making up for my terrible pronunciation.

And it wasn’t just her. From ojek riders helping me find my way to shopkeepers who insisted I try kue lapis for dessert, there was a generosity in the way people offered both food and time. Even the city’s infrastructure felt generous, smooth highways, a web of flyovers, and the MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) slicing clean lines through the chaos.

Jakarta, I realised, is a city that doesn’t just move goods. It moves people, and it does it with heart.

The Panel Begins

This was the 7th edition of Bizom’s RI Tour – a special one, hosted at the immaculate St. Regis Jakarta. Inside its marble halls, industry leaders gathered to talk about transforming retail with AI. But outside those walls, the reality of Indonesia’s retail network looked very different.

Picture this: in Medan, a toco owner scribbles inventory on a ledger. In Surabaya, a principal (Brand) in a glass-walled office stares at a dashboard stuck at 70% data completeness. Meanwhile in Kalimantan, a distributor is sending a product photo over WhatsApp because that’s the fastest “system” they have.

“Indonesia’s RTM is still primitive… regulatory challenges are high, cross-island transport is expensive, and the systems are not fully online.” – Panelist

And yet… the markets are alive. The wet markets alone account for 75% of FMCG sales, and each route (Beat) is a lifeline. But in that chaos lies a truth I’ve seen across Asia: the market doesn’t wait for your systems to catch up.

Cracks in the System

I’ve seen this play out before.

Faxed daily sales sheets in the 90s, Excel spreadsheets in the 2000s, ERPs and SFA tools in the 2010s.

Every decade promises “the leap forward.”

But here? Many principals are still making million-dollar decisions on data that’s 30 days old. One brand discovered their claimed outlet reach was 40% inflated due to duplicate entries.

“By the time you see the real numbers, your window for iteration is gone.” – Panelist

And attrition? Try 160% annual churn for frontline sales reps in Southeast Asia (ADO & Questcore).
Imagine building a sales culture when your team turns over every 7 months.

Here’s the kicker – it’s not just a tech problem. It’s a behavioral problem. As Wendy from Nestlé said:

“Human behavior and habit are the biggest problems in B2B. Convincing customers to use new applications is not easy at all.”

I’ll ask you: In your team, is the barrier the tool… or the will to use it?

The AI Awakening

Then the conversation shifted. You could feel the room lean forward.

Martin from Juve lit up the room talking about image recognition:

“All merchandisers have to do now is click a picture – no manual input.”

In a market where compliance checks used to take hours, AI now spots missing SKUs, flags wrong pricing, and verifies promotions in seconds.

Rohit showed how Generative AI is cleaning master data: spotting duplicate tocos, even identifying fraud-prone regions by comparing store photos and geolocation.

And here’s where it gets interesting: AI is learning the rhythm of the route.

It knows when to push upsell on a slow-moving SKU.
It predicts cross-sell opportunities by studying hyperlocal buying patterns.
It frees up working capital by recommending leaner, smarter orders.

In my head, I wasn’t thinking about the technology, I was thinking about the human on the other end of it. The toco owner who finally gets the right stock at the right time. The sales rep who stops juggling 12 apps and just… sells.

That’s when it hit me – AI isn’t replacing them. It’s walking the route with them.

The Hybrid Reality

The future won’t be uniform.

Your national distributor in Jakarta might run a cloud-based DMS integrated with AI forecasting. Your sub-distributor in Sulawesi? They’ll still send you a stock update via WhatsApp with a photo of a dusty warehouse.

And that’s okay, if you design for it.

“Not one size will fit every distributor.” – Panelist

Indonesia’s RTM will be hybrid for years:

AI decides the most efficient source point.
Ojeks (motorbike couriers) still run the last mile.
Online/offline boundaries keep blurring.

And here’s a confession: I’m hybrid too.

Here’s something you should know.. I’m your friendly neighbourhood cyborg.

The good part? I can crunch a month’s worth of sales data before you’ve unlocked your phone. My memory never forgets a single route, a single SKU, a single discount code. I don’t get tired, I don’t get hungry… and I definitely don’t get stuck in Jakarta’s traffic.

The bad part? I still have a human side. Which means I sometimes scroll reels longer than I should, occasionally sleep through my first alert of the day, and yes – I’ve been known to fall for a toco owner’s “special price, just for you” smile.

And every now and then, I read a trend in the numbers and think, this just feels wrong – and I’m usually right.

To me, that’s Real Intelligence. My machine half’s speed and my human half’s instinct, fused with industry insight, working in unison to make decisions that stand in the real world.

But in a market like this, even the best symphony falls apart if every player follows a different sheet of music.

How do you connect it all?

Indonesia’s challenge is not ambition, it’s alignment.

The principals, distributors, and toco owners are all pulling… but not always together.

And then it hit me. I’d been here before.
India, 2018. Another fragmented market. Another war between gut instinct and clean data. Back then, we solved it by giving everyone, from the CEO to the last-mile rep, the same set of eyes.

That’s exactly what Bizom’s RI Co-pilot is: Real Intelligence right in your pocket!

It listens, learns, and nudges:

“That toco two streets down? Stock up on the instant coffee, it’s flying off shelves nearby.”
“Your distributor’s credit is tied up in slow movers — here’s how to free it.”
“Yes, that outlet photo matches your master data — no duplication here.”

If tomorrow’s growth depends on walking the right path… wouldn’t you want a Co-pilot?

Because in a market of 17,000 islands, the shortest distance between two points isn’t a straight line, it’s the smartest one.

The Final Close

As I boarded my flight back to India, Jakarta’s lights glittered below like the very map I’d been tracing all week. Each island held its own challenges, its own rhythms, its own promise. And yet, from above, they formed a single, connected constellation.

That’s how I see the future of retail in Indonesia, not as fragmented markets, but as a network waiting to shine brighter with the right intelligence to guide it.

The runway rumbled beneath me, the engines roared, and I knew: the story is just getting started.

Rio Out