Bianca Doerschlag walked the RetailSpaces audience through what most people get wrong about digital twins: they think it's one thing. It's not.
Think of a digital twin as a living, breathing replica of your physical stores, but in software. It's not just a 3D model sitting on a server. It's connected to real-time data flowing from your actual buildings: sensors tracking energy use, systems monitoring refrigeration units, devices capturing foot traffic patterns. When something changes in the real world, it changes in the digital twin. When you test something in the digital twin, you can predict what happens in the real world.
WD Partners recently worked with a major home improvement retailer running over 2,000 stores nationally. The ask seemed simple: help us move from AutoCAD to Revit. What they discovered wasn't simple at all.
After meeting with 20+ business unit stakeholders across three days, Doerschlag's team found what she called familiar problems: data silos, manual transfers, information falling off cliffs between teams. "Water cooler talk," she said. "Information just passed by someone running in the office. That's ad hoc."
They reorganized the structure, moved the retailer from drawing tools to data tools, from manual to automated processes using systems already in place. The result: an estimated ROI of $8-10 million annually once fully rolled out.
The retailer is now moving this through the organization enterprise-wide, building toward full digital twinning to enable future technologies.
Another client—a wholesale retailer—asked WD to help build digital infrastructure for their remodel program. The team laser-scanned 600 locations, creating full as-built documentation in Revit with all systems and assets included.
Midway through, the parent organization pivoted: use this clean data in their digital twinning platform. They were moving from 2D facilities tracking across thousands of locations to 3D use cases.
"This team is striving for hundreds of locations in this system by next year," Doerschlag said. "They're working ferociously to get to a fully-fledged digital twinning system by 2028."
Doerschlag broke down a building lifecycle into three phases: design (5%), build, and management (95%). Most retailers focus on that first 5%. Digital twins capture value across the entire lifecycle.
Imagine knowing when a refrigeration unit breaks—not just that it's broken, but where it is, who maintained it last, what's happening with that facility. Now multiply that across your entire fleet.
"Think about that one problem store in the back of your head that's a unique snowflake," she said. "Now think about that when you've got your entire fleet. What does that mean if you can gather information, test new store concepts, understand energy output across all your stores?"
Doerschlag's advice: look at your existing data now. Clean data means clean processes, which means you'll manage data correctly going forward.
Three phases: Scoping (define your goals, pull in stakeholders, evaluate existing data), Building (fill gaps, tag assets, establish management protocols), Integration (map data connectivity, deploy IoT devices, set up dashboards).
Nvidia and Lowe's touch their digital twins three times daily per location. That's not manual—it's automated processes feeding real-time data that helps optimize merchandising, customer journey mapping, and facilities management.
Doerschlag closed with a prediction that should wake everyone up: by 2032, artificial intelligence will be stronger than the sum of all human intelligence.
That's seven years away. Seven years to set up the data infrastructure that lets you leverage AI at scale. Seven years to organize the information that determines whether you're competing or catching up.
The retailers building digital twins now aren't doing it because it's trendy. They're doing it because the window is closing. The ones who wait until AI is fully mature will find themselves trying to feed messy, siloed, manual data into systems that demand clean, connected, automated information.
"Are you collecting the right information?" Doerschlag asked. "Are you laying down framework that allows you to move quickly when you want to move quickly?"
Watch the full talk below 👇