On the inaugural episode from our “Reinventing Customer Experience” podcast, ZS Principal Arun Shastri and Associate Principal Gopi Vikranth chat with Suresh Kumar, global chief technology officer and chief development officer at Walmart, about how the retailer has enhanced its customer experience strategies during the pandemic, predictions for the next generation of retail omnichannel, and much more.
On the inaugural episode from our “Reinventing Customer Experience” podcast, ZS Principal Arun Shastri and Associate Principal Gopi Vikranth chat with Suresh Kumar, global chief technology officer and chief development officer at Walmart, about how the retailer has enhanced its customer experience strategies during the pandemic, predictions for the next generation of retail omnichannel, and much more.
Gopi Vikranth:
Hello and welcome. This is Gopi Vikranth, and I lead personalization and customer experience analytics at ZS.
Arun Shastri:
And I’m Arun Shastri. I lead the artificial intelligence practice at ZS.
Gopi Vikranth:
We both work at ZS where we use our industry expertise, cutting-edge analytics, technology, and strategy to create real-world solutions for our clients. In this executive series, we’ll be talking to leaders about how they are reimagining customer experiences at their organizations, and the role personalization plays to drive customer loyalty.
Gopi Vikranth:
Arun and I are quite passionate about this topic, as it is one that our clients wrestle with, and as consumers we are constantly reimagining how businesses can do a better job of engaging us. Join us as we explore the answers to these questions through our conversations with executives who are paving new paths.
Gopi Vikranth:
With us today is Suresh Kumar. Suresh is executive vice president, global chief technology officer, and chief development officer at Walmart. Walmart is the world’s largest retailer with fiscal year 2021 revenue of $559 billion. And Walmart employs more than 2.2 million associates worldwide and welcomes approximately 220 million customers and members each week.
Arun Shastri:
It’s a pleasure to talk to you, Suresh. Thanks for agreeing to participate in our inaugural podcast. You bring such a rich history of experiences across retail and technology. An interesting fact about Suresh, Suresh received the 2021 IIT Madras distinguished alumni award. Very, very special. I can’t wait to hear from you, Suresh. Welcome to our podcast.
Suresh Kumar:
Thank you Arun, and thank you for having me as part of this podcast. Very nice to meet you as well, Gopi. Arun, very kind of you to mention the IIT Madras alumnus award. I’m actually very, very grateful for the ways in which the institute actually helped shape my technical expertise, my entrepreneurial spirit. One fun fact about Walmart global tech is that we have got a lot of IIT Madras grads in our team right here. We have our own alumni family over here.
Arun Shastri:
That’s great. I’m not an IIT alum, but I think Gopi is IIT Mumbai. And outside this podcast I’ll let you two figure out which is the better IIT, I suppose. But Suresh, I think it’s so nice to have you. Let me get things started with the following. You’ve been a member of several trillion-dollar organizations. I don’t know if there are many people in the world who can say that. And you’ve been member of these organizations at the time of their growth, from Amazon to Microsoft to Google, and now Walmart.
Arun Shastri:
Can you speak to us a little bit about how your philosophy and approach to technology and operations, and its impact, particularly on customers? How has that philosophy evolved?
Suresh Kumar:
Well Arun, I’ve been privileged, like you say, to have been part of some great companies. And of course my favorite, of course, is my current job at Walmart. Here, let me start here, because we are actually marking the one-year mark of social distancing, working remotely, managing through COVID-19. I’ve been thinking quite a bit in terms of how we define the role of technology, first at Walmart, and I can tie it back to a lot of my own growth within the technology world.
Suresh Kumar:
It’s really about three things. It’s about enabling speed, it’s about driving innovation, and it’s about having an impact. These three come together in terms of saving lives, in terms of helping people get through day-to-day. Every company does this slightly differently of course, and the focus is unique to each company. But at its core, I believe technology is really about helping people and helping people with their issues. Of course, at Walmart, we impact hundreds of millions of lives including more than two million people that we actually work with ourselves.
Suresh Kumar:
Again, to go back to the pandemic, when the pandemic hit, we found ourselves needing to deliver on a new set of urgent priorities to help our associates and our customers. Technology becomes a critical enabler for all of these things. Just imagine how the pandemic would have actually gone through if we didn’t have all the technology that was there at our disposal. In fact, we couldn’t be having this Zoom conference ourselves even just a few years ago.
Suresh Kumar:
The way I think about technology is really about how it helps people, and how it helps us cope with issues such as the pandemic, but also in our day-to-day life. Within Walmart itself, we have delivered a ton of stuff and I can’t say enough good things about what we have been able to do by our team, how our associates have been able to come together and help. When I think about technology and when I think about the pace of working, how we have been able to deliver, having things like the right tech stack, having solid fundamentals, all of these things become very, very important.
Suresh Kumar:
Whether it is at Walmart, whether it is in any of the companies that I have worked with, fundamentals play a huge role. But ultimately, it’s really about people. Technology is an enabler, and we have a saying at Walmart that we are people-led and tech-empowered. This is true, especially at Walmart, but ultimately when you start digging through, whether it is at Google, or whether it is at Microsoft, or any of these places, people make the big difference. People really make technology come alive.
Arun Shastri:
So, people-led and technology-empowered, but then of course the customer is such an important part of everything, right?
Suresh Kumar:
Absolutely right.
Arun Shastri:
I heard at the 2021 investor community meeting, Doug McMillon, talk about the customer flywheel. If I remember correctly, the customer being at the center, and then you had several tasks. So how do you own the primary destination? How do you serve customers broadly, but also deepen relationships with them? Monetizing capabilities, and of course lowering cost sustainably, and then last but not least, I think, how do you constantly reinvent and reinvigorate your customer value prop? In what ways, do you think, has this flywheel really evolved in the last year, Suresh, as you’ve grown to achieve record revenue but at the same time serve your customers’ needs?
Suresh Kumar:
Absolutely. You have actually articulated the flywheel much better than anybody else. It really starts with the customer at the center. So we want to start…we always put the customer at the center, and we want to earn their trust as the primary destination of everything that they want to have in their household essentials, their food, all the things that they need for their everyday lives. From there, we want to actually start building on top of that.
Suresh Kumar:
We continue to make sure that we refine our flywheel based upon what our customers want, where we see opportunity. As more and more customers started looking for safe and convenient ways to shop during COVID-19, that became one of the most important things that we could look at. So our omni offering, the underlying work that it supports, becomes more and more important. We start with the customer because we are building and we are designing the flywheel for them.
Our first priority, like you said, is actually to take care of the essentials, the big basket, the stock-up trip, if you will. We want to be the best and the first place that they shop. The Supercenter, of course, does it extremely well, having a broad assortment, 200,000 items of the most frequently shopped products. So close, right? 90% of the U.S. population within 10 miles of a Walmart, that’s a huge advantage.
And then we start adding pickup and delivery, that helps us grow. More people used, during this pandemic, our pickup and our delivery options, and we continue to evolve, and we continue to keep meeting this growing demand. The next part of it is really about serving our customers more broadly. It’s really about deepening our relationship, helping harness a healthier mix with them. As we do more for our customers, meet their needs, we want to make sure that we can really be the destination for them no matter what they are trying to do.
Suresh Kumar:
It’s about e-commerce, it’s also about health and wellness. We announced our financial offering. Putting the customer at the center, taking care of everything that they need, and then driving our scale and impact, that’s the one that helps us take the volume and the impact that we have got, making it sustainable, making it lower cost, and then unlocking value through monetization, through other capabilities, making it a lot more holistic in the way in which we think about our customers. We invest in the customer value proposition, and we get the flywheel to turn.
Suresh Kumar:
We start by creating value for our customers, then we create value for our own business. That’s how we think about the flywheel.
Arun Shastri:
When you talked about grocery pickup and delivery business, I wanted to just say congratulations. I think I saw that for Fast Company’s most innovative companies, you were at number six in AI. And I saw that to a large degree that you felt that putting the customer at the center of it and thinking about grocery pickup and delivery business was a big piece of that.
Suresh Kumar:
Oh yes, absolutely. Thank you for that. Yes, we are very, very proud about the accomplishments that we have had in this particular space. Grocery pickup has been fantastic for us, and in fact, it’s a way in which we can serve our customers, not only through convenience, but safety as well, which becomes even more important during this pandemic.
Technology actually helps us in this regard, not just in terms of the actual delivery of the pickup piece of it, but as you saw, we use AI to make sure that we can substitute the right products if one particular product becomes so popular that it goes out of stock. Not only our algorithms actually figure out how to adjust the demand going forward, but for that particular customer, what is the best substitution?
These are the ways in which technology actually can be used to actually help drive the customer experience.
Gopi Vikranth:
Suresh, you’ve been probably the primary destination and I know you said this as well that for many people when it comes to in-store, what do you see as the path for you to be the primary destination on digital? Is it about an omnichannel? Is there more to it? What does that look like from your vantage point?
Suresh Kumar:
Look, we want to be the primary destination. It doesn’t really matter how customers want to shop. Some customers would love to shop by coming into our Supercenter and going through the vast selection that we offer to them by themselves. Other people love the convenience of just driving up and having our associates drop off the products already having picked them up. And we have others who like to have the products delivered to them.
In fact, they would like us to deliver products not just to their homes, but maybe even inside their homes as well. Our primary focus is that we want to meet our customers where they are, how they want to shop. It doesn’t matter what their preferences are.
We have been transforming as an omnichannel retailer for years. Of course COVID-19 has certainly accelerated all of these efforts. More and more people are turning to omni offerings like pickup, home delivery, all of these things are now starting to accelerate quite a bit.
Suresh Kumar:
I’m often asked about what omnichannel actually looks like from a Walmart view. But it’s not about Walmart’s view. It’s really about the customer’s vantage point that matters the most. Our customers and our members actually will start seeing seamless, highly personalized end-to-end experiences. In my mind, this distinction between online and offline, e-commerce and stores—it’s an artificial distinction. Most customers actually don’t think of it that way. They think of it as, “Here’s the products that I want. And here’s the way in which I would like to shop in this particular context.”
We want Walmart to be able to meet that. That is the path that we are on, and that’s really about putting the flywheel to work, is leveraging our store footprint, our omni assortment, right? And bringing them together in an engaging digital experience. You can start in one place and you can end up in a different place in a very, very seamless manner.
How do we then take things like loyalty programs such as Walmart Plus, a new membership program, and be able to integrate all of that into the customer experience as their shopping journeys?
Gopi Vikranth:
Suresh, when you talk about this end-to-end seamless experience for customers, I assume that data is going to play a central role.
Suresh Kumar:
Absolutely.
Gopi Vikranth:
... because you’ll have to exchange that information on what the customer is doing across all these touchpoints. Walmart pioneered data sharing with CPG partners back in the day. That was the purpose of improving EDLC, or everyday low cost. Now how does a partnership look like in 2021? How will it evolve? Are you looking into new digital and data products like the way it was pioneered back a few years back? Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Suresh Kumar:
Absolutely Gopi. You hit on two very, very important pieces. One is data. Data is absolutely essential for everything that we do. In fact, data is the new oil. So, all the clichés that you can think of, they’re actually really true. Without data, you can actually not make any of these things work. Data plays such an important part in everything that we do, not just in the supply chain, but in the customer experience as well.
That’s why I keep talking about it as a holistic kind of end-to-end experience. The second part that you talked about are our partnerships. It is absolutely essential for us to make sure that we create really strong partnerships that ultimately benefit our customers, and it benefits our partners as well. Whether it’s working with CPG companies, whether it’s working with small businesses, creating solutions for our marketplace sellers, this ecosystem is one that really ends up creating, ultimately, the value for our customers. And that ends up creating value for everybody else.
Suresh Kumar:
With respect to suppliers and with respect to CPG companies particularly, we help them evolve as our customers are evolving. Data helps us, making sure that our CPG companies really understand our customers and our customer needs, and they can use that to make a supply chain more efficient, but they can also use that to make sure that their products are designed better.
Suresh Kumar:
We are creating a bunch of things that we will announce at the right time. But through the years, we have built our own flexible, scalable technology that really connects all of these pieces together. You’re talked about CPG companies. We have talked about how that helps the supply chain. But our media business is another great example.
We have got this vast omnichannel presence, and it creates a very powerful cross-sell system. We know our customers very well, and when you start putting these pieces together, our digital properties, Walmart.com, our app, and our omni capabilities, these, including... You’ve got what, 170,000 screens across 4,500 stores. You start now adding our first-party shopper data. You can activate the connection between the brands, the CPG companies, and our customers, and you can do that in a closed-loop way, something that nobody else is able to do in an omni way—whether it is purely online or inside the store. We are bringing all of these things together.
In fact, we have created our media business and we renamed it Walmart Connect, precisely for this reason. We can connect the brands to our customers in a very, very powerful way. That’s one area. We are providing new ways in which companies and advertisers can run campaigns more effectively. They can use self-service, they can use automation, and these ad-tech platforms uniquely leverage the data assets that we have and be able to create these closed-loop systems.
Suresh Kumar:
Since we started rolling out some of these, we have seen unprecedented growth because our partners really see the value in how Walmart is allowing, and the data that we have, is allowing them to connect directly with our customers.
You can start seeing more and more of these types of efforts as our customers evolve, as our business becomes more seamless and more omni, and as our CPG companies and our partners and our small businesses, they also evolve. And you will start seeing these loops getting closed even better in a way in which we can add more value to our customers and to our partners as well.
Gopi Vikranth:
Suresh, one of the things that I also noticed in the community investment meeting is that along with the Walmart Connect, you’re also building one of the largest... or you also have one of the largest delivery networks now. Is that also going to form another additional product in the future? Is that the idea?
Suresh Kumar:
Yeah. Look, I think one of the main things that we are trying to... One part of it is how we get our partners to be able to connect with our customers. The second part of it is really about convenience and around closing the loop all day. When you start thinking about last-mile delivery as another point that you brought up, Gopi. This serves primarily the way in which we can serve our customers in terms of convenience, safety, and timeliness. Whether it is getting products from our Supercenter, from our FCs into our customers’ hands in the most effective way possible, last-mile delivery becomes a very, very important part of it. And last-mile delivery also allows us to be able to reach directly and to be able to manage our customer experience in such a way that we can then allow our partners to be able to take advantage of that, whether it is through... fulfilled by Walmart, or whether it is again, through our own digital advertising network. All of these pieces start coming together.
Last mile is, of course, the place where all of these things come together at the point of fulfillment. That becomes a very, very important piece to the puzzle in terms of how we better serve our customers.
Gopi Vikranth:
And just to double-click into the earlier comment on advertising. Advertising is becoming a key driver of profitability for marketplaces the world over, right? I believe Walmart is now one of the top 10 marketplaces worldwide. However, if I put my end-consumer lens on, advertising has been a net negative impact on customer experience. A lot of times, we don’t really believe the sponsored ads have the best deal and that. When you look at this at Walmart, will advertising be more personalized and relevant at Walmart? How are you going to look at balancing ad tech and the relevance of advertisement, versus everyday low cost and the revenue that could come out of it?
Suresh Kumar:
So Gopi, if you take a look at advertising done right, then it creates a very, very good experience for customers because it helps them discover products that they really like, it helps them jog their memory in terms of the products that they need to either stock up on, or it might help them realize that, “Hey, there is a birthday that’s coming, I need to shop for it.”
Highly personalized, and context-sensitive advertising actually helps the customer. When we talk about advertising becoming a net negative, it’s typically when advertising is in-your-face, is creepy, and is not done well. We don’t want to do that, obviously. We want to make sure that we have got... We’ve talked about data, right?
Data and artificial intelligence that we already talked about, these are really enabling true one-on-one personalization across all of the channels that we have. Actually, research has shown that customers are more likely to shop at retailers that offer this type of personalization than other ones. Cross-channel personalization is really becoming the norm because customers are now expecting you to know their preferences much better so that you can save them time. You can make their life easier, and that’s where all of these things start coming in.
Suresh Kumar:
I see that the future of shopping includes actually meeting customers in a very, very highly personalized omni fashion. And we want to start serving our customers actually right when they’re starting to consume content. So whether they’re on TikTok, on YouTube, or Pinterest, or any of these places, you want to make sure that you understand what people are really, really thinking about in terms of what their needs are and what their preferences are.
When you talk about the flywheel, I mentioned that it actually starts with the customer at the center. All of the innovation that we are developing at Walmart Connect, and the ways in which we are leveraging data with our advertisers, goes back to that part of the flywheel. It’s all about the strategy that helps create more comprehensive shopping experiences for our customers while we are growing our business and while we are creating value for our partners, and doing it in a way that puts the customer at the center means that we can really help the customers lead better lives because we are saving them time, we are offering them convenience, and of course we are offering them value.
Gopi Vikranth:
So basically what you’re saying is that, yes, revenue, ad revenue is going to be a driver, but Walmart would prioritize the customer need first and just balance it out as a higher priority, and then any ad revenue is more of a secondary.
Suresh Kumar:
Absolutely the customer is always at the center. In fact, that is part of what we do. That’s the reason why it is there at the center of the flywheel, and it’s actually there in terms of our mission itself. We want to make sure that we offer lower prices so that we can help people save money and help them lead better lives. Leading better lives for our customers, and that’s really what it’s all about. The more we can help our customers, through all of this personalization, the better it is going to be, and it’s a great deal for everybody.
Gopi Vikranth:
Let me switch it a little bit, because for everything, for many of these initiatives that you mentioned, Suresh, I think today, you have to do it on the cloud. It’s not on-prem anymore.
Suresh Kumar:
Absolutely.
Gopi Vikranth:
And you announced this strategic partnership with Microsoft Azure in 2018, I believe. Walmart has to be one of the largest, if not the largest, moves to the cloud by an enterprise. Can you give us an idea about the scale of this? What are some of the interesting challenges or any interesting experiences that you might have faced as you brought this to life over the last couple of years?
Suresh Kumar:
Absolutely Gopi. You’re right, cloud is a very, very important part of how we think about our technology stack. But we are making sure that we leverage the cloud in a way that is unique to Walmart. We have a private cloud that we have built up in our own data centers. We are leveraging the public cloud. You talked about the Microsoft partnership. We have made use of public cloud, not just with Azure but other public clouds as well. And we are investing in our own management layer that brings all of these pieces together in a seamless way. That allows us to make sure that we can make use of the best parts of the cloud in a way that is uniquely suited for Walmart.
Now, you talked about scale. Scale is particularly massive. It doesn’t matter what you think about within Walmart. Last year was the first time that we ran 100% up on U.S. e-commerce and our Sam’s Club customer journeys on the cloud. That shows us, in terms of the power of the cloud that we are able to leverage, because we are able to make use of the cloud for its elastic properties. We can scale up and we can scale down in a seamless way. We can make use of our own private data center assets and we can make use of the public cloud as well.
Suresh Kumar:
Another area is really around data. We talked about data before. We have now built a data lake in the cloud. It is one of the largest data lakes, at least one of the largest data lakes that I have had the privilege of building. We have moved over 1.7 petabytes of data already into it. We are starting to build very advanced analytics on top of that for finance, for merchandising, for many, many of our other areas. That’s another way in which we have been making use of the cloud.
The third way, which I’ve talked about before, is inside the store itself. That also is part of the cloud. It’s the edge of the cloud. We have rolled out a cloud-powered checkout system to now over 23,000 point-of-sale devices. That is a allowing us to leverage the cloud right inside the stores where our customers are. You can see that as it evolves, our unique hybrid cloud is now going to become more and more tightly integrated with everything that we do, from the customer through personalization, to fulfillment, supply chain, last-mile delivery. All of these things are now starting to come together.
You can just imagine how, across all of the devices and across all of the compute and storage, the scale and the power of bringing everything together.
Gopi Vikranth:
When you think about this multiple organizations or multiple departments that function within Walmart accessing this large private cloud, is this kind of a federated model where each of the organization is able to build applications and they’re able to consume it. One of the challenges that we see is that operationalization of some of these applications becomes the biggest pain point, right?
How are these supply chain and finance and consumer, how are these able to work together? How did you get that done?
Suresh Kumar:
It’s a great point, Gopi. A lot of times, different departments building out their own stack ends up into isolated silos and we want to avoid that. But at the same time, we want to make sure that people can work fast within their area, they can be innovative, and they can move with a lot of agility.
One of the things that we have been very much focused on is this concept called highly aligned, but loosely coupled. We have applied that to our organization and we applied that to our architecture. We applied that to our technology stack as well. What it means is that we want to give the ability for individual departments to move with speed and agility within well-defined interfaces, and then allow for transparent data-sharing, and allow for transparent access to information across the boundaries.
The power actually comes when you start looking at data in a holistic way. We’ve already talked about that. The data lake, for example, is a platform layer that we want everybody to be able to contribute to it and consume from it. But we want the applications to be built using microservices with well-defined APIs so that within that, they can move fast, and they can innovate. They can try out new things, but the underlying data flows seamless and everybody’s able to benefit from that.
Arun Shastri:
Suresh, we talked about cloud. We talked about data. We’ve talked about algorithms. Of course a big driver for these algorithms is the data science and the machine learning. I’ve heard you say before that the power and potential of ML in everything you do is something that you consider carefully, yet we hear about, read about, and work with many organizations who struggle to operationalize AI.
I’m sure you’ve probably seen some of these challenges as well. Can you talk a little bit about what challenges these are, and how you’ve addressed them as you’ve deployed these solutions?
Suresh Kumar:
Yeah, that’s a great point, Arun. Three things come to mind in terms of operationalizing AI. Yes, we talked about data, we have talked about algorithms, we have talked about applications. But ultimately, AI is only as good as the data that it depends on. We spend a lot of time making sure that not only we bring all of the data sources together, but we keep it clean, we keep it so that we make sure that the data is complete and accurate. Because if you don’t have that, then you will not be able to either train the models, or you will not be able to make use of the AI algorithms that you have developed. That is one important part of operationalizing.
The second part of it is what are the specific needs of our organization and where does applying this really make sense? It’s much better to actually take areas where you think AI and ML can have a positive impact in terms of either the customer experience or the business outcome and work backwards from it.
Walmart is a huge, complex business. It’s moving a lot of incredible speed. So we want to consider how the pieces fit together and then pick the areas where we think AI and ML can have an outsized influence. And, of course, we talked about data and where we actually have the right set of clean, comprehensive data to be able to operationalize.
Suresh Kumar:
The third part of it is really around balance. How do you balance humans and machines, and full AI into ways of working? I told you that one of the major things that we are trying to do is to actually bring all of these pieces together. So strong partnership with operators and all parts of the business is very, very essential. We built this machine learning module, I’ll give you an example, to optimize the timing and pricing of our markdowns. This saved us about $30 million in this one particular area alone.
How did we do that? Well, three things. We made sure that we had the right data. We made sure that we picked the problem in an area where we knew we could make a huge amount of impact. And then it was really about bringing our merchants and our analysts and our technologists together, working together as one team, with a singular focus, to make our markdowns and optimize that better. That yielded the results.
When you bring those pieces together, then you can operationalize.
Arun Shastri:
Gopi and I often think of this as a modular approach to things. Is what you are describing really building these modules and putting these modules together?
Suresh Kumar:
Absolutely. And this also goes back to what I was just talking about in terms of highly aligned and loosely coupled. If you think of each one of these, whether you think of them as modules or microservices or even, on an organizational basis we call them optimization in a box teams.
Suresh Kumar:
These modules are building blocks and LEGOs. They can be optimized internally, but how they come together ends up creating a much more powerful global optimization and that’s exactly the way in which you are describing it as well. That is a key ingredient in terms of how we operationalize internally.
Arun Shastri:
The scale, 220 million customers, 2.2 million, it’s amazing. And then you have countries like India, and retailers are constantly trying to engage 700 million customers, if not more, digitally. What do you see? Are there some leading indicators that you can share with us on AI, ML, and other technology-driven innovation in these international markets?
Suresh Kumar:
Arun, I think it’s fascinating to actually watch the transformation in India. Every time I go over there, I am always amazed. One example, actually, that comes in mind is the work that we have done with our Flipkart business around AI models which extract text from images. This actually can solve for regulatory issues around detecting the country of origin, all of these kinds of stuff.
From a global view, I see that the penetration of ML and AI is actually starting to increase in nonurban areas. In India, for example, there is a need for training in vernacular languages. Conversational commerce is going to become more and more... It’s going to start seeing more and more penetration as we start being able to converse with our customers in the languages of their preference.
Flipkart recently announced a voice search that customers can use by speaking about their items in both Hindi and English together. These are the kinds of things that I’m starting to see in places like India. There is a bigger opportunity for AI actually in applications like social commerce. In India, a lot of commerce will require some kind of social validation, reinforcement, and you can start seeing that happen.
Another thing is, really, around simplicity and user workflows. India is starting now—obviously everything is mobile, right? They bypassed a lot of the desktop phases. You can start seeing how the user interaction is a lot simpler. The technology will need to scale and work across languages, across number of users, across number of different local entities.
These are all really fascinating things to start seeing about how AI really gets to the heart of helping people, no matter what context they’re in. Of course the context is very, very different when you start thinking about places like India. It’s really, really fascinating to see how these things are starting to come together.
Arun Shastri:
Suresh, this pandemic, we talked about the pandemic and we talked about the pandemic accelerating digital transformation, changing our habits. Sometimes we choose channels instead of brands, some people who chose brands are switching to channels. We’re looking for convenience in all kinds of different ways, right?
Suresh Kumar:
Absolutely.
Arun Shastri:
Of course as organizations embark on these digital technology operations, what advice do you have for them? What do you think they should focus on? What are some watch-outs, if you were to give some advice for those that are beginning in this journey, or on the early part of the journey?
Suresh Kumar:
Arun, I would probably boil it down to three things. First, keep your customer and your business outcome, the desired outcome, at the center. Keep that as a starting point. Work from that rather than work from what you have.
Second, it’s really about as you’re thinking about reimagining, whether it is digital or technology operations, look at the entire process holistically, and then figure out the areas that you are going to go after. If you start looking at things in silos, as piecemeal efforts, then you may find yourself in a situation where all of these things don’t fit well together. At the outset, start holistically and then figure out what to focus on.
And the third point is that it’s all about incremental progress. Big-bang changes don’t work. Test, learn, and continuously improve. Those three, if you keep the customer and if you imagine the end-to-end holistic changes and then focus, and then if you focus on incremental results, then I think you’ll be in good shape.
Arun Shastri:
Suresh, one last question. This is to the technologist and the futurist inside you. Flash forward and imagine the consumer industry five years from now. And let’s say the constraints on technology and data will evolve to where they need to be. What are your top three predictions on how customer experience and personalization will change, specifically in the next generation of retail?
Suresh Kumar:
That’s a fun thing, isn’t it? Retail is continuously evolving, but I really do think that we are in the process of another major retail disruption. Walmart was the what is new retail disruptor when it rolled out Supercenter and EDLC. Then you can say that the second innings was through e-commerce. But now I think we are really at an inflection point where there’s another major retail disruption that’s coming through.
It’s fun to think about what is going to happen in the future. My predictions, I think, are relatively straightforward ones. I think we will have a lot more of a personal assistant. Time is the most valuable commodity for everybody. You don’t want to sit and type and try to find products. You want some AI and you want that personal assistant to help you. You want it to be more natural, conversational. I think we will see a lot more of that.
Second, I think people will expect retailers and Walmart and everybody else to really know them very, very well. To be able to narrow down the choices to the most relevant options. There is a huge amount of assortment, there is a huge amount of selection out there. But what matters to one particular customer is what it is that they’re interested in. We will see a lot more around predictive analytics, around personalization, really at a one-on-one level.
It’s about timing as well. If I am interested in dog food, I don’t necessarily want dog food to be delivered to me every month. If I have a really large dog, probably it eats food a lot faster and I want the retailer to be able to know that. It’s about time, it’s about assortment. All of these things.
And then the last part of it, I think shopping is going to become a lot more integrated into people’s lives. I talked about being able to shop while you’re consuming content, AR/VR, social commerce. I think these modes of shopping, I think, are going to become more and more relevant.
Those are the three predictions. We’ll see how well that comes about. Maybe five years from now we’ll meet again.
Gopi Vikranth:
Suresh, thanks for taking the time. If I think about the key points that came out, one is customer at the center, driving the flywheel. That’s the biggest focus that you are looking at.
Suresh Kumar:
Absolutely.
Gopi Vikranth:
And then that morphs into how do you have Walmart as a primary destination for the customer, in respect of how they want to do it? Whether it’s online or offline or any means or mechanism. You’re striving and you’re taking the technology to meet that particular aspect on where the customer wants to be.
And you’re also looking into getting some of these new digital data products out which will help tailor this customer experience in a fairly personalized manner, and there is a lot of AI/ML that’s driving this. Thanks for some of the examples on vernacular language and how Hindi and English is being mixed out when we think about emerging markets.
Maybe in the U.S. it might come out to be a Spanish/English mix, or different depending upon how different consumers will start interacting with it. It might come out very well. And last but not least, I think, keeping the customer in front, looking at the problem in a holistic manner and test and learn iteratively, and then come out with some very personalized initiatives at the customer level are some of the big things that I took away from the conversation.
Suresh Kumar:
Absolutely.
Arun Shastri:
Anything that you wanted to add to that?
Suresh Kumar:
You’ve got it! I think that’s an excellent summary. Start with the customer, and make sure that we meet all of their needs in the way in which they want it. If we can do that, then technology really can help drive the customer experience.
Arun Shastri:
Suresh, thank you for your time and for taking time to share your insights, your rich experiences. It was a pleasure talking to you and learning from you. As you said, we’ll meet again in a few years and we’ll test your predictions at that stage.
Suresh Kumar:
Thank you, Arun. Thank you, Gopi. It was my pleasure, actually, talking to you. We had a lot of fun. Thanks for organizing this.
Arun Shastri:
Thank you.
Gopi Vikranth:
Thank you.