Retail, like several other industries, has undergone a makeover over the last few years. Long gone are the days when consumers lined up in serpentine queues outside brick-and-mortar stores to shop for their needs. The new-age consumer seeks a faster and more efficient experience within the comfort of their homes. The same applies to the in-store experience that is still very much a part of the mix. This also reveals the dire need for retailers to get into action, more so post-COVID, when consumer patterns have witnessed a drastic shift.  

Although there are a slew of retailers today, Walmart has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to customer service. Hari Vasudev, who is the SVP - Retail Tech Platforms and Country Head, Walmart Global Tech India, has been working on some of the biggest business challenges for the world’s largest retailer. 

A technologist by profession, he has been associated with Walmart Global Tech India (WGTI) for five years now and has previously worked with the likes of Flipkart, Yahoo! and Kodak. Currently, as part of his role, he leads Walmart Global Tech India. He is also the global leader for few of their retail tech platforms, in areas like data management and services, as well as catalog content and payments & transaction systems. Vasudev is focused on leveraging technology to help Walmart innovate with more agility, thereby creating more business impact by way of offering better services and products to their customers. 

To understand this better, Jibu Elias — Content and Research Head of INDIAai had a freewheeling chat with Vasudev, to delve deep into Walmart's approach to AI, challenges, and the innovations in store. 

The Walmart approach to AI 

At Walmart Global Tech India, it’s all about the innovation and application of technology to retail in a way that makes everyday life for their customers better. Citing certain examples, Vasudev shares that technology is applied across the spectrum of retail, whether it's in merchandising, or better sourcing for their customers to create the right assortment of products. They are also proactive in their pricing approach and in building an ML-based demand forecasting systems. 

“It’s all about creating impact for our customers and to be able to better serve them. It’s really about how we leverage technology in a way that allows the business to move with more agility and at the same time, helps to differentiate ourselves in the industry at large,” he adds, sharing that the retailer has always been big on innovation and disruption.  

Another example he takes up is that of getting forecasting right, which is a huge challenge in itself. During COVID-19, Walmart launched an initiative called ‘Ship from Store’ — in this case, if a customer orders a product and if the fastest way to get it to them is to ship it from the nearest store, Walmart will go ahead with the plan to provide top-notch service.  

“But here’s the challenge – when you do a demand forecast, or when you try and forecast how to stock items in the store, it's not sufficient to just look at signals that are coming from one channel, so that adds another layer of complexity. So, we built sophisticated AI models that look at multiple channels of demand, and seasonality and appropriately decide on item inventory at a store. We have to continuously reduce what’s out of stock in the store, and that is also with respect to online traffic that is served from that particular store,” he explains.  

Innovation at the forefront 

Vasudev highlights Walmart Global Tech India’s three big innovations — 1. Curbside pick-up 2. Pick-path optimization and 3. Smart Substitution. When it comes to curbside pick-up, customers order groceries online, and they have a notion of a default store (which is the one closest to their home), where they can go and pick up their orders. How it works is that a store associate already gets their order ready — next, Walmart makes use of geo detection to know when the customers drive into their designated parking spots. The store associate is able to detect when the customer has arrived, and this helps them load the customer’s trunk with the groceries. 

Speaking about Pick-path optimization, Hari Vasudev explains - “The associate at the store is typically picking orders from multiple customers. Since a typical supercenter is large, we want the associate to be able to walk the minimum amount in the store, as they pick items. This means that we have to essentially figure out a path, based on the mix of items in an order and the mix of orders that the associate is picking. That’s why we create an optimal path. We measure its efficiency by attempting to increase the number of picks that an associate makes per hour.” 

On the other hand, Smart Substitution works differently. So, when a customer orders a basket of products, Walmart gets their order ready before they reach the store. Occasionally, the exact item that they may have ordered may not be available in that particular store. Instead of calling the customer and wasting their time, there is a solution that focuses on finding the best substitute for the item that's out of stock.  

“Customers may have a brand affinity, and that is taken into consideration during substitution. We make sure to apply both the lens of customer understanding, but also product affinity, so we have this notion of a product graph and the customer preference graph. This has to intersect and then we pick the right items, so that the acceptance of that particular substitution by the customer is very high. At the same time, we thrive to keep the price difference between the original and substitute level within an affordable gap,” he shares, adding that doing substitution with any kind of AI is hard to achieve and algorithms have to be improved continuously.  

The AI standpoint in India 

Vasudev shares that Walmart is ‘heavily invested’ in India and has faith in the strong talent play here. Refuting that the whole subject is about cost arbitrage, he adds that It's about leveraging the talent that is available here. Over the last few years, a lot of innovation has happened from the teams in India, who work very closely with their counterparts in the US and other business organizations. 

“Whether it’s design, product, sciences, technology, or production operations, they're all co-located as much as possible in India, so that these cross-functional teams can come together and work with the businesses in various markets, so that they are able to build and innovate for our customers in those markets,” he shares, adding that the learnings from India are being translated into other markets. 

The opportunities at Walmart 

Vasudev says that any associate within Walmart Global Tech India, will speak about the ‘epic impact that they make to the business. That’s because it is here that one can change the way millions of people across the globe shop on a daily basis.  

“At Walmart, it is all about disruptive innovation. We have created new formats and built a world-class grocery business in a relatively short span of over 20 years. We have consistently been disruptors, and we're constantly looking to innovate and use technology as a way of disrupting the broader ecosystem, not just in retail, but even in areas beyond that. Hence, this ability to create epic impact at a very large scale is hugely appealing,” he shares.   

Considering a mix of online and offline, it's not just about building systems that can scale linearly in the virtual world, but equally, about dealing with extremely challenging problems that are prevalent in brick-and-mortar stores as well as in the eCommerce world. 

“Epic impact is the ability to be constantly innovating in a very disruptive way. It is the opportunity to grow limitlessly and foster a sense of deep connectedness that we are part of a larger community. We can use technology to make a difference for those communities that we are a part of,” he says.  

The clarion calls for responsible AI 

Walmart has a team called Digital Citizenship, which supports and advances the retailer’s ethical use of data and responsible use of technology. This essentially means ensuring that the data and the privacy of their customers are always intact.  

“We are always listening to our customers and essentially making sure that we have been clear in being extremely transparent and ethical in the use of data and being responsible in the use of technical data. As far as Explainable AI is concerned, we want to accelerate decision-making by automation, and be able to make decisions using data intelligently to serve our customers better. We also want to be able to understand the inner workings of how those decisions are being made,” he explains.  

The last word 

“At Walmart, we've always said that we are a people-led company, but a company that's also enabled and empowered by technology. We don’t look at technology as an end but more as a means to an end to make people's lives better, to serve them better, to help people save money, so that they can live better lives. We will always think of technology as an enabler and as a way of empowering people's lives,” concludes Vasudev.