The Emerson Group’s virtual Industry Day 2023 featured retail, marketplace leaders

The Emerson Group’s virtual Industry Day 2023 held Wednesday, Oct. 11, brought together retail and marketplace leaders, brand innovators and inspirational groundbreakers who explored and defined what the future of the industry will be and how, together, all parties can grow their businesses, teams and communities to expand and reframe thinking; embrace people and relationships; and envision the future and boldly build success in the post-COVID world.

Attendees were privy to conversations with impressive trailblazers and transformational leaders, including: Scott Galloway, Robin Roberts, Jimmy Chang and Scott Snook, as well as Annie Walker, Musab Balbale, Colleen Lindholz and Kate Meyer, Justin Honaman, Luke Rauch, Staci Cochran and Vinima Shekhar, John Marraffa and Pat Mooney, Michelle Wang Goodridge and Lisa Paley & Kshitij Kumar.

Among the enlightening segments was a session hosted by Ed Morgan, president/retail commerce at Emerson, which featured Vinima Shekhar, vice president of merchandising, wellness at Walmart. 

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Morgan noted that as an omnichannel retailer, Walmart is seeing very strong growth in e- commerce and asked Shekhar, what are some of the ways Walmart has enhanced the omni shopping experience?

Pointing out that Walmart’s vision is to become the customer’s first choice for digital shopping, every day, every season, for every item, Shekhar said Walmart is aggressively growing its e-commerce capabilities and its footprint continues to expand. “Our Q1 and Q2 results were strong for e-commerce, reflecting that our customers are voting for us. In Q1, we had 27% growth, and in Q2%, we had 24% growth,” she said.

Emphasizing that Walmart’s customers don’t think of us as two different brands, in store vs. online, Shekhar said, “They want to engage with our neighborhood markets. They want the excitement of the supercenter and the convenience of the store closest to them, which is the one in their pocket and our single app experience is continuously improving.”

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Earlier this year, Walmart completely revamped its home page to make exploring our full assortment easier and more inspirational for our customers, Shekhar noted, adding, “The site is now set up just like our stores, which means it’s more seasonably relevant.”

She went on to say that you may also notice the Walmart app has exciting AI enabled technology that helps customers better visualize how items might look in real life, whether they’re shopping for furniture or fashion. “We are continuing to strengthen and expand our offering, a huge convenience for our customers, providing them with more options and more flexibility. This is a huge differentiator for us because we’re leveraging the proximity of our stores to fulfill and deliver digital orders. What’s exciting about this is that we’re combining the power of technology with our network of physical stores. We’re making the shopping experience seamless across all channels and continuing to adjust based on the changing needs of our customers,” Shekhar said.

Pointing out that Walmart is making significant investments in supply chain, Morgan asked Shekhar to share the ways that it improves service to the customer.

“We’re transforming our business by making strategic investments in people centric automation,” she said, noting, “We talk a lot about automation. The beauty is that we’re still focused on being people led, tech enabled, which is why you see the investments that we’re making in supply chain of people centric automation and AI powered systems to create a more connected supply chain that increases capacity and enhances the accuracy and speed of fulfillment.”

Shekhar continued, “We’re investing billions over the next several years to equip our facilities with the most advanced automated systems, enabling us to run faster, more consistent and predictable business. When combining next generation FCs with our traditional FCs we can reach 95% of the U.S. population with next day or two day delivery across millions of items. As Walmart continues to grow its pickup, delivery and local fulfillment capabilities we’re adding market fulfillment centers or, MFCs to select stores across the country. MFCs are automated fulfillment centers built within a Walmart store, that enable us to provide a better customer experience by creating more availability, decreasing in store congestion and decreasing the time it takes to dispense an order. With all of that the ultimate goal is that our customers win too.”

Lastly, Shekhar said, "We want to become the customers’ first choice for digital shopping, every day, every season for every item and we’re aggressively growing our e-commerce capabilities,” she said, adding, “Our footprint continues to expand. A big part of this will be doubling down on Marketplace, and we’re putting a lot of resources into improving the experience for sellers and customers. We want to be the first choice for customers and sellers. Our goal is to create a platform that is super easy and welcoming for sellers and to provide an endless aisle where our customers can find what they need and discover items they might not know they need yet or want.”

Another enlightening session featured Kshitij Kumar, chief data officer at Haleon, who provided an introduction to AI and how you can get started with AI.

“AI working together with humans is what is going to be the winner,” Kumar said, adding, that AI really is just some software that's able to autonomously make some decisions, create content, create predictions and give some recommendations. It is built on machine learning, which is the ability for computers to learn by themselves without us having to train them,” he said, adding that there’s also Generative AI, which is AI that actually creates new content, pictures, videos and text."

Kumar said that AI is the fourth tectonic tech shift. "We started with computers. Then we decided to connect those computers, when you do that you have an internet. The third shift, was mobile, you take those computers that are now connected and say I'm going to put that power in the palm of your hand. The fourth shift is AI. If you make those computers and that Internet more intelligent, what can you do? We are at the beginning of that fourth tectonic shift now. At some point we'll get to the point where AI knows and can actually answer any question." Kumar said.

Kumar also noted that Generative AI is just opening the door to the use of AI. "Generative AI enables AI. Generative AI has made it really simple, really easy for me, my mother who is 80 year old who uses ChatGPT to ask questions and gets answers and she doesn't need to know coding," he said, pointing out that not all of those answers are accurate or to be trusted," Kumar said.

He continued, "GenAI today does not fully understand the context or the nuance. All it is doing is giving you the next best answer. Even though it looks like it knows the answer, it actually doesn’t know the answer."

He noted that GenAI is unlocking a world of creativity. "It can create new interesting things, however, it’s learning from us, what we're asking or doing, it’s seeing what we told it and putting it in context. It's opening the door, but it is opening the door to AI that is sitting behind a lot of these interfaces," he said.

Kumar also pointed out that there are many risks with Generative AI that comes from the bias in the data it was used to train on. "A lot of data we have isn’t always clean or balanced. AI doesn’t often know whether the thing it created for you is legal or illegal. These risks are there and they will continue. You can take a well thought out proactive approach to make sure that the value they are trying to open is done safely,” Kumar said.

Kumar also noted that AI is useful in ensuring product supply. "At Haleon, we did experiments with cold and flu. One of the issues with supply chain, is getting the right product to the right place at the right time. If you can predict when cold and flu will happen you can make sure there’s enough supply so anybody who needs the product has it at the time you need it,”  he said.

Lastly, Kumar provided advice on how to get started with AI. “The first thing we have to do is define, where do you want to play? Do you want to develop AI from scratch? Once you’ve defined the objectives, where are you going to invest, what’s the priority you’re going to focus on? How do you build the foundations? Let’s make sure there’s responsible AI, robust principles. You need to make sure that the talent is there. There’s a culture of AI. Data and AI is a culture problem not a tech problem. The most important thing is those data assets. Do we have those data assets properly? Where is our data, is it clean enough? Last, but not least, let's plan for the long term," he said.