How Walmart co-creates solutions for customers and associates

Tech teams at Walmart have been busy building bridges in addition to capabilities, ensuring that store associates “co-create” solutions to problems they really care about, and that those working in tech have a clear line of sight into how their efforts impact consumers and associates.

“It takes all disciplines to create great solutions,” said Desi Gosby, vice president, emerging technology, Walmart Global Tech, at NRF Nexus. For retailers and brands, it might also take a shift in mindset, one that includes failing fast and pivoting according to lessons learned, as a tech company might do.

Gosby spoke with Martin Gilliard, CEO of Arteli Inc., in a conversation about conversational tech’s role in retail transformation. Gosby, an MIT grad, multiple-patent holder and founding member of Intuit’s Innovation and Advanced Technology group, is in her first retail role, joining Walmart in late 2020. While in college, she said, she spent time at a company that that didn’t take tech seriously, and she “hated” it.

“I wanted to go somewhere where technology was a first-class citizen,” she said.

Walmart has come to fit the bill. Gosby’s team works in conversational AI, generative AI, extended reality, having foundational tech in place to be able to create immersive experiences, spatial awareness, spatial computing and more. She’s always been curious about how to solve problems to help people, she said, and how to use technology to do so: She had “instant gratification” when she learned to write code — using it to do her math homework.

Gosby’s team was already working in the conversational AI space before she joined, she said. The use of generative AI has unlocked creativity; her team supports about 30 different conversational experiences for associates, “and we recently released a beta version of a shopping assistant for our customers, as well.”

Using generative AI from a conversational perspective is less about how to fulfill a particular task such as, “Tell me where my order is,” and more about, “Help me find a toy for my 10-year-old niece whose birthday is next week.”

The team is working on using AI most effectively in customer care, helping agents increase understanding, improve productivity and provide the most effective suggestions. It’s also used for improving content on the website.

“We have literally hundreds of use cases that we’re working through,” Gosby said.

With emerging tech, she said, there’s a lot of time spent in discovery, sitting down with the business and truly understanding what the problems are. “And then we work with just one use case … and we try to prove that out end to end.”

Iteration happens quickly, she said. “We pivot based on what we learn. With our shopping assistant, we’ve recently released the beta, but we’ve learned a ton in just the few weeks and months that it’s been out.”

As for the associates, Gosby said, AI gives them “superpowers.” Efforts here are all about how to make them better and more productive at what they do. That requires spending time with them to understand pain points, finding out what they like and don’t like about their jobs, and inviting them into the solution process.

That’s in contrast to “just going in and saying, ‘Hey, we built this cool tech and you need to use it.’” In short, it comes down to “associate empathy.”

One of the reasons Gosby joined Walmart, she said — and one of the things she most enjoys — is the sheer scope and the tech challenges that scope presents. She learns something every single day, and the tech teams are inspired and motivated by the amount of tech involved. Engineers tell her daily that they see the impact they’re able to have.

“We get to create the environment so that our engineers, data scientists, designers can do the best work they can,” she said. Core to that is moving from being “order takers” to being co-developers of solutions that positively impact others.

“It’s change management, but it’s a mindset shift that we are constantly pushing, every single day.”