AI has slipped easily into the role that the internet played at the turn of the century.
It’s clearly useful, absolutely revolutionary and just about everywhere all at once — whether it’s consumers logging into ChatGPT to shop or retailers trying to make sure they’re on the other end of that query.
As omnipresent as artificial technology is, it is still nowhere near solidifying. So when retail’s top players talk about AI, they’re not all singing from the same hymnal.
Some give the topic du jour lip service and little else. Some are linking with the big AI players to rework their operations. Others slyly accuse them of trying to drum up interest by making noise on the topic, while it is they who are actually heads down working with the new technology.
Everybody’s getting there, but it’s the companies that were either founded with technology at their heart or that have jumped in with both feet that are loudest and proudest in hyping their AI efforts to Wall Street.
“The reason we’re leaning in is because we need to be where our customers are,” said Seth Dallaire, executive vice president and chief growth officer of Walmart Inc., at the Evercore ISI Consumer and Retail Conference this month.
Walmart — which has become much more tech savvy and grown into retail’s best counterweight to Amazon — is still trying to learn how shoppers are using the new AI tools and how their queries to a chatbot differ from what gets typed into the search bar.
“There’s a lot to learn, and it’s our belief that we’re going to learn more and learn better by being involved as opposed to sitting on the sidelines and waiting,” Dallaire said. “We’ve been public about how we’ve been partnering with some of those [AI] companies. Then also we get a lot of learning that we can apply to the building of our own agentic tools, like Sparky,” Walmart’s generative AI shopping assistant.
With AI being added everywhere, there have been a lot of nervous questions about where all the people are going to fit in.
Dallaire said there were places where “the human component or oversight is really important.”
“We describe our business as being people-led, tech-powered, and that holds true with how we’re approaching some of these agentic capabilities,” he said. “An example for you in marketplace [where third-party brands sell over Walmart’s website]: We could automate a ton of behaviors and we have the capabilities to allow sellers to give us more information about their products and ingest them into our product catalogue. But we need to have some human moderation over that ingestion so that we understand these are the types of things that we actually want in our product catalogue.”
When Michael Karanikolas, co-chief executive officer at Revolve Group Inc., talked about AI at the William Blair Growth Stock Conference this month, it was the human element that he was excited about.
“Revolve has been built for this moment, because we have such a strong foundation in data and technology,” Karanikolas said, offering an example from when he and co-CEO Michael Mente were talking to one of the company’s engineers, who was ready to move onto their next project.
“We were talking about, ‘OK, what’s the next low hanging fruit we can go after?’” Karanikolas said. “Because as the CEO, that’s typically how you think. What’s the low hanging fruit, right? What’s the next easy win?
“The engineer came back and he said, ‘I don’t want low hanging fruit, give me high hanging fruit, give me something really difficult,’” he said. “That’s the mentality of the people that we have. And so the project we gave this person was actually with regard to our retail stores, which is still a new area for us, but we wanted better tracking of movements of customers in the store…. Around a week-and-a-half [later], this guy came back and he had an incredible prototype. I swear it looked like something out of the ‘Terminator’ movie, right? It’s auto targeting and counting all the people. And I think it just goes to show how in this age of AI, a company like ours and a team like ours is really able to move fast and innovate.”
Matt Baer, CEO of Stitch Fix Inc., was also trying to burnish his company’s born-in-tech background during the company’s quarterly call with stock analysts.
Baer said the styling service was “embedding AI into the client experience” with the Vision feature, which shows users what styles will look like on them before they try them on for real at home.
Stitch Fix is also putting the technology to work on the back end.
“In private brand product development, we’re using AI to fundamentally transform the process,” the CEO said. “We can now design a full assortment for an individual private brand in about one week compared to the traditional multimonth design cycle.”
So, at Stitch Fix at least, AI is helping design the looks, pick who they would work for and show users what they’ll look like.
And that’s still just the start of it.
