Al-Futtaim's Eric Meulien on Building the Data Foundation Behind Agentic Commerce | Live from Paris

Hello everyone, this is Omnitalk Retail.

I'm Ben Miller and coming to you live from the Vuzion podcast studio at the NRF's Retail Big Show Europe in Paris.

Joining me now is Eric Moulien who is General Manager Digital Retail at the Alphatane Group.

Eric, welcome to Omnitalk Retail.

Thank you for having me here.

Oh, you're really welcome.

Look, let's get it started.

We have a global audience, so so many of you might be unfamiliar with the Alpha Tame group.

Can you please give us an overview of the total group and then its retail operations?

Sure.

So Al Futame is a family run business based in Dubai.

We operate across 20 countries.

The business has been running since 1930.

To tell you the truth though, it's a very old business.

We represent about 200 brands in retail, automotive and we also have other divisions covering hospitality and healthcare, education and real estate.

And you operate some of the incredibly well known global retail brands.

Can you give some examples of the brands that you operate within the portfolio?

Yeah, sure.

Some of the greatest brand we run in the Middle east are Ikea, Marks and Spencer, Toys R Us, Kiabi for French Listener and Sandro Mage Ted Becker.

Right, fantastic.

So tell me about you then.

What's the role that you do for the group?

And Rita, Eric, what's your retail background?

All right, so that's a long story, so I'll keep it short.

No, no, go for it.

What I do for the group, my team is managing the E commerce technology as well as digital marketing, CRM and csm.

So basically all the digital ecosystem to provide that omnichannel approach to our customers.

My background has been running retail for many years.

Walmart, 10 years.

I work for a lot of retailers in the us, Canada and Europe.

Okay, is that Walmart in Canada?

Is that.

Yes.

Fantastic, fantastic.

Okay, right here we are at NRF Europe.

There's been a lot of conversation around commerce strategy.

I know you've been on stage or you're about to go on stage, particularly talking about agentic commerce.

It's a really big topic.

So for you at Alphontaine, how are you thinking about the opportunity of Agentic and how that fits into your commerce strategy?

It's a great topic.

I mean, of course everybody knows about it and everybody is experiencing it.

You may be searching on Gemini, on ChatGPT and you will see that your experience is continuously evolving and we need to adjust to that as retailers.

So we look at it from two perspectives.

The first one is how do we interact with customers on Our platforms, on our websites, on our apps.

So we do a lot of pilot test and learn.

And we have AI agents that have been running on our platform for a couple of years now.

We were one of the first ones in the Middle East.

But more interesting for me is we're looking at the type of data we need to sustain and support those evolutions.

Okay, could you give us some examples about that?

What's the data?

What's the foundation in your eyes that's going to make all this possible for.

Me to explain it?

I mean, to use an image.

So if you were searching online a couple of years ago, it was almost like asking for direction.

I'm looking for drill or for dress and where can I find it?

And basically Google will return whatever is the best place for you to go and find what you're looking for.

Today with Genai, what we see is a lot of customers asking to solve a problem.

A bit like you will engage with a store associate asking for a specific problem.

Okay, I've got that problem.

What do you recommend?

And that's really changing the type of information we need to maintain in the backend.

So instead of having color and size and some of those specs and now we need to be able to tell you, okay, how do I maintain my linen shirt?

Can I actually maintain it?

Is it going to be scratching my neck if I wear it?

Is it okay for a humid climate?

And that type of information today is not available.

Okay.

So I think people often talk about that as the context layer.

You know, we've moved from keyword search, which you could almost program, to you couldn't sit there and program every single item or every scratches their necks.

How are you thinking about trying to build that context layer?

I think it's actually exciting and fun to tell you the truth.

So in our team, we created a tool that actually goes online, asks those questions, ask which questions are the most asked for each one of the products and the brands we carry.

From there we create a grid or and we ask Genai to grade all products information against the grade that you expecting or looking for.

And based on that, we know what products are lacking information.

And then we go back and we generate that information.

So you're creating a constant feedback loop.

Exactly.

It's a loop.

Really interesting.

One of the things when we were talking earlier, Eric, you said that E Commerce, your ecom business is growing.

It's growing year on year.

It's growing month on month.

One of the things where AgentIQ is live is around discovery.

What are you Seeing for your customers in your region about how they, how are they using all these different AgentIQ tools to help discover products.

So we're very lucky because the Middle east, especially the Gulf countries, the market is really, really growing year over year.

As you said, we have a customer base that really appreciate good service.

So they are really engaging those AI shopping assistant, they're expecting our apps and our website to be really, really the next generation.

They want to be at the front of the technology and they are really early adopters.

So it's really easy to engage with them and to test new functions.

And we do that all the time.

Okay, and just on behavior, are you seeing this behavior within your apps, within your own properties, within the third party?

So the chatgpts of the world and what are you thinking about as the way you'd love to get to in your commerce strategy?

We see it everywhere, it's the birth of it.

So it's still a small number.

So you still have a lot of customers just looking for something with high intent and they're looking for a product that is very specific or brand that is very specific.

So this is still the majority of the search.

But we see the growth of those engagements with Gen AI growing month over month and it's starting to really matter.

And I don't think that's the end of it.

I think that that's going to continue to evolve and it will force us to redesign and rethink website platforms.

And how are you able to get the balance between kind of consistency of using the technology to get the best of it and then the real variation that you have both in geography and brands?

Somebody on a shopping mission in an IKEA could be very different to Marks and Spencer's for example.

How do you find the commonalities and the differences in that?

So very early we decided to keep the technology centralized.

We use design thinking and critical, critical thinking in what we do and we implement a technology that we call Atomic design with a design system that basically is shared across all languages and across all brands.

But it gives the impression to the customer that they are looking at M and S or Toys R Us or ikea.

So the feel and look is different, but the backbone is one single code.

And for us it seems simplify those differences and it makes it very quick and flexible in adjusting it.

So if we make a change to one brand, it's immediately available across all brands.

Okay, okay.

So just help us.

For people who aren't familiar with the principles of design thinking, so explain what that means and Then how you bring it to life within the group.

So for me, there's two really important components.

The first one is you start everything from a blank piece of paper, so your canvas is always blank and you resign the journey based on what you are trying to solve.

So you're solving a problem, what the customer wants to do, and you're trying to simplify to the utmost.

And that becomes the basis for us to code the solution.

Okay, interesting.

I also want to talk about customers.

We've talked about data being central to all of this.

How are you able to build a sort of a unified omnichannel view of your customer behaviors when they're across, as we said, so many different businesses and geographies.

So we have a loyalty program called Blue, one of the biggest one in the region.

And through Blue, we collect consumer data offline online, we aggregate all of the data and we create a single view of the customer regardless of what they do and where they are.

And that really serves our entire ecosystem.

Loyalty, CRM recommendation, personalization, everything is based on that system.

It's very powerful.

Okay, you're going to have to tell us more about that, Eric.

The number of people that come on our board and talk about wanting a single view of the customer, but they can't achieve it.

What have you been able to do that's different that you've been able to.

Make this happen from very early?

We decided to collect consumer data and consent in our pos, send it to a central database, a CDP if you want, that will aggregate that information, validate it.

And then once we launched the websites, we did the same and we connected both and basically we validate those customer profile in real time to make sure we know exactly where they sit in terms of value, but also in terms of information to make sure that we have the right phone number and the right email.

Okay, so look, Eric, I'm going to get you out of here.

One last question.

When you've gone through that process and you've been able to get this single view of the customer and you've got this loyalty, what are the sort of things you're able to do for your customers off the back of it, what benefits to the shopper does it unlock?

The benefit is we know exactly what you like based on what we see through the transactions, through the information you shared and that will populate your Blue experience.

So everyone will have a different experience on our Royalty program and we can service a bit like other, I would say brands do online.

When you go on Netflix, they will know what you like to watch and they will recommend those.

So we do that for each one of our customers across all of our divisions.

Okay, so you have a full personalization engine.

That's correct.

Devrinon Online.

And does that feed into what they see in store as well?

Soon, Soon.

Okay.

That's a Watch this space.

On that note, really insightful.

Eric.

Thank you for joining us.

Thanks to the team at Fusion and for NRF Big Show Europe for making all of this coverage possible.

And stay tuned for more.