Carrefour's Helene Labaume on Innovation at Scale: From Computer Vision to AI Product Formulation

Bonjour, and hello, everyone.

This is omnitalk Retail.

I'm Chris Walton.

And I'm Anne Mazinga.

And we are coming to you live once again from the Fusion Group's podcast studio at the NRF big show in Paris.

It's a fun day, Anne.

It's the last day of the show.

Last day of the show.

Is it Thursday?

It's Thursday.

We made it here.

Despite an impending strike, there's still lots of action, and my favorite is how our guests just laughed at your pronunciation of Bonjour.

Bonjour.

Yeah, well, she's probably gonna laugh when I pronounce her name now.

So without further ado, we, Elaine Laboum, the Innovation and Capital Funds Director at Carrefour.

How'd I do?

I'm fine, thank you.

Yeah.

How'd I do on the name?

Was it perfect?

Perfect.

Perfect.

Yeah.

You're lying.

But, hey, flattery will get you everywhere.

Well, then let's start to talk about Carrefour.

Maybe start there for our audience who might not be familiar.

Talk about Carrefour, what products you sell and kind of how you play in the space in France.

And then also I'd love to get an understanding of your role and everything that you oversee, because it's a pretty impressive title.

Okay, so Carrefour, it's one of the biggest retailer in the world because we are in more than six integrated countries, which are France, Spain, Poland, Romania, Belgium, Brazil and Argentina.

And we are in more than 40 countries in mass enfranchise.

So it's really huge retailer, mainly in North Africa, Middle east and also Central Asia.

More than 90 billion revenues per year.

The first hyper market we launched was in 1963.

So we are no old company now.

And what can I say?

So innovation at Carrefour.

Yeah, tell us.

So when we talk about innovation at Carrefour, we talk about disruption and prospection.

So we like to say, then if you say a connected barbecue lunchbox cafe, it won't be us.

If you see a new chocolate from somewhere, it's not be us.

It's really about what we've launched.

We've launched autonomous delivery, autonomous stores, Genai platform for marketing, Web3.

A long time ago.

So we are really here to think about what could be next for Carrefour.

And what's your background?

How did you come into that role?

Yeah, so I joined Carrefour a bit more than three years ago.

Before that, I used to work in the retail space already.

Family business, specialized in party goods.

So in the us you might know all party City who unfortunately shut down a few months ago and it was like the party city in France.

And before that I used to be a lawyer in M and A or corporate.

So just tell your children to study low and you'll be able to do many things.

Yeah, it's always interesting that people in your area always seem to have a legal background to some degree.

So how do you stay current or on top of everything in the startup space?

Okay, this is, I would say our job on a daily what we do.

And of course for three years now we have built a VC fund called Destor in which we invest in four streams which are future of E commerce and retail impact, fintech and data intake for operations.

And this is a way for careful of course to invest in future through the startups, but also to be very at the heart of the startup ecosystem and to be stick to everything what happens and when everything is new, regarding products, regarding technology, regarding solutions.

So it's very important for us.

And so it's definitely linked to what we are doing within the innovation team on a daily basis.

Well, and what are some of those kind of standout initiatives as you're kind of moving forward?

Digital transformation at Carrefour?

What are some of those technologies or some of those deployments that you feel like stand out most?

You know, the Gartner curve, I guess.

Yeah, yeah, right.

Who does it?

Yeah.

So at the innovation we are always, you know, like at the beginning of the curve, like to check everything emerging regarding technologies.

And so if I think about computer vision, for example, we launched projects maybe three, four, five years ago.

It was not mature maybe at this time.

And now it's scaling and now we are scaling projects of computer vision and shelf, you know, replenishment and many other things here, of course, at Vision, you are the heart of everything.

What happened within the digitization of the store and of course Genai agentic, of.

Course the Alphabet soup of AI.

All right, so Ann and I are both former executives in the innovation area at Target.

And so one of the questions I have for you is how do you communicate the value of your innovation work throughout the organization?

Like how do you keep people aligned with it?

Because that was always a trick for us.

I'm curious what the secret to your success is.

So we have three pillars.

We work within innovation and VC team which are of course checking on trends, delivering projects and promote what we are doing internally and outside.

So how we're doing that, we are doing a lot of notes for comex.

For example, we have a monthly note regarding all the trends for the XCOM member, we do monthly.

We also for all our projects within innovation, we have sponsors from comex and we have a lot of chance because we have.

Our CEO is really, really keen to check what happens with innovation because for him it's very important.

That's the key.

Yeah, that's the key.

That's the key right there on board, on the top.

But also you have to onboard people from the businesses and the ground because we are a retail company and if you don't have the business people you're going to wear.

Right.

Well, I'm curious what some of the top innovation areas are that you believe will, will impact the industry and especially at Carrefour in the next five years.

As I said previously, store digitization with everything we see with storage.

Digitization.

Yeah, that's cool.

This is very important.

HCs, computer vision, everything.

Because use cases are almost infinite.

So it's very, very crazy.

And also I would say robotics for sure.

In the.

Inside the front of the store.

Maybe.

Maybe.

Okay.

Things we can think about.

Yeah, right.

Of course we think about warehouses, supply, but maybe to mobiletics within the store to have the associates for sure.

Okay.

What we are looking at right now, it's also smart glasses because we can imagine many use cases for sure.

Yeah.

There's a new product coming out today.

Yeah, I believe.

Yeah, it's crazy.

Google made announcement before summer new glasses from Meta two days ago, Samsung at the end of the month.

So it's.

Yeah, I got my Meta glasses.

I got to put them on.

Yes.

Anyway, so I think that the.

We're gonna see many, many uses cases for consumer, but also for associates.

So this is something we are deep diving in right now.

And also, and another thing really, really specific to retail, I think and or to our field, it's AI for formulation of products.

This is something we are working on right now.

I've heard about that too.

And it's really how we can improve the recipes, the formulation, find new vegan formulations and improve without sugar, et cetera.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's really about that also, I think so.

That's great.

Those are great answers.

All right, so let's get you out of here on this.

So with all that you just said, if you were to predict say five, 10 years out, how will retailing be different then than it is today?

I would say three things.

Three things.

I would say AI for sure.

But it's not AI just for AI, you see, because it needs to serve the consumer, it needs to serve the associates.

It's not just for the beauty of building algorithm technology for sure because and of course when you think about AI and digitalize your store if you don't have a strong tech you will go nowhere.

So you need the infrastructure, the network and etc.

So it will be key.

And the third one, human of course because you can have the best stores with all the technology but you still need human.

Otherwise customer is not looking for just robots in the store.

I don't believe that.

Yeah, maybe someday they're just not from Crawl four.

All right.

Well thank you so much.

That was very enlightening and it also corroborated a lot of what we've heard at this show already, particularly the robotics call out.

That was really interesting.

So thanks for spending time with us.

Thanks to the Fusion Group for sponsoring our coverage here at NRS big show in Europe.

And until next time and be careful out there.