Learn How Walmart Creates Immersive Digital Shopping Experiences At Scale With SVP Tracy Poulliot

Hello, everyone.

This is Omnitalk Retail.

I'm Chris Walton.

And I'm Anne Mazinga.

And we are coming to you live from the Walmart Seller Summit in Sunny San Diego, CA at the Gaylord Hotel.

And we are pleased to introduce our next guest, Tracy Juliot, the SVP of digital shopping experience at Walmart us.

Tracy, thanks for joining us.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

I'm honored to be here.

Well, let's start by hearing a little bit of your background and talk about your current role at Walmart.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I have been in E commerce in some way, shape or form for about 15 years.

Okay.

Spent a lot of time focused on the customer experience and really thinking about how to solve really challenging problems within E commerce, within Walmart.

Currently.

Today I get the luxury of being able to lead a team that focuses on delivering the best app or website shopping experience that we can possibly deliver for our customers.

So, Tricy, how have in those 15 years, how have Walmart's digital channels evolved in your mind if you were to sum it all up?

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I'll just focus in on the last five years.

In particular, if you think back to where Walmart was in early 2020, we actually had two different shopping apps.

That's right, I forgot about that.

Yeah.

We had what we called the orange app, which is really how you bought your groceries or online delivery from our stores.

And then we had what we called the blue app, which was more of a traditional E commerce shopping experience.

And over the last few years, we've been focusing on how do we merge these experiences together in a way that we can eliminate some of the burden of the customer of figuring out how to engage with Walmart.

We believe that if a customer wants to search for an Apple, it's on us to figure out if are they looking for Apple products or are they looking for apples to eat?

Right.

And so we've been on this journey of really thinking about how we simplify the customer experience.

We remove complexity, and we really create experiences that save time so customers can spend time doing the things that they love.

Yeah.

Living better.

Yeah, exactly.

So I have a question for you, because any E commerce experience has challenges.

What would you say, like, some of the biggest challenges are right now when you're trying to optimize digital shopping for Walmart customers?

And how are you using tools, even like AI, to help address some of those challenges?

Yeah, that's a, it's a really good question.

I, you know, if I just think about retail in last several decades, to be honest, the really big innovation has been the ability to transact digitally up until recently with AI.

Right.

And so really what we have historically over the last couple of years is just a digital catalog, Right?

And if you think about that, there have been attempts to.

To create more emerging immersive experience experiences that kind of expand beyond just a digital catalog.

But the challenge has always been scale.

How do you do that at scale across a very large assortment like we have, where there are hundreds of millions of items?

And I think what AI has finally given us is this next big innovation that allows us to create more intuitive, engaging, and immersive experiences at scale that we just couldn't do before AI.

And so some of the things that we're really playing around with is one Sparky, our shopping assistant that we announced earlier this year, which we're really excited about.

But we also have tools that have been around for a few years, like virtual try on where you can test the clothes that you want to buy before committing or viewing furniture in your room before you commit to that purchase.

And I think what's most exciting about AI is we now can scale those capabilities in a way that was just prohibitive in years past.

So we're really excited about the future.

Okay.

Since you mentioned it, Sparky.

Yes, Sparky.

We've talked about it on our show, but I imagine there's still quite a few people out there that aren't as familiar with what it is.

So first of all, what is Sparky now and where is Sparky going?

It's a really good question.

So Sparky is our generative AI shopping assistant, and it does everything from synthesizing product reviews to allowing customers to compare items and really just make more informed purchasing decisions.

We want our customers to have confidence in the way that they shop, and we believe Sparky is and will continue to play a really big role in that.

But I think more importantly, we're really excited about what's to come.

And I talked a little bit earlier about simplifying experiences.

And one of our big goals is how do we solve problems for customers?

We believe that Sparky is going to play a really important role in solving problems at scale.

You can think of everything from figuring out what to eat for dinner tonight, which, if you're a parent with young kids, I am just figuring out what you're going to do for dinner is a problem.

It's the biggest problem in my life.

Usually it is.

Right.

We believe that Sparky is actually going to help solve problems like that for Customers at scale by bringing great assortment, great options to customers together with services we offer like recipes and the ability to say, I'm going to create an entire meal solution for the week for my family in a few clicks, which is really where Sparky can help customers in a new way.

So we're excited about the future and Sparky is really going to focus on how do we create, how do we solve problems in new and exciting ways.

Okay, well, what else is ahead?

When you think about the future of the Walmart app experience of digital shopping, what are you excited about and what kind of things are you testing?

Can you tease anything?

Yeah, I mean, I think we're really just excited about how AI is creating a really new world of retail.

And I think as we think about the future of E commerce and the future of digital shopping, it's really an AI led experience.

And I think it's somewhat hard to even imagine what that's going to look like because we're just not used to it today.

Sure.

So it's hard to describe what the future is going to look like, but what I will say is it's, it's really going to be very AI forward and very focused on how do we continue to solve problems for customers in a way that simplifies their experience and lets them spend more time on the things that they care about most.

And that'll be anchored by a few really key things.

One, continue to have great assortment.

Our marketplace sellers play a really important role in that for us.

The second is continue to have great prices.

You know, Walmart stands for everyday low prices and we want to continue to deliver that experience for our customer.

We also want to continue to deliver great experiences in any way that customers want to choose to shop, whether that's in our stores, online or with Sparky.

We want customers to be able to choose their own destiny and have a great experience, however it is that they want to engage with us.

Yeah.

Well, Tracy, thank you so much for joining us.

You left us some nuggets to think about, particularly I'm trying to wrap my head around right now this nugget around digital being the tool to unlock scale a way, particularly with AI too.

So I'm going to think more about that as we go on here.

But, but thank you again for joining us.

Thank you to the Walmart team for having us here at their seller summit.

And until next time, and be careful out there.