RELEX’s Madhav Durbha on Building an AI-First Mindset in Grocery | FMI 2026

Hello, everyone.

This is Omnitalk Retail.

I'm Chris Walton, and we are coming to you live from the Simbi booth in beautiful San Diego, once again from the FMI Midwinter Conference.

We're in booth 118 in the FMI Tech section.

Now, standing in between us again is our next guest of the day, and that is Madhav Durba, the group vice president at Relex.

Madhav, welcome to OmniTalk.

Thanks for being with us today, man.

Thanks for having me here, Chris.

Glad to be here.

All right, so I caught wind of a talk you gave recently and I got to see some notes on it.

And one thing that struck me in the talk you gave is it was the talk was around developing an AI mindset.

And you said there was this.

You.

You espoused the concept of a recipe, which I thought was really interesting.

So can you explain for our audience what the recipe is to develop an AI mindset?

Actually, it's called AI First Mindset.

Oh, AI First Mindset.

Okay.

So the recipe is something that we have seen so many patterns of cloud companies being successful with their AI journey.

What we have seen work well.

And for most companies, this is what I would recommend.

This is just like your stock portfolio.

Okay.

Yeah.

Right.

You have certain amount of stocks that you are very predictable, very proven.

Whereas you will have some stocks that are a little bit more aspirational in nature.

So it's no different.

We think about the mix has 70% proven AI.

There's plenty of AI that is already proven and delivering true value and focus 70% of the effort on those types of AI.

Okay.

20% of the effort on emerging use cases in AI.

Right.

Something that's in earlier innings of AI then about 10% in aspirational projects, or call it moonshots, if you will.

Moonshots, yeah.

So, yeah, that's how we think about it.

That's how you think about it.

Okay.

That's how you advise others to have an AI first mindset.

That's correct.

Okay.

AI is an exciting topic.

It's very easy to get caught up in that.

But ultimately, humans are at the heart of supply chain.

As long as I've been in this business, it's a human.

Human business.

Right.

So making sure that we bring humans along on that journey, AI by itself is not going to be successful.

Right.

You have to make sure the humans that operate your supply chain are embracing AI.

So it's very important for organizations to over invest in the people aspect of it.

Making sure you're giving them the tools you're giving them the technologies and investing in their education on AI.

That's a very critical ingredient for success of any AI led transformation.

It's funny I'm a technologist saying this, but really, people are very important aspect of it.

Well, it's a common theme we've been hearing in the interviews today and even last week in terms of taking AI and adapting it to the organization.

You have to think about it culturally.

You have to think about what the design of that process and that workforce is going to be for the future.

So.

Yeah.

What do you think about that?

Yeah, I think what I sensed is cautious excitement.

That's a good way to put it.

Yep.

There is a lot of excitement, a lot of potential that AI has to offer, and a lot of leaders are already experiencing it, not, not just in their enterprises, but themselves as consumers.

So I see that the caution is coming from the fact that there is also a lot of hype.

And the onus is upon sometimes upon these leaders to filter the hype from reality.

And the most pragmatic way of approaching it is looking at it holistically, not as a technology initiative.

Look at what is the impact on my overall strategy.

What is the impact on people, process, and of course, technology?

Yeah, yeah.

There's going to be a lot of AI Sherpas, I think, leading a lot of organizations here in the next few years.

All right, now we've been.

I've been trying to put people on the spot in every interview, and I'm going to do it a little bit with you again too, because in that same talk, you said something that I'm not sure that I agree with it.

So I want to give you a chance to explain yourself.

And you said, reimagine the future.

Don't automate redundant processes.

So what am I missing in that statement?

I think when it comes to AI adoption, learning is as important as unlearning.

Okay.

Sometimes there is a tendency to say.

I got you now, all right, light.

Bulb, and just take that and automate it.

But let's rethink.

Should we even be doing that process to begin with?

Exactly.

Okay.

The way you navigate today and the way you navigated 30 years back from point A to point B is very different.

Why should it be any different for enterprise?

Right.

AI adoption.

Right.

So it's an opportunity to rethink.

That's a great piece of advice even for my own life, my friend.

Like, you know, rethink about it.

Don't just keep doing the same things over and over.

You know, try to think of a new way to do whatever the goal is that you want to accomplish.

Actually, unlearning is the hard part.

Right.

You know, learning is easy for me.

Right.

Well, so that's the reason why I made that.

That's great.

Oh, God.

That's.

That question.

That's good.

Good answer, too, man.

Wow.

We are fortunate to work with a lot of leading companies and seeing these patterns of really successful adoption of AI, that's what gives us reason to believe and reason to continue our mission of.

Helping companies be careful out there.