How Walmart is using AI to update key functions like search

What does Walmart’s chief product officer do? In his words, he “[acts] as a nexus point to bring together [employees across teams] — whether it’s folks in design, engineering or business science — to solve customer problems that deliver against the business goals and the business outcomes at scale.” Essentially, if there’s a big project that requires many different teams, Alferness is likely helping spearhead it.

Alferness joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and spoke about his approach to the role, Walmart’s latest product updates and his philosophy to buzzy emerging tech like artificial intelligence. He dove into how he approaches big product launches that transcend departments, as well as the data and research he uses when launching a new endeavor.

The tying bind behind all of this is that new products need to solve for a real need. When it comes to AI, for example, the product can’t exist for its own sake. In fact, in his estimation, a new AI project shouldn’t even have the technology in the name.

“From my point of view, it’s not important to say, ‘Hey, so we built such and such product, now powered with AI,'” he said. “I don’t think customers care one way or another. I think they just want their problem solved.”

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity.

Using all forms of customer data
“We bring in information from our customers from all angles, all dimensions that we have — things like customer surveys, feedback forms, emails to myself, to the team, to my bosses, to [Walmart Inc. president and CEO] Doug McMillan. All of that stuff gets ingested, pulled in. We take a look at it. We make sure that we are either thinking about the challenges that they’re presented or prioritizing some of the gaps that they’ve noticed. But I’d say, importantly, we do look at it very nuanced, in terms of metrics. So when we’re looking at, for example, optimizing search. It’s really not around: how do we just optimize the overall revenue or GMV that we get out of search? But it’s: how are we delivering against the query, the question, the intent that the customer has put into the search bar? How do we deliver against that in a way that drives trust and drives our customers to come back and ask us those kinds of questions over and over again?”

Updating search is the next frontier for AI
“One of the big focuses for us has been around leveraging artificial intelligence — large language models, all of that emerging technology — in ways that really solve problems for our customers in just really magical kinds of ways. Just a couple of examples for you: On the search side of the world, we’ve been working really, really hard to do a number of things to better understand the intent: what it is a customer is looking for. And we reflect on that in a number of different launches, things that we brought to life recently. One of these things is guided search. So instead of making the customer do all of the work of trying to figure out what they want and breaking down their task into an individual query and bringing that to us, just come to the search bar and tell me what it’s about: ‘I’m planning a birthday party for a seven-year-old who’s really interested in dinosaurs.’ OK, well, I’m guessing you want some dinosaur-themed cups and plateware, and maybe these would be appropriate balloons, and these could be appropriate toys for others to bring to the party, etc.”

The customer doesn’t care about AI
“From my point of view, it’s not important to say, ‘Hey, we built such and such product, now powered with AI.’ We can solve problems. We can make it easier for customers to find the unique, special product that they are looking for in a sea of hundreds of millions of products in our catalog. AI can help us make your selection of that perfect ottoman different than my selection of that perfect ottoman, or that perfect red shirt or chair or whatever it is. And if you do it right, you shouldn’t be branding it as AI. You should just bring the magic to customers. They’ll be delighted and come back to it time and time again. And so I don’t think customers care one way or another. I think they just want their problem solved.”