#42 Owning the Customer Journey: Yana Routshtein from Walmart on Navigating AI, Social Commerce, ...

0:00 [Music] [Applause] welcome to the retail reality show welcome to another episode of the retail reality show and by the way very good dancing y so you get a special award for that today it's a special for a special episode and show for a particular reason because as you know my first co-host Marty left to follow his uh Wellness new New Wellness Endeavors

0:31 and we found a great new setup with Y and Nicholas you already heard a show with them and I'm very glad and happy because first of all we expand our reach and secondly we get great new viewpoints um into the show and we also get get uh great new people people like Jana Rin I hope I pronounce that well and we will get to you in a second Jana thank you for joining how are you today where did

0:55 we find you I'm good I'm good I mean it's well we we'll obviously get into it on the call as well but we're all just uh or some of us are back from NRF and still chasing our inboxes from the days that we missed uh while we were in New York and then all the follow-ups from the event so it's it's quite intense but uh no complaints it's all good I agree I'm also catching catching up but I'm

1:19 getting there slowly yeah I narrowed my inbox down from like more than 200 emails to Now 50 so I think I'm on the right track very good and then there was back and Linkedin and a few other channels too and WhatsApp cool as I said today we have an amazing guest we have Jana Rin from Walmart Jana I hope I pronounced that correctly and Jana uh heads up the digital or the the personalization in all digital channels

1:45 at Walmart and we really glad and happy you could make it today but would you quickly introduce yourself to the audience please of course thanks for having me guys and I I feel like I missed a lot by not not being another FST year it's an event that I like the most but didn't happen to be there this year so as n just said so I work for Walmart us I'm based in cicon Valley and I had the

2:09 personalization platform along with our Discovery Pages at buybox so really if you think about my job is to make sure that our customers feel that their journey is tailor to them as they engage with us especially in our e-commerce platform we obviously Omni retailers so we think across all interactions that we have with our customers and you know better than anyone else that it happens everywhere and all the time uh and my job is really to just kind of help them

2:37 feel understood respect their preferences making sure that they feel that we know them uh pretty well especially for those who visit us very often help guide them from their different Journeys you know Walmart being a retailer that sells so many things that many people don't even know that we have them my job is also to inspire them discover more things with Walmart and start the new Journeys with w Walmart and maintain that relationship over time so that's a little bit about

3:04 me I have been with Walmart for six years now I'm actually celebrating six years today fun fact oh congratulations that's a lot I I've never been in any place for six years and their entire time has been with e-commerce um in different roles kind of rotating across the entire journey and then uh before that I was in Consulting to again retail and consumer clients and before that I was in retail so my entire career is around

3:30 like I'm super passionate about the industry every time every year and we consider to do something different like oh but there's so much cool stuff happening and it keeps happening so I think we're all kind of in this place where it's always evolving and interesting to all of us to stay okay so you are in Ecom for quite a while would you say this is the most interesting times in these days yesterday we saw deep seek a few months ago it was

3:54 another model yeah so the the tech is exploding it feels like so what what's your view oh they was a was an event I was like it's very interesting that we're recording today after the events of yesterday yeah so anything I thought about like being applicable yesterday suddenly should be reevaluated I think it's every every year you know you look into something that's happening in the industry and you feel like wow that's so interesting and uh and especially last

4:21 couple of years across all Industries has been like the T industry is evolving it's very interesting to watch how both merge right like how they retail comes together with some of the tech advancements and then how it influences both how customers shop which is a big thing like you see a lot of different trends that emerged in the last year or so and how custo and what we do to serve their needs on our side and what tax

4:44 enables us to do so yeah I think another three four years will be quite interesting okay and then AGI takes over and everything is gone I don't know I don't know guys that's a lot to talk about a lot of considerations yeah we don't have uh 40 days only 40 minutes right so yeah I think this leads us right to the ice forer questions that we like to ask in the beginning of every episode so I mean

5:12 we already talked about dipic but what what do you personally prefer like which AI tool are you keen on these days I use a few so I'm like I rely on CH GTP a lot uh just for my day-to-day use I do have of Gemini um I have tried um others to just sometimes I compare results out of curiosity uh but uh I R quite a bit on gen GTP and I really think like it

5:43 became the Google search for me that what the Google search used to be a couple of years back and U applications all around like all around it's not only about like shopping things that you know the topic of this conversation but a lot about solving deeper problems like I have been traveling internationally a couple months back my son had some allergic reaction they have different medicine I went and search and GTP what is the comparable medicine how is it

6:09 called what's the active ingredient like the entire thing like took me a couple of minutes you walk to local pharmacy you kind of know what to buy and it's not what I would buy here in us and I was like just reflecting on that experience like wow that's that's what that's what that assistant kind of making your life easier should be so I think I think it's interesting to see when you compare a few also how they

6:33 give you different results or Combine results from like different ones yeah I mean like if you if you think about think about industrial applications probably a lot of companies combine a few right but when personally you well there are few agents that you can use that combine too but personally I just find it still very very interesting how they sometimes do give very very different results M and for uh for personal shopping for your home for

7:01 your family do you shop online or in store no I shop online a lot but uh only I would say I'm still me personally again not not you as average consumer that's a different thing but me personally I think I use a lot of these tools for search still not to make my choices necessarily between different retailers if you think about like the Journey of shopping on CH GTP for instance or Gemini you would customers

7:34 usually would ask something you learn about the product sort of you go through that understanding of the product and then you can ask them like where can I buy it or they will give you options where you can find it so I think I'm more still on that learning kind of side of things and then comparing but then sometimes I do transact on different platforms for what they would recommend but we have seen like if you look in the

7:58 average customer like I think about 20% of us customers today like they are impacted by the like actually like having those conversations with the I agents and then they they they go and they transact based on those recommendations so that's one of the trans okay yeah I think it's amazing that we've reached to a level where we we can trust an AI assistant to decide on what medicine to buy that's incredible I just wanted to say I mean

8:26 that's also I mean depending on the medicine you take that's a lot of trust you have to have in in the AI yeah well eventually we do go to a store and we ask the pharmacist and you know and they can us if it's not the right direction but at least you get some direction y but do not guys thinking if you think about it that's because you we right we were born before yeah and there's certain common

8:51 knowledge we have so once you read those things you apply a bit of critical thinking on what you know like right like you you I mean I mean I I didn't approach that completely blind like I don't know anything about it I was very specific in trying to navigate that situation it's a very interesting topic of its own like if you don't know anything about the subject and you go in you ask some of these tools do you have

9:15 the actual ability to judge where it's true or hallucination what not so I think it's that's that's a topic KS me up tonight like what do I teach my kids in the age when they everything can be solved with the eye and how do they make those decisions and understand what's true and what's not Jana I think I have so many questions because you are working for one of the biggest Global retailers and you lead personalization in digital channels as

9:38 you said in the beginning that makes you a particular interesting partner for discussing trends that you see obviously I guess many Tech vendors are knocking on your door every day you are going to the major events you have probably analysts fill us in what are the biggest Trends you're seeing in Commerce in these days I'll take probably a step back before we start talking about gen interest in stuff because we need to assess like the maturity of the industry and where we

10:09 are in the end of the day if they think about retail e-commerce specifically what we do is to get the right product to the right customer at the right price and speed right so before we jump even talking about right product right customer and everything available and Technology these days if you look into the trends for the last few years price and speed are absolutely essential you have to meet that it doesn't matter that you have a be like the most beautiful

10:41 experience like customers are very price sensitive when it comes to retail we have just lived for two years inflation yes it's slowing down yes people taking steps to get it better but customers just literally have less money to spend so you cannot neglect the sensitivity to price which really stays the top consideration for our customers especially when it comes to their day-to-day spend yep speed also becomes extremely kind of dominant component in

11:12 all of that so customers get used to like getting things really really fast Amazon Prime can get you stuff in day two Walmart can get you stuff from the nearby store in an hour 3 hours tomorrow you pick so even for Price sensitive customers we really see that becoming a norm so if you're suddenly a smaller seller in a Marketplace and it takes you 3 days to ship well that puts you in a bit of a

11:39 disadvantage so these are just these are like must happen this is like this is a foundation right without that you cannot even successfully compete in the market like hygiene hygiene Factor speed and price and these are expensive by the way to maintain right so I don't want to neglect that like if you if you if you think about making strategic choices where invest in some of the merging technology in the business of low margins when you are under time pressure

12:06 for price and you need to be very successful in shipping fast which is also quite expensive many times you really like your options are pretty narrow like depending on the size of a retailer but it's important to understand it puts puts more pressure on you to be even more profitable and you see this raise to profitability across all retailers you see Amazon experimenting with different years of they are you know pricing on the prime like everyone is trying to find

12:33 Opportunities to get a bit more profitable I mean if you just when I chime in if you look at Europe I mean I'm from Germany we have Ali little they are the champions in efficiency probably and attractive price value Rao and they're expanding to other regions like the US and especially in times when budgets are tight I think they gain a lot of market share in the last two years which they now maintain and I think it established players more the

12:58 premium grosses have a big issue when it comes to that they're pretty good by the way I heard great things about them like every time I go to Europe I try to stop by the store and see what's later there from my Consulting days we did a lot of learnings on how they run and then just kind of getting back to the right product to the right customer this is where on the experience side we see a

13:18 lot of innovation yeah this is the this is the personalization the core of personalization is really to cater to a specific customer their needs right right that's true that's true and then a couple more things sort of on top of that so if you think about it like probably three years ago or so majority of the conversations were around how do I get my platform better how do I invest in those things to like get the right

13:46 thing to right customer how do I work with Google to be a top of the choice in the search because your journey was very sad I would say like the majority of customers were going for similar Journeys today you see this extreme Spike of Social customer shopping on social I mean it started more than three years ago I I'm just saying like when it started getting such an acceleration that it becomes really meaningful to your business so you you have a social

14:14 pie you have a lot of direct to Consumer if you look into like who is spending money on retail today so obviously majority of the higher Spenders are still Millennials those are like good value Seekers kind of they still have this habits of shopping the retailers going to Google or not but your next Generation gen Z this is a social this is the direct to Consumer this is Extreme loyalty to small Brands and they shop very differently and then on top of

14:40 that you have all these tools available for the customers to shop in a completely different ways so as a retailer you need to one constantly think how you you get your platform better using all these different tools to appeal to customers like I think the top one used last year was all for shopping was the agents the chat bots of the of the sort and you see them implemented across many many retailers so that's like you get to the reality

15:10 where it's almost like must to half for you because customers getting used to it in other platforms and then add add to that that you you need to constantly think about your presence in Social your presence in targeting customers and getting them directly to your platform so all of that on the smaller Brands who direct to Consumers where you play against them and I think that creates this very very complex ecosystem sort of where you need

15:36 to make a lot of different choices and really see what plays well with your strategy it's funny how you're talking about how Walmart needs to compete with direct to Consumer Brands when you know they probably feel the opposite right when you're getting into the market with the director consumer brand it's very difficult because you don't have the resources to be on all the platform and you know and and to have they start off without an audience right so it's harder

16:04 to make experiments and to know what's working and what's not not working for you guys you already have the audience so if you if you want to you know test something new you can basically AB test and see how how the audience reacts to that that's true but on the other side it's more nuanced I think some of these smaller retailers are winning some of the specific audiences because they cater to this audience so like let's pick uh

16:34 a I don't know some fashion retailer that is specifically appealing to JZ right and they kind of talk to that audience yeah you see some one of the friends strs that you see is uh C retailers inviting especially brands that really have a focus and one story around something specific that they do they invite communities of their customers influences to shape things with them right and then it becomes very nuanced it's very one toone that's

17:05 personal relationship and they're winning that share with that customer for that specific product when you compare that to larger retailers and obviously like Walmart Amazon of the world a big exception because they like have everything of everywhere but if even you go to middle size where you Department Stores of the over world right like when you have selection of things suddenly you need to be more nuanced like you want to take to this audience in this way someone else who

17:31 shops this brand that you carry under your umbrella in a different way so it's a it's a it's an interesting personalization platform uh Problem by the way to solve how you sell different brands or different products differently for different audiences but this is why that becomes a concern sort of or something that you should keep eyes on I wouldn't say like you know there a bunch of considerations but you have to be aware of that because you have a whole

17:58 generation that 10 years from now will be your key purchasing power and they show differently so you can bring money today but you need to think about the future yeah and it starts with probably understanding your customers like like you said I mean Walmart is a you have a multitude of Brands you you're not a d2c company you have every if you take a category like ketchup or I don't know meat you have a 100 different of those

18:26 yeah probably and you need to understand and read out of the data or implicit explicit data which brand does the customer prefer and then ideally show it when they put together the card or even proposer card probably in the future before we It's a combination of things yeah sorry now go ahead I just wanted to quickly double click on uh what you just said on social social commerce because social is and social commerce is such a big buz word it has

18:55 become such a big buz word and I would be interested what exactly do you mean is that rather advertising organically on Tik Tok or Instagram where you put influences on your brand spaces there or is it more shop on those platforms like shop Tik Tok shop or is it just placing uh a link directing them to your your own.com or how do you see social commerce and different flavors of that it's actually a really good question because I think as you research

19:23 like a lot of things are been mixed under one umbrella I think Y is like even better expert than myself in that so I respond what I meant and then please feel free to chime in uh what I meant more of less of the advertising advertisement when you see kind of targeted ads for you on Instagram inviting you to shop things at Amazon or Walmart I meant more of um the smaller brands that use also the checkout

19:48 capabilities that exist in this social platform say so they target you with the product and they basically Supply you the F solution of like transacting then shipping it to your house so that's more of like this direct to Consumer kind of thing that that happens right there and you're not refering you're leading to some retailer website to go and complete your transaction and it creates two things one is again these are the products many times it's a unique

20:15 products that customers attracted to that you cannot find many times in retailers and then I think um a lot of the largest rer retailers actually learn what sells and try to on board these Brands you see that happening so they have it as part of their uh portfolio of products but the second thing is also sort of takes away that opportunity from you to start that conversation with the customer and start getting more things that you can offer to them and like

20:43 start that relationship right so because that happens right there it's not only that you have this competing cell of some product that maybe brand that you don't carry it also takes away from you the opportunity to start engaging that customer so both are not not necessarily great outcomes if you're competing against some of these Brands makes sense I think there is um there are two more aspects to this so one is when you're on social media

21:10 you're not necessarily in the mindset of shopping you might be in a mindset of like getting inspiration and Discovery but I mean social platforms have been trying to do social commerce for many years now and it's only now starting to pick up there's a reason to that right it's the same the same customer but with a different mindset so when you convert them to your website it immediately kind of changes their their mindset into a shopping mindset but when you keep

21:39 everything on the same platform it wouldn't necessarily work the same way and then the other aspect is the dependency right if you get used to do all of the customer Journey on a platform that's not owned by your brand it's a thirdparty platform that can tomorrow as you know we saw just last week with Tik Tok it might stay it might not stay and even if it stays they can change the rules they change the rules

22:04 all the time they change the algorithms all the time they change the experience all the time and as a brand you have very very little control over the experience and the customer Journey so would you as a brand really want to be dependent on what the third- party platform DCT dictates um as as the way to do things it's a really really good point and this is why you see some of the smaller ones probably who try to enter

22:29 the market build their brand as you said understand their audiences before they can scale on their own using those more than the larger ones where you have more of a brand control and uh reputation means a lot to you and whatnot um just looking a little bit at time that's very interesting discussion on social commerce but I would particularly be interested of your opinion and your views Jana on AI because we we talked or we started

22:56 discussing about biggest Trends in e-commerce and we started with deep seek and and chat GPT so I think it would be very interesting to get your view on how do those things change personalization so I think they change they they impact two kind of aspects of what we do one is how customers shop we talk about some other Trends in this but like again some using the chats like what you can integrate in your experience what customers expect to

23:25 to be part of your experience as like the entire industry evolves and there's another side of how you use them in order to make your platform better and kind of marry the two so um let's take an example work for an example and then we can see like how experience sort of evolved in the last couple of years and I'm going to go a bit broader than personalization for this because I think this is where we are in a world where like new

23:54 connections sort of being created or the ways we learn about customers like work very different L mhm so today two years ago you would go you would search you you go to the uh to e-commerce platform you search something you get your search results if the retailer is advanced in terms of some of the personalization capabilities will start layering in understanding of you what you are most likely to interact out of set of all options available in the catalog you'll

24:23 see that come to Crossing ranking like what do you see first what do you see next there maybe Brands you purchase before maybe things that we predict that you may be more uh likely to buy based on you know your other preferences and it's all kind of world of different probabilities predicting what is it that you're most likely to do then you start interacting you get recommendations recommendations big p of anything I relate still right you keep building

24:48 like you keep keep shopping you go to product pages you read through this you can you make your own decisions you're sort of like you're guided quite a bit but you also learning and doing a lot of the lift yourself to try to understand different components it's kind of like a restaurant when you have a menu but at the end of the day you're making the choice uh and versus you know going to a chef's restaurant where you know you

25:13 have this taste Chef tasty meal where where they serve you the entire meal yes it's almost like I would put it I would put slightly differently like it's a really good analogy I would say you get a menu and if you're vegan you have all the vegan being form as vegan so you clearly know what to do today you go to retailer you go to search search is different like you let's say you search for a TV you can go there's a chat

25:40 window pops up and you're not just saying like hey I'm want a TV but you can literally throw all your choices there and get so you say I want a TV of X in I care about good quality I don't care about weight making it up right like and thing is like durability whatever is important for me and then it gives you the options for those specific things which is this is which is The Catered menu from the shaft

26:08 to to your example because it's not like you need to go and narrow down your choices further you get that you get a summary of why you seeing what you're seeing and how it's doing against the key attributes of that product that you care about because you literally just said that this is what you care about and it's not like we need to guess and then you're pretty much done like then later we can recommend you the

26:34 TV stand the cables whatever there PlayStation goes with whatever you like other things you may be interested and that's an interesting change of how this like technology helps to solve for the same use case I would say on the customer making the choice but it's done very differently so this is where if you if you bring under the same umbrella both the understanding of that implicit intent explicit intent that c customer gives you like this is what I want and

27:00 the implicit intent on the personation side of this is I know what you're most likely to buy how price sensitive you are what brands you prefer what not well that's a that's like you get to point B much much faster so I think it's on the experience side on the other side we also need to understand that to deliver on this experience you are very much rely on the availability of all these different of parameters to be served to you right so

27:30 it's one thing the customer tells you like oh this is what I want and the other side to understand where the agent the algo can get this data right yeah and not just that there are you know kind of implications from the retailer right because if you have inventory that you want to push you need to take those into account when you were giving those personal recommendations as well but I want to take it into a more uh practical

27:57 I mean if we can get some action actionable insights for our listeners today let's say that I am a retailer that is looking to start implementing AI across the business could you maybe walk me through the the Practical how and and what will be the first steps that you would recommend first of all I would highly recommend not to jump on the jump on the hype just because everyone is in the hype of doing something it's very

28:23 important we just talked about profitability the choices of what you invest in how invest in like extreme important so you go back to the strategy what is it that you're doing and you're really evaluating if this is something that you need now before yesterday I could say like it's a very expensive business to do but yesterday we s different way of doing things but let's talk about all the considerations that should go in this right like number one there's models are

28:51 not perfect you have reputational risk for larger retailers the risk is higher than for smaller retailers so something you need to think about if it's customer facing super important how much risk are you willing to accept number two the costs right yes you have a lot of Open Source models that can be used but if you running a business at scale there is cost of like Computing cost is actually running this right like you need the

29:21 energy you need the chips you need whatever otherwise you're like super slow which you also cannot afford right and the impation and on boarding mainten honestly like if you have few if you have few talented Engineers hly you can drop this model like you do experiment things but in certain point you like you need the power to run it and it's that becomes very important um I wouldn't talk about any regulatory because I don't think we

29:47 are we're in this in the stage where someone has any regulations around it we like we still haven't don't know how to regulate uh social social media so that's past so wild wild yeah so you make those choices basically again going back to reputational risks and uh and I think like that that the component how tight it is to your strategy so if you're like let's break it down to like an example right like if you are

30:11 experience experien your investor that that lead leads with experience then yes you will start actively thinking about it like okay I let's say I sell High consideration products I sell fashion and then you have have uh some of the leaders in the industry who do have larger Pockets from other businesses around like Amazon right like Amazon relies on other businesses that are not retail right to to basically keep their profitability going so if that if they start investing

30:40 in things like item summaries and item description and review summaries in item page and that becomes a norm like you cannot go away like you need to think proactively how you can serve to that because that's that's an essential part of your experience customers consider a bunch of things you're going to lose but if you're a grocery retailer I mean what's important for that banana that it's like well priced you get it uh with speed again and maybe

31:08 like you pick couple of components nutritions while not not then you make this Choice like you know like maybe I'm not they and to start this game it's like it's not the top priority for me so just going back to this like I think it's extremely extremely important that we think about what is it that we like how it align to our strategy if you were following different products and features being shipped by different retailers using AI

31:36 it's very funny to see that a lot of us landed in pretty much the same place so you see applications of agents that we discussed you see summaries of products you see summaries of reviews you see some of the guiding components popping up here and there I personally don't believe it's random because it's like when you think about this problem is two ways or one is customers getting used to something I need to make sure that I have that to offer or I'm solving

32:02 the same customer problem if I'm Mass retailer Walmart Target Amazon like all the world like my customers coming to buy certain things with me it's the same like the customer need of what they're buying the necessarily change and then you think what is more efficient more engaging way of solving this so in the end you end you end up with very similar Solutions now if you compare the size reput risk also becomes a problem with sex same concern and you apping safe and

32:33 then you see people saying something like well generated by Ai and that comes from this and that comes from that because you want to make sure you don't surface it in the same way that you would say something that's very deterministic so by the way to that reputation risk like I think a lot of the things that Amazon does on the marketplace of s that's for the same reason when you have a lot of solutions Solutions being available for sell

32:58 to use but on their own risk right because you're like you Amazon will not just go and do the Creative Images they'll not do like different things they will put it on sellers give them options but then they carry the responsibility of the information that they provide y yeah just double sorry and then if it works then they can Implement that at scale right yeah but I'm I I just feel like there such a great area right now you

33:28 can also ship something like you you see it very often as you said like UAB test you have a scale of customers you large ril let's say right like you test a feature but then somewhere down the line something hallucinates and it's a specific product and it comes from nowhere and you're like oops and it happens to the best and everyone because this is just maturity like where we are with the solutions I mean that probably

33:52 it's a learning curve that many businesses need to go through and also like you said make a a conscious decision if they would accept that risk or or not and I have I have I'm working with with businesses that have decided no we won't expose it to Consumers first we do it in internally so we expose it to our support agents we put it on our the desks of our marketeers to be faster and more efficient in content generation

34:17 so I think that's also a strategy you have to take a conscious decision I think like you said I actually think strategy there's a lot of solutions backend what I think many since since the hype started with AI I think many people completely forget about the grounding and The Roots which enable AI ultimately which is data I think all of a sudden natural uh or or llms and and gpts produce great output in a in a

34:48 language you can understand it's not code it's it's it's voice it's easy to understand but it uh I think the quality comes with the data being fed into those uh those models and if you have like in a retail environment you have point of sale you have Ecom you have personalization engine you have delivery platforms there are so many data points that you have to bring together in order to make something meaningful out of it out of it my question would be where do

35:16 you see the biggest challenges and obstacles when it comes to data and how how do you solve them the interesting Trend that I have seen is there's a lot of new companies that come with agents that sit on top of the data so you basically introducing that layer of another agent that can find different patterns in the data explain structure that unstructured whatever do different manipulations to make sure that data is in the better shape before you run any of the algas so

35:46 your quality of outcome is better it's it's definitely something that a lot of tack leaders thinking about very like so it's not it's like it's actually Beyond retail in the way but you're right data and quality of data is a key concern when it comes to those Solutions now the funny thing that we have seen um it's a brain of a sort right it's not a human brain but it's a brain of the sort that drives logical

36:13 connections so many times you see different things coming and surfacing things that like not pretty things that we didn't know so we going to expose it too I think it also raises the you know the the infinite question of build versus buy right I mean with AI now it becomes easier for retailers and Brands to build their own Tex Tech right using a lot of Open Source tools but would

36:43 that be the best solution or would I mean the word is going as you said more and more towards like AI agents that specialize on specific um challenges right and there are already some tech compan comp that developed that took the AI models and used them to develop specific answers to those specific challenges so would you I mean how do you how do you um evaluate the opportunity when you have a specific customer problem or anything else that

37:15 arises if you want to build your own solution with your own team or to Source an existing solution from the market I think the easiest way to do it is like how how core it is to your business how big is the risk that you're taking if you really need certain amount of control and it's absolutely essential for your business to be successful then building is a way sometimes it takes longer but if that's not something

37:43 that's kind of can break things we can get there faster with uh with third party Solutions I also think there is a certain third category sort of where applying third party Solutions gives you actually more value if you look into I keep going to Fashion Beauty retailers because like this is an interesting area of its own there where you don't have large Tech teams that's not the core of what you do your core is to design

38:10 really good product good quality of product your your your core is to inspire customer certain lifestyle so then why would you buy you would just buy some expertise it will be faster for you you not it's not core to your business and on top of that you'll probably learn from what others do so when you think about personalization Solutions and different algorithms for prediction ranking and things like that if I'm going and applying it across three four

38:40 different fashion retailers that comparable I'm actually learning quite a bit I'm not necessarily like it's not the same customer I'm not taking any personal stuff out right like I'm training algorithm on the largest set of data so every incremental customer I bring gets a better quality of Tech being deployed so in that case it's absolute buy because you can you know exactly what it costs you you can control and it's not core to your business you can spend the biggest

39:09 brains of your business to do what is core for you to do and that's an enabler for you great I like that and I've seen that also not I mean you did a very you did a a subvertical specific example like fashion versus grocery you can do the same for line of business yeah so customer service I think it's also a commodity and uh you learn from uh from other uh from let's say applications and installations because the SAS business

39:39 is is aggregating that up and and solidi solidifying the the solution so I'm conscious of time Yana we get great uh input from from your end every time we at the end of a uh of a podcast we ask the same question and the question is very simple um and I will just read it and I would be curious on your answer if you could give one piece of advice to a CEO of a big retailer in these days what would it

40:06 be Anna um I think staying curious and staying close to your customer I'll give you an like this morning actually was listening to our chief gr officer Seth deler and he was sharing a bunch of examples on how he is using jtp with different questions and perplexity and then the and Gemini and like I was comparing and laughing about it but watching him do that got me

40:39 thinking that that's actually like what we have to do is lead and as you go up you can get very disconnected sometimes from like what's happening your customer so I think staying and leaving daytoday the life of your customers and understanding what they actually going through like really helps you make better decisions the amount of emails I get from our from John forner on like I saw this it didn't make sense to me why this

41:09 is what we are doing is insane and and every time I talk to my team I keep saying you know why he's producing all this feedback because he is actually shopping Walmart for everything that he needs in his life and then he's able to uncover all the things that our customers are uncovering so I think maintaining that connection with your customer there's nothing else that can replace it because there's no other way for you to learn and uncover gaps in the

41:33 experience and keep evolving and understanding where they're going as a customer so I think that's that's probably the key thing that we all should keep doing to basically keep customer Centric yeah the advantage of retail is that we are both the the retailer and the customer at the same time that's that's like that's a fun part about our industry right you can leave it you can leave it every day you want to go experience something you want

41:56 to compare prepare something you're going to try something just go and do it yourself and then you're like now I know how it feels that's another great point to finish why we're all in retail business and that's why also probably the retailers and the brands are all keeping up with the recent Trends because they experience it on their own yeah and with Gen C I think I would I would even add with ch C you have to put

42:19 yourself you have to force yourself into new shoes because uh if you're getting older like my my mom she's on Instagram Facebook she she's not into Tik Tok but I think if you want understand the young consumer groups I like also social media Blue Sky for example today I read there are many many video platforms emerging on Blue Sky on the protocol that that kind of emulate Tik Tok but are diff a little bit different and probably

42:44 there's another another ecosystem created a sub geny whatever and I think you have to force yourself into those younger groups in order to understand how they they shop well this is what we have uh kids for no jokes aside I was doing assessment the other day across my team who is using what and I was like I need to hire a couple more people who are active on Tik Tok yeah I was like you guys guess we have an educational

43:08 Gap here then I need to make sure that we are all somewhere yeah I mean there's this great not sure if you know and even Walmart I think there are some employees like I saw this Tik Tok of of an Aldi employee who got viral she was sitting on the check out and and uh I think she did a dance or something like this and it got viral and you can find the same with Walmart employees who are very

43:29 enthusiastic about their job and and what they do on the shop floor and people like like this and it gets viral all of a sudden and I think that's a very interesting dis uh thing going on new ways to build your brand well Yana thank you so much for being with us today this was fascinating thank you so much for all the questions you pushed me thinking about certain things so that's I appreciate that it's very nice to go

43:57 look back and understand where we are so thanks so much for that thank you Yana I appreciate your time let's uh connect in a couple of months and see how things have developed yeah we'll see if anything that we said actually like evolved to something that we predicted let's do that thanks guys appreciate the time