Adaptive Retail is the Future

This week, I had the opportunity to join Walmart CEO Doug McMillon on stage at CES to talk about the technology powering the new world of Adaptive Retail. This is an exciting time to be a customer and an exciting time to be leading the future of technology-powered retail.

At Walmart, our purpose is to help people save money and live better, and Adaptive Retail is the future for how we deliver. Our customers’ needs have evolved around convenience, choice and trust as they are increasingly savvy about how new technology can help them get what they want, when they want it, in an even more convenient fashion. As retailers, our success depends on how we can innovate to meet their evolving expectations. As technologists, our success depends on how we build the right systems and foundations to make the retail experience seamless and delightful.

Currently, we see a fundamental shift in three areas of retail: discover, purchase and receive. Customers make hundreds of decisions during the buying journey that get them from how they find out about a product to how they pay for it to how they get the physical good into their hands. Some of these decisions happen online, some happen in store, some happen while they are online or in a store.

Today’s customers don’t think about which “channel” they are using. They move seamlessly across platforms and spaces. The lines are blurred, and, to succeed in this next generation of retail, we are adapting. We are agile, predictive and responsive as we redefine omnichannel.

With Adaptive Retail, Walmart is bringing the best aspects of any one channel to the other. Everything great about eCommerce - no lines, easy search and find, personalized recommendations – must be available in the store. And everything great about the store – try on, customer service, instant purchase – needs to be available from home.

Everything is interconnected, which is only possible with sophisticated technology. Walmart has invested in transforming our retail infrastructure with tightly integrated backend systems, supply chains with built-in intelligence to predict and orchestrate the movement of goods, machine learning for deeper understanding of preference and intent, not to mention the advancements to the customer experience on the front-end … a full gamut of tech-powered advancements across the journey from discover to purchase to receive.

Ultimately, the benefit of Adaptive Retail is a better customer experience. Thinking of every channel as one “retail” means we remove friction and shift any burdensome aspects of shopping from the customer to us as retailers. It means we layer data and insights into every aspect of our business and in the personalized experiences we’ve built into every touchpoint.

Walmart, with our huge network of physical stores, our modern supply chain, and our unabating focus on the customer, makes us uniquely able to deliver the personalized and seamless shopping experiences of Adaptive Retail.

And it’s done in a way that’s true to Walmart’s roots: innovation with purpose and intent.