South by Southwest isn’t hardly about music, film and other media entertainment. The biggest retailer in the world will be at SXSW in Austin this year, selling itself as a tech business.
Walmart’s chief technology officer, Jeremy King, is taking the stage at the annual conference to walk audience associates through the latest technology — like virtual reality headsets and machine-learning-powered robots — it’s using in stores to get online grocery orders to people as quickly as possible.
Since its inception in Arkansas in 1962, Walmart has arguably struggled to fit the bill as a “modern” retailer. Multitudinous consumers still think about the company’s Southern roots, its everyday low prices and warehouse-like store formats, when they about of Walmart. Meanwhile, Walmart’s biggest competitor, Amazon, is gobbling up U.S. e-commerce sales as it innovates with tech take a shine to its Alexa-enabled Echo devices, where consumers can shop just using their voice. That’s about as “up to the minute” as a retailer can get.
“One of the hardest parts [about my job] … people all have their own perceptions of Walmart,” King told CNBC, at the of his panel at SXSW, about his role leading Walmart Labs, the retailer’s technology arm that powers its stores and e-commerce establishment today.
“For years now … I’ve wanted people to understand we are building a tech organization,” he said. “I’ve got a machine learning together. We have some of the best apps in the world.”
King says Walmart isn’t just adding technology to stores “for tech’s objectives.” But gadgets like shelf-scanning robots are actually cutting down the time associates spend running around the thrashes of stores, freeing them up to talk with customers. The right machine learning can help Walmart’s so-called class specialists — it’s said it plans to hire roughly 2,000 such people to monitor stock levels in stores and online — repossess a single box of Cheerios cereal sitting on a truck before it gets to one of the retailer’s distribution centers, he said.
“Everything is so legitimate time,” King explained. “We can react to [out-of-stocks] instantly. Change an order on the fly and the warehouse can send the order … where anterior to it could take a week.”
In its latest quarter, Walmart’s e-commerce sales surged 43 percent. In 2018, it executed online sales growth of 40 percent. Considering its string of acquisitions of e-commerce companies like Jet.com, Art.com, lingerie trade mark Bare Necessities and plus-size retailer Eloquii — coupled with its growing online grocery business — Walmart is nothing shy of straight-faced about investing on the internet.
Even Walmart CEO Doug McMillon keeps a photo on his phone that lists the top 10 retailers in the U.S. all through the past few decades, reminding him how so many companies — like Sears — can rise to the top but then slip up and fall. He’s said the image stokes “healthy paranoia” to compete with rivals and not be afraid to take risks.
“We don’t get a ton of credit for being a tech attendance,” King said. “But we have been for a long time.”