Enterprise tech’s evolution and where it is headed

I recently had an opportunity to speak with Isabelle Bousquette of The Wall Street Journal’s CIO Journal for its 10-year anniversary. As we discussed how significantly enterprise technology and the role of Chief Information Officer (CIO)/Chief Technology Officer (CTO) have changed in the past decade, I thought about my own journey and what I’ve learned along the way.

It has become increasingly clear the critical nature technology plays in every organization. Technology underpins everything we do in retail at Walmart, but you can apply that in pretty much every industry. This means the roles of CIO and CTO are now an integral part of setting the strategy and making sure the organization is well equipped to succeed. In many areas it has moved from a supporting role to being critical for the success of the company. 

Consider my own story. It was around this time nearly three years ago that I joined Walmart in a newly elevated CTO and Chief Development Officer role. I had long admired Walmart as an early adopter of technology who had stayed at the forefront of innovation. Doug McMillon’s vision of a new Executive Committee level role overseeing all technology and business services has enabled us to accelerate our company’s digital transformation and create exciting new experiences for our customers, members and associates.

Thinking further back to 10 years ago, I remember that distributed computing was just starting to have its impact. This led to the formation of the cloud, an entirely new way of not just writing software, but it also unlocked a lot of new capabilities. The creation of the cloud and distributed computing has enabled us to be able to reason over much larger pieces of data than we could have ever done before. It has also allowed us to create very powerful models whether it is Artificial Intelligence (AI), data or analytics. We can now collect and reason over the kinds of data that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. This has led to new customer experiences like our new Choose My Model feature in our app and on Walmart.com. Choose My Model uses AI-powered virtual clothing try-on technology to enable customers to select a model who best represents their height, body shape and skin tone. This experience and others like it would not have been possible 10 years ago.

Acceleration of computing power and sophistication of deep learning models

There are two enterprise tech trends that are going to continue to accelerate. First, the capabilities of the devices that are in people’s hands whether they are associates or customers are going to continue to increase quite dramatically. Even a few years ago we didn’t have the computing power we now have today on smartphones and other gadgets. Add IoT and more and more compute and storage is being pushed to the edge. All of this is having an important and outsized impact on enterprise tech.

The deep learning models are going to get increasingly sophisticated as well. We will see problems being solved using these models that were essentially unthinkable a few years ago. Enterprise tech is going to be influenced by the ability to create these models and run compute by having intelligence at the edge that was never possible before. These are the two things that will continue to impact every aspect of technology including enterprise tech. 

Where are we headed?

It is not a cliché. Every company is a software company. Therefore, how a company can leverage the power of technology and the power of software is going to become increasingly more important. I believe every customer interaction will have a digital component to it. Every business process is going to be deeply impacted by technology either through optimization through analytics or through automation. In order to continue delivering the most innovative associate and customer experiences, we recently announced plans to hire 5,000 Walmart Global Tech associates globally as we double down on delivering tech innovations for our 2.3 million Walmart associates along with millions of our customers. What energizes me for the next 10 years in enterprise tech are the groundbreaking technology capabilities we will continue delivering to make our customers’ lives easier. 

This article was originally published by Suresh Kumar on LinkedIn.