This story is from April 9, 2023

Walmart CTO says India is retailer’s tech backbone

Walmart CTO says India is retailer’s tech backbone
Suresh Kumar, CTO & CDO, Walmart
The world’s largest company, Walmart, has no direct customer touchpoints in India, but a lot of its operations are powered by the country’s tech talent. Even its CTO and chief development officer is an Indian-origin engineer – Suresh Kumar. On a recent visit to Chennai, the IIT-Madras alumnus said Walmart Global Tech (WGT) centres in India are the retailer's tech backbone, and support all areas, from supply chain optimisation and merchandising technology, to payments and customer experience improvements.

"Walmart Global Tech has a number of centres in the US, but the India centres are bigger," Kumar said. WGT has around 11,500 people across Bengaluru, Chennai and Gurugram.
India, he said, has inherent strengths in payment, including a strong fintech ecosystem, and so Walmart has leveraged the talent here to create a payments product focused on emerging markets. "The payments product for our Mexico business is completely built from scratch from the India centres," Kumar said. Called Cashi, the application is a digital wallet service launched for Walmart customers in Mexico to help them digitally make payments, receive money, get credit, buy insurance, etc.
India is also at the centre of many of Walmart’s core data science and machine learning work. "A lot of the AI/ML work around the computer vision-based tools used in our operations happens here," he said. One such tool is the IRAS scanner – an accessory fitted to autonomous floor scrubbers within its Sam’s Club stores, which once installed, captures data as it moves autonomously. This data helps to easily pin-point item location, freeing up associates' time. Another tool done here is VizPick, used by teams in Walmart stores, that leverages augmented reality to quickly locate products and bring it out from the back room to the sales floor efficiently.

Walmart has been using OpenAI's natural language models in our conversational AI system Converse (even before ChatGPT came). We incorporated the learning model and built a layer on top of it to adapt it to the Walmart context. We are also using it internally for associate communications. We will continue to invest in generative AI. Major changes are underway in tech, but we are very steady and thoughtful in our investments. Walmart Global Tech will continue to go full throttle on data science and machine learning and its use cases across front-end and back-end operations.

Suresh Kumar, CTO & CDO, Walmart

Kumar described Chennai as "a fantastic location" for tech talent, and an ecosystem indicative of India's rapid strides. "We started Walmart's Chennai centre during the pandemic, but have ramped up very rapidly," he said. Chennai's biggest draw, he said, is the presence of top universities, and Walmart has relied on one such institution to further its R&D. In March last year, it partnered with IIT-Madras to enable IIT-M students and WGT associates to work together on research projects. "This partnership is a pioneering academia engagement model for us. We are trying to recreate it globally, engaging with universities in the Bay Area and Atlanta," Kumar said.

With India being such a vital cog, significant efforts have gone into replicating the global Walmart culture in its centres here. "The culture here is the same as what we have in Bentonville," Kumar said. The Bengaluru centre even houses what’s called the Spark Square, a one-of-its-kind centre that offers an immersive experience about Walmart’s history, culture, business and innovation through experience zones.
People, Kumar said, like to work with Walmart for the kind of deep problems they are able to solve and the widespread impact they can create. Global media recently reported that Walmart in the US has consolidated offices and urged employees to relocate for in-person work. Kumar said employees both in India and the US are visibly excited to resume working from offices. "People love it. When they come back, they find energy, they trust each other more,” he said. Providing flexibility is however important, he added.
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