The Doing Business in Bentonville Podcast
To create an ecosystem that connects leaders of all kinds – industry, community, student, educational, civic, investment and entrepreneurial – to help overcome Omnichannel Retail barriers through exclusive, insight-rich content.
The Doing Business in Bentonville Podcast
Ep. 102 - When Technology Meets Business: How RFID Changed Walmart Forever
Ever wonder why your size is never on the rack when the website says "in stock"? That frustrating disconnect between what retailers think they have versus what's actually available has plagued the industry for decades—until RFID technology changed everything.
In this revealing conversation with retail veteran Mike Graen, we explore how a single technology implementation transformed Walmart's apparel business and set new standards across the retail landscape.
With 42 years of experience spanning Procter & Gamble, Walmart, and consulting roles, Mike provides a masterclass in how technology adoption must be driven by customer needs, not the other way around.
The journey began when Walmart's apparel department faced exclusion from the company's growing curbside pickup services due to notoriously inaccurate inventory. With inventory accuracy hovering around 60% (meaning 4 out of 10 items shown as available actually weren't), the customer experience was suffering.
When RFID was finally implemented, it revealed actual inventory was 30% lower than shown in systems—a sobering reality check that ultimately led to better customer experiences and increased sales.
What makes this story particularly valuable is how it demonstrates the critical importance of cross-functional leadership. This wasn't just a technology project—it was a change management initiative requiring buy-in from merchandising, store operations, IT, and suppliers. The implementation transformed not just inventory accuracy but how teams worked together across traditional organizational boundaries.
Looking ahead, Mike shares exciting possibilities for retail technology: truly frictionless checkout experiences, AI-powered inventory management, and a future where store associates are freed from data collection tasks to focus entirely on customer service.
Whether you're a retail professional, technology enthusiast, or curious consumer, this episode offers valuable insights into how businesses can successfully navigate technological transformation.
Well, hello everyone, I'm Deanna Baker and welcome to Doing Business in Bentonville. We have an exciting topic today with one of my long-term friends in the business world, michael Grain, mike. And let me just give you a little background on Mike and then I'm going to kick it over to him. But Mike has a rich 42-year career and it's from both sides of the aisle, so both supplier and retailer. He worked for almost 30 years for Procter Gamble, right 25. And then on to Walmart, so definitely switched to the retailer side for a period of time, as well as Crossmark and Collaboration LLC, right and consulting.
Speaker 1:So all of his talent has been focused on collaboration to help deliver sales to the retail supply chain and he has linked suppliers and retailers through all of these journeys together by leveraging information technology and data to increase sales and profitability. So, mike, we're really happy to have you here. I wanted you to be a guest on Doing Business in Bentonville with me because of our journey and how I came to know you and what an asset you were to me doing what you do best, came to know you and what an asset you were to me doing what you do best, and so today we're going to revisit how we were connected through the RFI journey at Walmart, but then take it beyond that to everything else that we hear about happening. What's on the forefront, why we should care, depending on whichever discipline you're in, and maybe we can show others kind of the way collaboration can work.
Speaker 2:Indeed Awesome.
Speaker 1:So let's go back to that day.
Speaker 2:Sure Well, first off, thank you very much for the opportunity to be here. It has been fun to work with you. It's been fun to work with your team when you were at Walmart. We went through quite a turbulent time of trying to figure out what the right thing to do for the shopper was. I feel like we landed in a very good spot and set up a very good platform for all retailers to participate, so I really appreciate the opportunity to come and spend some time with you today.
Speaker 1:Fabulous, fabulous. So RFID I didn't know what the acronym stood for. I didn't know that it was about 2018. And I was the SVP in apparel, leading the team there, and I was faced with a dilemma as a leader of my team in that, globally, I knew where our company was headed. I knew that curbside delivery at the time was what everyone was working on and we were still in two apps. We had an app just for grocery pickup and then we had we called it the green app and then we had a blue app which was for all things, general merchandise.
Speaker 1:But all of my counterparts were busy figuring out how to get included in this curbside delivery and it was obvious that the customer was migrating there and apparel was completely left out of the conversation. And I knew why. I mean, it wasn't that it was unfair. It was a real simple reason in that the inventory was not accurate and we knew it was inflated on paper, was not accurate and we knew it was inflated on paper.
Speaker 1:But in order to be confident that they could pick an order for a customer and deliver it, they need to know that the down to the skew level, which is pretty intensive in apparel, had to be there, and you know, one solution was, well, carry more inventory. Well, anyone that knows anything about apparel, if you do size and color combination, one program can be 60 different SKUs, right? And so that was not a solution for us. So I knew I had an issue if I wanted to be part of the box, right? So we started this journey to educate ourselves on what was feasible and what maybe some of the solutions were, and that led our team to you, right, and I would just love to get your thoughts, being on the opposite side of the table from us and what you saw.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Well, I think the first and foremost, the most important part is this is not the first time that we tried an RFID strategy, right, and I think a lot of retailers out there were also involved with that. You know, prior to the 2018, 2019 time period. Literally since World War II, I've been along for a long, long time, really. It came to retail actually when I was still with Procter Gamble, if you remember, linda Dillman and Pam Cohn from Walmart really tried to drive what's the next level of engagement with suppliers and Walmart. It was RFID, particularly at the case of Palo Alto, right, can we track product all the way out through the supply chain? And at the time it was. Let's start out real small with a small prototype, and let's back all the way up and see if can we get the next 50 suppliers or 100 suppliers, and what we found quickly was, yes, we could do that. The technology was still pretty expensive. I mean, tag costs were above the 27 mark. That made it prohibitive to do anything below case and pallet, and so we put that on the shelf and we did a couple of other iterations as well.
Speaker 2:What happened in 2018, I think, was a perfect storm. It was literally the costs had come down, the technology had become better. The cost had come down, the technology had become better. And this age-old problem of what do I have in the box and where is it located? Specific enough I could send an associate or a customer to go find it was extremely difficult. We're talking about we call a term perfect match. Perfect match is if the audience says I have five and I actually have five. That's a perfect match. We found that to be literally in the 50 to 70% range, 60% range. So pretty bad right. When you're looking for a specific color shirt or a specific size of a garment, we can't have that level of accuracy and have our associates go chasing that.
Speaker 2:So I was working I'd been working with Walmart for a while at RFID. We had stood up a prototype in a local store, which is infrastructure. That was technically a raging success. So we now knew the technical benefits were down. Now the question was could we create a business case? I thought why to do that and that really let in. It was a perfect storm in terms of in a good way, in terms of you and your team trying to figure out how do I get into this online space, this buy online. Pick up in store space, which is what it's called today, and the big barrier being I got to know what I have and where it's located. Otherwise, I'll be sending people to chase things that are not in the store. So it was a very good opportunity to work together.
Speaker 1:Well, you talk about the perfect storm. I mean, I had to reach the point as a leader of my team where my desire to be a part of the emerging infrastructure of Walmart was worth my uncomfortable feeling in the space where I knew nothing. But I had to find out because the other thing that I knew was true beyond that our inventory was off was that others were ahead of us competitors. So I had seen it Lululemon. I mean, they were really probably at that moment in my mind, the most efficient in the use of it. But I saw the tags in Target and Macy's had talked about it years ahead. So we were behind. And I think one of the big things that made me say, okay, maybe now is the time was originally, I remember the cost of the ticket being like 25 cents or something crazy, and, of course, when you have opening price point items, it just mathematically didn't make any sense. But now they're telling me well, it was about five or six cents at the time. So I'm like, okay, all right, it's actually possible for me to play in this arena now. So it was my quest to have my team a part of where Walmart was moving that pushed me out of my comfort zone to do this and I remember one of the first things that we did is we went down to the Auburn University lab. They have everything set up to explain RFID and my team there learned not just the technology but how tickets were made and a lot of the infrastructure choices that were available at the time, which you know we could do it as simplistic, fast and inexpensive if we wanted to use a handheld device, or it could be seamless with, you know, infrastructure inside the store, which obviously was going to cost a lot more money and time to get approvals. So we left there really with a mission to take it back to the leadership of Walmart to say this is worth our investment of time and money. And they gave us the green light and so from that point on it was kind of like opening a Pandora's box and I'm like, oh my, there's a lot more to this than I ever imagined.
Speaker 1:And so you know it took a team of people cross-functionally in Walmart and we had to have skin in the game from people not just merchandising any longer, but literally within IT who was going to develop the tools within store operations, who was going to create the processes for our store associates, to follow and train them, and then my first goal was bringing all the suppliers on board because, guess what? We had to reticket everything. So that took us about a year, and so I think one of the lessons I've learned as a leader is just the passion you have to have around a solution for the customer, because it may take not you but maybe the person that comes behind you even to see something through because of the length of time it takes. Fortunately, I was able to see this one through. We had a little thing called COVID that was in the middle of it, which added a wrinkle, but it was a journey for us that we had to learn along the way. No one could give me you couldn't give me the full blueprint.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Right for how it was going to play out at Walmart, so that was probably my mother. My other big learning in this is that I couldn't let fear of the unknown stop me from starting the process. You know, I knew where I wanted to go. I just didn't exactly know the way to get there, but I surrounded myself with people who knew more about it than I did.
Speaker 2:Well, but I think in retrospect, one of the things that I can remember vividly on that is it was very clear from my perspective.
Speaker 2:There was a group of facts that you knew really solidly, things like we want to be part of this online process going forward. That's going to be one of the big strategies for us being successful in the apparel slash fashion business. Number two, that just because I knew some things about this technology from past experiences didn't mean that that necessarily translated into where it was today. So you gave yourself the opportunity to say I know what it was when I was there before, but I wonder what it is now. And you asked yourself those questions versus oh, that'll never work because it's too expensive or it doesn't work or whatever the rationale was.
Speaker 2:And the third thing is you were very clear in terms of what your role was. Your role was merchandising, senior leadership and engagement with the suppliers, because without tag product it doesn't happen. It can happen in a small proof of concept or a pilot in the store, but in terms of getting broad adoption across the industry and using it for other things, it's got to happen to start at source, and that's where that supplier sourcing started. So working through those challenges and knowing what you do and then recognizing hey, there's a lot of stuff I don't know. I need operators, I need IT folks, I need supply chain, I need industry experts like GS1 and Auburn to come alongside me to be able to do this, and I think it was a really good case example where you physically led this work from a business standpoint, but you delegated those the parts that you needed more help with to other people in the company.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and it was. It was their buy-in as well that allowed it to happen. So you just think about the the all of the associates across 4,000 stores for the apparel floor to work differently and to have to learn the new technology. So my store operations partners were critical, the people that helped us track whether the store associates were picking orders. If they weren't, if there was a nil pick, why, and helping us really drill down to why isn't this being adopted more readily. So it was a continual, even after everything had been turned on and it was working well. Then what were the other unintended consequences or things that needed to happen in order to fully unlock the potential of the technology? And so it was a continual learning. But I am so happy to be able to say we solved a problem for the most skew-intensive, laborious category in the box Apparel right, and we proved its worth and now it's in general merchandise correct.
Speaker 2:Correct, correct. Walmart has expanded. They've been very public about this. They've been expanded well beyond apparel to going in things like home and electronics, and automotive and sporting goods and basically anything in the kind of general merchandise space, and the great thing is that I would say that there's a lot of retailers that are following quickly and doing their best job to keep up and catch up. So I think you went from a position where you started this whole journey is, yeah, you're probably behind to a place where you're clearly demonstrating leadership from a technology standpoint, from a business standpoint.
Speaker 1:Well, in apparel it's interesting because it's so fluid in how it sells. But becoming as systematic as we could for the way it should function at store level was a learning that actually changed the way my team worked. So we had to go back and even how we purchase goods. Stores are very unique the different layouts, different stores. It's not prototypical, in fact. There are no two stores exactly alike and if you think about it apparel or fashion fashion today is in the center of the box and so there's a high degree of variability. And the fact that now I can look on my app and if I'm shopping for an item, I can know which rack it's on with certainty. That took a discipline back to the merchants and how we bought differently and managed the inventory differently.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:So it really created a change in work for every discipline of the box. Yeah, and I am sure something else will come along. Something is probably right now that's going to change the way we have to. You know our working ways again, but I'm very happy. The team rose to the challenge. The suppliers were excellent partners for us. Once everything was ticketed back to the supplier conversations and it took a full year for us to run through all of the inventory and get it ticketed. The onus was on Walmart to finish creating all of the processes and internal tools because they had been paying for the tickets for the better part of the year and were not seeing any value from it Right part of the year and we're not seeing any value from it.
Speaker 1:So you know, it really was a pressure back on the company to be good stewards of what the suppliers had invested in, because this was to grow their sales as well. Right, and Mike, you told us it was going to be like the industry average was off about 50, 60%. You just quoted I recall the day it went live, for us it was 30%. I recall the day it went live for us it was 30%. Yeah, 30% drop on paper from what we were seeing the day before. And of course then we had to wait for orders to normalize, to get everything back in stock accurately. But there was definitely a payoff in sales for us, in sales for us, not to mention, I think, what it can do for the future of apparel in Walmart as a total. So I'm very proud of it. If you can't tell, I'll go on and on.
Speaker 2:But just to build on that, I think I mean, okay, if it was 50, 50, 30, whatever the number happened to be. What we did find was when it was wrong. It was usually an overstated situation. So it says I have five of these pairs of socks. I really don't have five of those pairs of socks. I don't have any of those socks. And so to correct that inventory, it required an RFID reader to read the RFID tag, to update the SKU count on that particular item. And I'm usually saying I don't have five, I have one or I have zero, for example. Well, that creates obviously a shrink opportunity inside the store. So how do you account for that situation so you don't penalize the store for things like that? So the whole markdown process became a really important part of this as well, which is how do you manage that from a strategic level? Because we don't want to put the system in and immediately the stores hate it because they're seeing all kinds of markdowns, right.
Speaker 1:So that challenge was there as well and in addition to just it not being there cleaning up the accuracy. So I don't have three of this, I have two. I don't have one, I have three. When you come down to a rack level and one of your fringe sizes has a holding capacity of one, it is.
Speaker 1:You know, that was actually something I hadn't thought of in becoming more accurate, was able to actually reduce inventory and not miss a sale, right, right. So it wasn't just I have it or I don't or I have zero I thought I had five but just really fine-tuning the accuracy so that we could show the customer that we have one left, two left, three left, which to me is incredible in this space.
Speaker 2:Well, I think the only other thing is okay. So we've now reflected what we actually have versus what we thought we had, and I have three of these SKUs sitting in the back room. I have none sitting on the sales floor. Driving that replenishment from the back room to the sales floor and getting the operations team to execute against those alerts was a huge unlock, because I can tell you, I can get your on-hands right all day long, but if no action occurs which changes getting product on the sales floor for a customer to buy it, we're not going to sell more.
Speaker 2:So again, from my perspective, it was a clear example of it's going to take a bunch of disciplines to make this happen. No one does that. And I think the other piece is is there's so many projects that we do today which are well, let's just go do this, it's an operations project? This one was which are well, let's just go do this, it's an operations project. This one was merchandising operations, supply chain technology, design, industry people all coming together to do these projects. These are not technology projects, they're change management projects, and I think that's what really makes them A much more impactful but B a lot more difficult and a lot more coordination you have to do.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and how you tell the story to your organization matters. That's another thing I learned. So, as we're talking about investment and CapEx and all the different components, when I would go in to present the case for this, I could be in my company competing for money that was either going to go to this or maybe to build a milk plant. I mean apples, oranges, both. You know, of course, we wanted to do that. We, you know we'd love to do both. But when a company is having to make, you know, rational decisions about where the money goes and be prudent with it, it's important on the leader of each discipline to come with a story and the reasons why, and to be compelling and hopefully get the buy-in you need. But that takes a lot of passion behind it. It's not just fact based. But that was also a new muscle that I learned. Yeah, and that well, of course it's important. Everyone should know it's important. I mean, look around, but literally, when you're having to make those kinds of decisions, not everything gets a yes.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:So that was a huge learning for me as well.
Speaker 2:Well, this project, I'm sure, was scrutinized a number of different ways because, literally, we were recommending moving into this exactly what you just said, which is moving into a very tumultuous time period in the world, which was COVID, much less the retail industry, and there were a lot of options of what do we keep doing, what do we stop doing, et cetera, what do we put on hold for now, et cetera, and this one fortunately made the cut. It is a good thing it did, because if we would have put that back on hold, we guarantee we would be where we are today.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I think it's very evident when you see some of the retailers today who haven't started that journey.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you know I said I was behind. I felt like we were behind. I am thankful that it was given the green light when it was, but even more of a lift today, when I think now all of us as leaders should be thinking about what the next thing is.
Speaker 1:What else could remove friction for the customer? What else could make it easier for store associates or fulfillment? However, the customer wants the goods to be fulfilled. We should be thinking about that. So what do you say today, with a lot of the technology advances that are going on around us all the time, if you hear of something today and you're like, well, that's not right for us right now, what would you say to someone that was in my position, like I had at Walmart?
Speaker 2:was in my position, like I had at Walmart. Well A it could be a piece of solution or a piece of technology that just isn't ready yet, and I think we experienced that in RFID. When we started back in call it 2003 timeframe. Did we learn a bunch? Yes, Was it ready from a cost perspective to ticket individual selling items at the store? Not really. Was it effective enough yet? So was it ready to actually solve the problems that we wanted?
Speaker 2:And I think you always have to think through that and that's why there's still a lot of proof of technology and let's go try it in the store for a few days and let's go try this, let's try that. So congratulations to those companies who make those decisions to go try that. But sometimes it just comes back and says not ready yet, right. There's other things that are yeah, the technology's ready, but we have fundamental business challenges out there right now that we got to get to before we can go and do this right. So if my shelves are all empty, you know, putting a technology like RFID and no resources to get the product out of the back rooms and sales floor wouldn't help us. So operational things you have to have as prerequisites for that, or to come on board when you install it. And then sometimes it's just and I hate to say it but bad project, bad timing. Right it was. It was just a great idea. There was a business need. This is the right technology to solve it.
Speaker 2:But unfortunately, it's not the right time now, and I think there are technologies out there today that people are still looking at. For example, one of the other ones that was not pursued that aggressively was shelf-scanning robotics. Well, shelf-sc shelf scanning robotics have been very successful in a lot of retailers today, and now they're starting to do things like be able to actually scan RFID tags. There's companies out there, like Badger Technologies, that could do that, and so it can actually do a shelf scan and it could do RFID. It can do a number of different things at a lower cost than a potential associate free golf associates to spend more time with customers. So a lot of this stuff is yeah, it's ready to go now, but it's just not ready because of where we are, and I think those are the stage gates you have to go through. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So I would recommend people just read and be a student of the business. You know what is taking place. How are others using it today? Um, because I mean, you could certainly point to me and say you do not have to be an expert right to um, to, to be, to become passionate about uh technology and where it could be used to the benefit of your customer and your associates. Um, but you know, the answer may be no for now, but it's not no forever. Yeah, and you know that's what we learned.
Speaker 2:Well, and I think at the end of it this is part of being involved with the industry for so many years and being both on the supplier end and the retailer end. And then you know the technology end is who's the driver? Who's the driver of this business challenge? I would argue in the 50s, 60s, 70s maybe, the suppliers were a lot of the drivers because there was only three networks out there and they drove a lot of their advertising through media that drove customers into the store. So I think the suppliers were on the driving force of that and I think that that transitioned over to the retailers suddenly taking control of that and really offering a complete, great experience for the customers that can get anything they want.
Speaker 2:I think now there's this thing that we all have in our hand that becomes the shopper, the consumer. The customer is now in driver's seat. So if I'm standing in front of a rack of clothes and I'm looking for a size or whatever and they don't have it, I'm probably not going to go ask to see if it's in the back room somewhere. I'm going to pull out my phone and I'm going to get it another way. So the customer becomes much more in the driver's seat and I think the great thing about what Walmart has done is they recognize a customer is always boss, they can hire and Sam Walton said they can hire us and fire us at any time, but just by deciding where to spend their money. So the big piece of again back to this example is knowing the customer has always been at the forefront of knowing that we how do we make that decision? How do we make sure products are there and a good price and a good value and good merchandise to be able to meet their needs?
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah. I remember John Furner telling us once that customer doesn't need to see our org chart, meaning they don't need to know the. You know what's happening in the Willy Wonka machine. They just want the goods the way they want it when they want it, how, and that's incumbent upon all of us to make that as seamless as possible?
Speaker 2:Very true, very true.
Speaker 1:So I've talked a lot about you know from my vantage point, but what other disciplines you know, whether it be suppliers or the supply chain, can this technology help that you're seeing today?
Speaker 2:Well, I think most retailers and suppliers will start on the avenue of getting their on-hands correct and knowing what they have and where it's located. That's been the primary driver that's gotten people into this technology. I think a few other retailers have taken a little bit different approach, which is the asset protection or loss prevention kind of mechanism. The asset protection or loss prevention kind of mechanism, and not so much of necessarily stopping people because of shoplifting et cetera, but just knowing. Well, how did my on-hands get to 50%, 40%, 30%, whatever? How'd that happen? Because I ordered 100 shirts and if I received 100 shirts and I sold 50 of them, I should still have 50 of them. How did I get so far off? So I think this particular technology now that does require us to probably step up the level of technology in the store from a handheld to some fixed infrastructure. But it gives you the go to say I just sold three shirts and six shirts, just walked out the store. Maybe no stop, but first thing I do is I fix that on hand so I don't disappoint the next customer. Secondly, I can give that data over to the asset protection folks to go.
Speaker 2:Here's what happened Can you look at, figure out what's going on and figure out what's happening. The other one is did I get everything I paid for? I paid for a hundred shirts. Did I really get a hundred shirts? Did I get 95? Or did I get the right size color combination that I needed to put that product on the shelf? Or did I mix it all up? Instead of five blue and five white and five gray, I got all black. That doesn't help me. That screws up my audience as well, and the customer is looking for that level of assortment. So clearly, those are the two primary drivers that people look for the most part.
Speaker 1:You know, like I can imagine if you had the readers and you could start from the supplier so they know with certainty that the dozen shirts left in the right combination. Then, let's say, it hits a Walmart distribution center and it's checked and verified there. Then it makes its way through the back door into the store inventory and it's accurate. Imagine all the post-audit cleanup that you've just done. Right, like everyone can agree on, the number is the number, and so to me, just the efficiency of it if it's carried back through the system as well as through the front door of the store.
Speaker 2:Yeah, which is ironic because, when we go back to the vision that Linda Dillman and Pam Cohn had, it was being able to do exactly that. So that's where they started. The real problem was at the store. Now we've sort of shifted a lot of this to the store and now you see retailers going back up the supply chain and going I need to know where it is at every step in the supply chain.
Speaker 1:It didn't come down to components at a supplier factory.
Speaker 2:Sure could, sure could.
Speaker 1:And making sure you have everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So very cool. So, Mike, where is the future? Like you know, give me a little, excite me a little bit for what you see coming next or where you think it might be going. I won't hold you to it, but I think our listeners would like to know of where you see the future.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think there's a couple. The first is in a retailer, a mass merchandise retailer, club retailer. We have to recognize that RFID is a great tool in the toolbox. We have to recognize that RFID is a great tool in the toolbox, but it's not the only tool in the toolbox. There are certain properties of RFID liquid and metal that become very challenging to be able to make this technology work.
Speaker 2:So I think the first thing is what are the other potential technology, whether it's a 2D barcode, a QR code, an image of the item, something like that that allows us to do what do I have and where is it located, with items that are not RFID friendly?
Speaker 2:That's the first part, so I can see us being able to do this for other products that, even though they won't work with RFID necessarily. The second part is and we've all seen this, so it's not a surprise to anybody but that whole seamless shopping experience where I literally just take stuff and walk it out of the store. And clearly Sam's Club has the best example of that with their Scan to Go app, where you can literally never go to a checkout. You literally go into the club, you pick up what you want, you scan it individually, and then you go through an artificial intelligence arch which allows them to be able to say yes, we've audited this basket. To the best of our knowledge, everything has been compensated and paid for in there. I think that's that kind of frictionless environment. Nobody likes standing in line checking things out. I don't know a whole lot of people other than you know, really geeky people like me, that like self-checkout. They would just prefer to grab their stuff.
Speaker 1:You could get your side hustle if you want, I mean, if you like it that much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you could do that. Probably won't do that, yeah, but to me, those are the couple of things which is combining the power of RFID when you don't have RFID friendly products, and I think this whole seamless checkout experience is and the industry is well aware of it. They've been trying to chase that for a long, long time, but to me, those are the. Those are the ones that I think are really exciting and intelligent. The third one is is real obvious. Everybody's talking about it.
Speaker 2:People have been talking about artificial intelligence forever. Well, this gives you a rich signal of what do I have and where is it located. In every box in the store. Now you have data where you can use AI to do really, really creative and business-driving things, versus what you had before, which is running AI on a platform of 30% to 40% incorrect data, right. So getting the data right garbage in, garbage out getting rid of all that but knowing exactly what you have and where it's located, you can build AI tools that drive work at the associate level, which is exception-based work, okay.
Speaker 2:And the last one I'll tell you is we still spend, in my opinion, way too much time asking our associates to collect data for systems that we have, whether that's scanning it out or fixing a price label or even RFID wanding. Even though it's been a great benefit, we're still asking them to collect data for our systems. To me, the future is how do we free them up from that? They never have to scan anything. They never have to perform any task to collect data for our systems. Instead, they're just given alerts of things that they need to take care of. That, physically, we have recognized as an inconsistency in what we want from a stalker.
Speaker 1:Well, I would think there has to be some point where, a tipping point where RFID is being used across the box so much that it is worth the investment needed to take that out of the associates' hands, right? There's got to be a tipping point where, mathematically you're like this makes more sense than the labor that we're costing ourselves, right? So perhaps we'll see that. I think so. I think so. That would be amazing. It's very exciting.
Speaker 1:If you had asked me back in college, when I knew I wanted to be a buyer, that I would be having this kind of a conversation, that what I would learn would be so all-encompassing, it would have blown my mind. But you know what the beauty of the retail industry is, that you are a Forever student and you do keep learning, and that's why I love, you know, this forum with doing business in Bentonville, and why I was hooked on it is that we do get to do that. I mean, what an amazing career we all get to be a part of. So thank you today for joining me on the subject, thank all of you for tuning in to our podcast and again, my name is Deanna Baker and if you have any questions, any feedback for me, I would love it. Please send it. You can find me on LinkedIn and yes, deanna is spelled odd D-E-A-N-A-H. I have had a very creative mother. I'll thank her for that, but I really appreciate you tuning in today. Again, we love feedback. You all have a great day.