A Walmart Labs director explains how the superstore goes from testing AI and other tech in a lab to scaling it to stores across the company
- Vinod Suresh is the senior director of product management at Walmart Labs, where most of his work is focused on Sam's Club.
- He explained the process of testing and implementing new models and systems within Walmart, from incubation to scaling across the company.
- "I think we start with a very lean experiment, sometimes with pen and paper, sometimes with just a simple page - a landing page and stuff like that," Suresh said during a keynote panel discussion at the eTail West conference in Palm Springs, California. "And then we go from there."
- He gave the example of Walmart's "Scan & Go" app, which was created over a weekend by two developers and then ultimately rolled out to all Sam's Club's locations across the US.
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Walmart is no stranger to the intersection of technology and retail.
The company's innovation arm, Walmart Labs, focuses full time on both of these entities, developing solutions to improve the in-store and online experience at the superstore.
For example, the Labs were involved in the implementation of in-store robotics to make associates more available to help shoppers on the floor.
As the senior director of product management at Walmart Labs, Vinod Suresh has seen innovations at all stages of the process, from idea generation to their implementation in stores across the company. Suresh explained that when it comes to testing and scaling new programs and technologies across the company, there is generally a process of growth.
"I think we start with a very lean experiment, sometimes with pen and paper, sometimes with just a simple page - a landing page and stuff like that," Suresh said during a keynote panel discussion at the eTail West conference in Palm Springs, California on Monday. "And then we go from there."
Suresh's work is mostly focused on Sam's Club, the membership warehouse chain owned and operated by Walmart. He has been directly involved in the process of testing and implementing new models and systems from Walmart Labs, from incubation to scaling across the company.
Suresh gave the example of Walmart's "Scan & Go" app, which he said was created over a weekend by two developers.
The app was tested in over 100 Walmart stores in 2018, though the service was halted that same year. The service, which lets customers scan products on their phone and skip the checkout lane, currently exists in all Sam's Club's locations across the US.
When it came to the rollout of the program in Sam's Club stores, it was first tested in one Sam's Club location in Fayetteville, Arkansas in 2013. The team tested the app here to evaluate customer feedback to learn about how the program would fare on a larger scale.
"And then we went about rolling it out from one club, 10 clubs, to 50 clubs, 100 clubs," said Suresh. Eventually, the service was rolled out to all Sam's Club's locations.
Suresh emphasized that when it comes to projects and rollouts like the Scan & Go program, it is important to understand that the product innovation process is not siloed at all. Rather, the process is constantly evolving and being influenced by real-time feedback.
"So what we are doing is we are continuously integrating," Suresh said, explaining how learning from customers and seeing how a product is used in real-time is something that even the smartest minds might not be able to anticipate when in the production process.
For example, when Suresh said that when the Scan & Go program was rolled out, there was initially an issue with fraud. Suresh said that in looking to solve this issue, the process was essentially the reverse scaling process of the rollout. They scaled back, solved the issue, and then slowly reverted back to normal.
To Suresh, this process with the Scan & Go program is just one example of how Walmart Labs scales its innovations.
"I mean, we have done that time and time again with various different products," he said.
