In a special conversation to CNBC-TV18, Suresh Kumar, EVP, CTO & CDO of Walmart said, “COVID-19 has been made very heavily on our minds, whether it is today, last few months, it is really a personal concern for us and it doesn't matter whether you are in India, whether in other parts of the world.”

On business challenges, Kumar said, “COVID has been a complex business challenge for every industry and that has really been at the forefront of everything that we are doing, keeping our associates, our customers, our family, our loved one safe. There is a strong obligation in terms of making sure that everybody is going to be safe while the business continues to flourish. So millions of people are counting on Walmart every day, even more so since the pandemic started. So you have to make sure that our supply chains are running properly. Our customers are feeling good.”

On technology adoption, he said, “So the way I see it, is that a lot of disruption in retail had actually already started even before COVID, I like to think the initial disruption was actually driven by Walmart, way back in the 80s, through supply chain. You can say that e-commerce was another major disruptor and that was enabled by the availability of broadband access to the internet, but these things come in waves.”

He added, “What COVID really did is it accelerated it. What we saw was consumer adoption of things like our pickup or delivery service, all of these things accelerated significantly when the pandemic struck. Things that would have normally taken years, happened in a few months. So that is the sort of the framing of how technology, COVID all of these things are starting to come together. Specifically, with respect to our customers, we see our customers starting to adopt new technologies and new ways, a lot faster.”

“You can imagine, as we started rolling things out, whether it is around our pharmacy, pickup, or whether it is our COVID-testing, these things were adopted very quickly. So one of the key things is really around speed, and how we bring innovation to our customers and to our associates as quickly as possible.”

On adopting innovation Kumar said, “Before COVID, we started a journey of building a technology stack that is going to allow us to innovate and to roll things out very quickly. At the base, we started building out a hybrid cloud that takes the best of public cloud and our private data centres and that is the stack on which we are starting to build all of our technologies, this is just one way of doing it.”

On investment in building infrastructure, Kumar said, “So data is the new oil. Think about the amount of information that we can process, given all of the new technologies that are starting to roll out. The cloud is really enabling us to be able to harness data at a scale that we have never been able to do so. So data is at the heart of driving this transformation, but in terms of how we do it, I thought I always said about the hybrid cloud. We are trying to do is we are trying to invest in those areas where we have an outsize impact while we are continuing to modernise, and while we are continuing to drive innovation.”

For full interview, watch accompanying video...

(Edited by : Aditi Gautam)

First Published:Aug 29, 2021 11:10 AM IST