Dollar General's AI Leadership Move | Fast Five Shorts
Dollar General has appointed Travis Nixon as SVP of Artificial Intelligence, tasking him with using AI to optimize supply chain, store operations, and merchandising. But how long before every retailer has a Chief AI Officer—and is this even the right approach?
Waqas Khan delivers a masterclass on why standalone AI roles may follow the same fate as Chief Digital Officers, most of whom lasted less than two years before the role dissolved. The panel discusses why Dollar General's SVP approach (rather than C-suite) may be smarter, which executive should oversee AI transformation, and why AI needs to be embedded across all functions rather than siloed.
Sponsored A&M Consumer and Retail Group, Mirakl, Ocampo Capital, Infios, and Quorso.
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Transcript
Dollar General has named Travis Nixon as its senior Vice president of Artificial Intelligence optimization.
Speaker A:According to Retail Dive, Nixon is tasked with leading Dollar General's quote, business process management initiatives, end quote, by using AI to promote optimization across areas such as supply chain, store operations and merchandising.
Speaker A:Nixon most recently served as the head of AI for Dropbox's security division and previously held other leadership roles at Meta and Microsoft and Waqas.
Speaker A:How long before every retailer has a chief AI officer?
Speaker B:So before I answer this AI question, I'd like to remind all of us about another trend.
Speaker B:A few years ago it was called the Chief Digital Officer and a whole bunch of companies went out and there's some statistics about more than half the companies at one point had a Chief Digital officer.
Speaker B:And now if you look back, you will discover that very few companies have those roles left.
Speaker B:And usually if either those roles are tacked onto somebody's other responsibility.
Speaker B:So you'll be, you know, you're the chief merchant plus the chief Digital officer, or you're a CIO and the chief.
Speaker B:So there's, so it's because the problem with these standalone roles is that these individuals are dependent on other executives, other business partners to actually deliver, deliver on what they're promising.
Speaker B:They don't own the infrastructure, they don't own the application, they don't own the store operations.
Speaker B:So for each one of them to have an impact, they need to work with somebody else.
Speaker B:And, and as they do that, they, they, they find that it's harder to do than, than before.
Speaker B:There was a report that was published by, a few years ago, I, I want to say by a World Economic Forum, and they took the, the CDO title and they said, okay, you know, by the way, the, the lifespan of a CDO was less than two years eventually.
Speaker B:So they call it.
Speaker B:So they start with the chief dazzling officer, then this person becomes a chief disconnected officer, then this person becomes a chief depressed officer, and then they exit the company.
Speaker B:So I don't, I don't want to say that AI will, will go through the same cycle, but I think we have to be careful because AI will become part of the business it is in.
Speaker B:It has to be in the business.
Speaker B:So everybody has to be aware of AI.
Speaker B:Everybody has to be, you know, receptive to the technology ideas that are coming through it and sort of permeating the business.
Speaker B:That's how this will last.
Speaker B:I think we are going through a phase in which these roles will be effective.
Speaker B:I think they'll raise awareness.
Speaker B:I think they'll.
Speaker B:And eventually These roles will get absorbed inside the organization.
Speaker B:Your chief merchant has to know how to plan using AI.
Speaker B:You know, the merchandising planning has to be enabled by AI and the merchant who is responsible for it will do it naturally.
Speaker B:So the standalone drone exists until it becomes, quote unquote, a transformation job.
Speaker B:And at some point it goes away.
Speaker B:So that's my sense that I think it'll be fashionable and effective for a period of time, but I don't see this lasting for more than five years.
Speaker A:Yeah, that's a really interesting point of view.
Speaker A:Akash.
Speaker A:Chris, how do you feel about this?
Speaker A:I mean, do you think that then should companies be hiring this role?
Speaker A:Should they be using consultants to come in and be the chief AI officer to kind of embed what that those practices, those AI practices across the organization like Wakash is talking about?
Speaker C:Well, and this is why I love doing this show, because I never know when I'm going to learn something that I've never, ever thought about.
Speaker C:And Wakash just totally nailed it for me because he's 100% right.
Speaker C:And so if I ever get asked this question again, I'm going to say what he said and what I think.
Speaker C:And the reason I say that is I think Dollar General listening to Wakash, is taking the right approach.
Speaker C:They're making him an svp.
Speaker C:They're not giving him the chief officer title like we saw from Lululemon when we talked about Lululemon doing this a few months ago.
Speaker C:Because he's right.
Speaker C:They're going to be on an island.
Speaker C:And you have to have the support of someone in that C suite that's overseeing you to help you get the work done that you need to get done to create the transformation in the organization that needs to happen.
Speaker C:And so that's the right approach and it's probably putting it in the hands.
Speaker C:So the key thing to me is actually, who in the C suite deserves the responsibility for overseeing the AI and overseeing that person?
Speaker C:That's the key question.
Speaker C:And who's going to be the one most equipped to do that?
Speaker C:And then you have to ask yourself, do I have that right person in my C suite?
Speaker C:Because if I don't, then I probably need to make a change and still make a hire too.
Speaker C:So that's, that's.
Speaker C:And I've.
Speaker C:Thank you, Wakash, because I've never thought about that.
Speaker C:And I think you're dead right.
Speaker C:That's exactly the way you got to approach this.
Speaker C:Otherwise you're going to see the situation like you described before.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Kelly, how, how do you think about this?
Speaker D:Yeah, I would really echo a lot of what Wakash shared.
Speaker D:I think from a leadership standpoint, maybe there's a temporary period of CIAI titles popping up, but really what's going to be important is every functional area of the business needs to figure out how they can apply AI to their own space.
Speaker D:Whether it's, you know, back office becoming more efficient.
Speaker D:You know, there are just hundreds and hundreds of applications that can be used.
Speaker D:And then of course there's the forward facing consumer end.
Speaker D:So it needs to be embedded across the whole business.
Speaker D:So maybe it's not even a C level role, but some kind of guiding principles how we think about AI, you know, educating the organ on capabilities and even like letting SMEs arise in each of the different functional areas so they can figure out how to deploy within their teams more from just an operational standpoint will be really important in the next few years.
Speaker D:But I, I don't see it becoming a long term leadership function because it, you know, it's even almost a channel at this point.
Speaker D:So you, you don't have a separate Chief Retail officer, chief E Comm officer, chief AI or it needs to be integrated.
Speaker C:When I look back at my career too, and I think about how, you know, retailers approach the E commerce transformation, to Wakasha's point, they siloed it off and had they instead said, okay, digital is now the responsibility of the chief merchant, would the industry have transformed faster if more people had taken that approach?
Speaker C:My hunch is yes, they would.
Speaker D:Exactly.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:I mean, I think, I think it goes back to what we were talking about for me at least two weeks ago when all the layoffs happened.
Speaker A:We have not done a restructuring yet at companies that resemble the impact that AI is having on how work is done and the right combination of leadership and teams that we need in order to support working in this way.
Speaker A:And I, so I think whether that's an internal person or that's an external, you know, consulting group that is coming in, bringing your teams up to speed and educating them on how to deploy AI in their various areas, I think the most important qualifications of this person is going to be getting the teams to think together or creating like you're saying, Kelly, that a group of SMEs or even, you know, it goes back to the days of, of like what are these, these teams that are kind of trying to accomplish one task and who's the collective group of people who can help kind of set up a plan that doesn't break it down by silos like you're talking about, Chris, and really is trying to think about how are we making decisions as an organization together using this technology that can continue to fuel the growth of our organization.
Speaker A:And I think that's, that's something that a lot of the retailers right now are dealing with and I think are going to continue to, to make some, some missteps, make some mistakes.
Speaker A:They're going to have to let people go and hire people back in order to kind of figure out what the right mix is to be successful here.
