Walmart SVP Greg Cathey on Walmart’s Transformation & AI Innovations | Live at NRF 2025

Anne Mazinga: 00:00:00

Hello, everyone, this is Omnitalk Retail.

Anne Mazinga: 00:00:02

I'm Anne Mazinga.

Chris Walton: 00:00:03

And I'm Chris Walton.

Anne Mazinga: 00:00:04

he Fusion group, booth number: 4938

Anne Mazinga: 00:00:08

Chris.

Anne Mazinga: 00:00:09

Where we will be all next.

Anne Mazinga: 00:00:11

Well, I was gonna say all week long.

Chris Walton: 00:00:13

All week long, technically, Anne, but yes, for the next three days.

Chris Walton: 00:00:15

I think you're right.

Anne Mazinga: 00:00:16

We would be.

Anne Mazinga: 00:00:17

If we were here all week long, we'd be in an empty core of a shell of the Javit Center.

Anne Mazinga: 00:00:22

We'd have to send sos.

Greg Cathy: 00:00:24

You'd be the only ones here.

Chris Walton: 00:00:25

Yeah, we'd probably be the only ones here.

Chris Walton: 00:00:26

Yeah.

Anne Mazinga: 00:00:26

Yeah.

Anne Mazinga: 00:00:27

That could be an adventure.

Anne Mazinga: 00:00:28

That could be an adventure.

Chris Walton: 00:00:28

Wherever we go, the party starts.

Chris Walton: 00:00:29

Ann.

Chris Walton: 00:00:30

Right?

Anne Mazinga: 00:00:30

That's true.

Anne Mazinga: 00:00:31

Well, let's introduce our guest who's in between us here we have Greg Cathy.

Anne Mazinga: 00:00:37

And Greg is the SVP of transformation and innovation at Walmart.

Anne Mazinga: 00:00:43

Greg, welcome to the show.

Greg Cathy: 00:00:45

Thanks for having me.

Anne Mazinga: 00:00:46

And you also have a couple of other things under your purview.

Anne Mazinga: 00:00:48

We just learned too.

Greg Cathy: 00:00:49

I do, I just sprung on y'all that I also have responsibility for asset protection and then all of our safety apparatus for Walmart us.

Anne Mazinga: 00:00:57

Just a couple more things to transform.

Chris Walton: 00:00:59

So I gotta ask you because Transformation and Innovation, that's a unique title.

Chris Walton: 00:01:04

What does it actually entail?

Chris Walton: 00:01:05

What are you in charge of when it comes to transformation?

Greg Cathy: 00:01:08

A little bit of everything.

Greg Cathy: 00:01:09

You know, transformation at Walmart is everything and the kitchen sink.

Greg Cathy: 00:01:17

So as I think most, hopefully most of your listeners know that we are people led, tech powered omnichannel retailer dedicated to saving people money so they can live better.

Greg Cathy: 00:01:29

So I start there with like people led.

Greg Cathy: 00:01:32

We're here to make technology that is going to make life easier for our customers, make it easier for our associates.

Greg Cathy: 00:01:39

One of the things that we say is for my team is we want to make sure that we're eliminating thankless tasks from our associates so that minutia, the work that really doesn't provide joy or excitement as an associate's coming to work and all with the purpose of making sure that our customers save money and have a better life.

Greg Cathy: 00:01:59

So typically we start in the field.

Greg Cathy: 00:02:03

So we are a frontline obsessed team.

Greg Cathy: 00:02:06

We're in the field, we're talking to customers, we're talking to associates.

Greg Cathy: 00:02:10

What's not working?

Greg Cathy: 00:02:11

Where do they find friction?

Greg Cathy: 00:02:13

And then we bring it back to the home office and work on solving it.

Anne Mazinga: 00:02:16

And how do those conversations go?

Anne Mazinga: 00:02:18

Like, tell us a little bit more about that.

Anne Mazinga: 00:02:20

I mean, is it like you're just Walking up to people like, hey, what could we be doing better?

Anne Mazinga: 00:02:25

Or is it like more formal than that, where they're submitting feedback via platform?

Anne Mazinga: 00:02:29

Like, how does it all work?

Greg Cathy: 00:02:30

Yeah, it's a great question.

Greg Cathy: 00:02:32

So we do have formal feedback mechanisms where they can submit it on their phone.

Greg Cathy: 00:02:37

And it's like, hey, I've got a great idea.

Greg Cathy: 00:02:39

Have you thought about this?

Greg Cathy: 00:02:40

Have you thought about that?

Greg Cathy: 00:02:42

A lot of them are not only ways for us to improve sales, but a lot of times it's.

Greg Cathy: 00:02:48

They're seeing waste in the system and so they're trying to take out waste and cost as they go along.

Greg Cathy: 00:02:53

Now the other way is we do just walk up to people and it's like, hey, how are you doing?

Greg Cathy: 00:02:58

How's everything going?

Chris Walton: 00:02:59

So like, conversations happen that way.

Greg Cathy: 00:03:01

That's exactly right.

Greg Cathy: 00:03:01

It's like, it's like if you could change one thing about your job, okay, what would you change?

Greg Cathy: 00:03:07

And they'll just start going through a whole list of things that we could improve on, which is great.

Greg Cathy: 00:03:11

We have a very open culture at Walmart and our associates feel very comfortable giving us ideas about how to make the business better.

Chris Walton: 00:03:19

Yeah, those are always the best conversations, especially at the store level.

Chris Walton: 00:03:22

You never know what answers you're gonna get.

Chris Walton: 00:03:23

And you'll get some really candid answers if you ask the questions the right way.

Greg Cathy: 00:03:26

You need to be prepared for honest and direct feedback.

Chris Walton: 00:03:29

Yes, you do.

Greg Cathy: 00:03:30

Our associates will give us honest and direct feedback.

Greg Cathy: 00:03:32

But that's the way.

Chris Walton: 00:03:33

That's what I loved about working in the stores.

Greg Cathy: 00:03:34

That's right.

Chris Walton: 00:03:35

There's no fooling around.

Greg Cathy: 00:03:36

And that's the way that you really can create transformational changes.

Chris Walton: 00:03:41

I wanna ask you about the innovation side though too.

Chris Walton: 00:03:43

Cause I wanna make sure I understand your role too.

Chris Walton: 00:03:44

What type of timeline horizons are you looking at?

Chris Walton: 00:03:47

So like.

Chris Walton: 00:03:48

Cause there's innovation for 10 years, 15 years, 3 years, this year.

Chris Walton: 00:03:51

Like, generally speaking, what type of timelines are you working towards?

Greg Cathy: 00:03:54

Yes.

Chris Walton: 00:03:55

Yes.

Chris Walton: 00:03:55

All of it.

Chris Walton: 00:03:56

All of it.

Greg Cathy: 00:03:56

Is that true?

Greg Cathy: 00:03:57

All of those, yes.

Greg Cathy: 00:03:58

So there are things that we're working on that are going to be fairly fast, let's call it a quarter, maybe two quarters, that we are rapidly prototyping, trying to get it out for our field associates to be able to use work, kick the tires on, give us feedback.

Greg Cathy: 00:04:16

And then there are things that we're working on that's probably going to be 10 years out.

Greg Cathy: 00:04:20

Okay, so.

Greg Cathy: 00:04:21

And there's everything in between.

Greg Cathy: 00:04:23

A lot of times though, it just.

Greg Cathy: 00:04:24

First of all, it depends on where the tech is and you know, where's the software?

Greg Cathy: 00:04:29

And are the people that we're either developing it with or developing it internally, are they ready to scale?

Greg Cathy: 00:04:35

But we were the whole range of timelines.

Chris Walton: 00:04:38

So one more follow up question too, because I think it's really interesting, especially for our audience of retail executives too, to understand just how you guys work.

Chris Walton: 00:04:44

So is your connection point mainly with the product teams then particularly inside the organization or who do you mostly connect with to help them with their jobs?

Greg Cathy: 00:04:51

So we operate in a four in a box model.

Greg Cathy: 00:04:54

So my team would represent the business and so we would be building use cases based on feedback and data that we're getting from the field.

Greg Cathy: 00:05:00

And then we're working with tech, our engineers, we're working with product and.

Greg Cathy: 00:05:06

And then the other really important team that we're working with is human centered design.

Greg Cathy: 00:05:10

So really thinking about it from the end user and is what we're developing, is it going to work and is it going to be simple?

Greg Cathy: 00:05:17

And I don't need owner's manual this big to be able to for our associates to figure out what's going on or our managers.

Greg Cathy: 00:05:24

So the human centered design is a great team and we rely on them heavily.

Chris Walton: 00:05:28

Great.

Anne Mazinga: 00:05:29

Okay.

Anne Mazinga: 00:05:30

Based on all those things you were just talking about, Greg, the things that you rolled out in a quarter, things that you're looking at, you know, from the last year, we'll say, what are you most proud of that you and your team tested, put into market or accomplished in the last year?

Greg Cathy: 00:05:46

So we have a, we have a platform that we call Vispic.

Greg Cathy: 00:05:50

So Vispic sets, Vispic sets on an app application that we have called me at Walmart.

Greg Cathy: 00:05:59

So all of our associates have access to this via device that we provide, a phone that we provide for our associates.

Greg Cathy: 00:06:04

They can also use it on their personal device through byod.

Greg Cathy: 00:06:08

But most of them opt in for a phone.

Greg Cathy: 00:06:10

And so with Vispic, this platform, it's basically an inventory location program.

Greg Cathy: 00:06:17

So using computer vision, we can go into a back room, we can go onto the sales floor and we can identify oldest problem and in retail, what do we own and where is it?

Greg Cathy: 00:06:27

And so in doing that it gives us a massive amount of data and signals.

Greg Cathy: 00:06:30

So one of the things we did, and this was something, if you want to talk about quarter, two quarters worth of implementation, we took, we know sometimes we have some deleted merchandise on top stock.

Greg Cathy: 00:06:44

Some stores call them Risers.

Greg Cathy: 00:06:45

Risers, yeah.

Greg Cathy: 00:06:46

We also knew we had some clearance up there.

Greg Cathy: 00:06:48

So we created filters within Vizpic.

Greg Cathy: 00:06:51

So if an associate is working all they Would have to do is take their phone out and just hold it up and it would identify.

Greg Cathy: 00:06:57

This is on clearance.

Greg Cathy: 00:06:59

This is on.

Greg Cathy: 00:06:59

This is deleted.

Greg Cathy: 00:07:00

We need to work it down.

Greg Cathy: 00:07:02

Could be on rollback and we want to make sure that we're showing the value on the side counter.

Greg Cathy: 00:07:06

Yeah, so that was, that was a really fun one.

Greg Cathy: 00:07:09

Just, just a little factoid.

Greg Cathy: 00:07:12

Last year we viz picked one point, almost 1.5 billion billion items from the back room to the sales floor.

Anne Mazinga: 00:07:23

That would have.

Anne Mazinga: 00:07:23

What would have happened?

Anne Mazinga: 00:07:25

Those items would have what?

Greg Cathy: 00:07:26

Well, 30 years ago when I started 94, I would have taken a piece of paper and a little.

Greg Cathy: 00:07:32

I.

Greg Cathy: 00:07:33

I know.

Greg Cathy: 00:07:33

Thanks, thanks.

Greg Cathy: 00:07:35

Thanks for telling me.

Greg Cathy: 00:07:36

So I would have taken a piece of cardboard and a marker and I would have went to the sales floor and I would have written down what I need and then I would have walked to the back room and looked for hours to try to find it.

Greg Cathy: 00:07:47

Now we can, we already know what's on the floor and what's in the back room so we can send that information to our associates.

Greg Cathy: 00:07:54

And so think of all the time that our associates are saving instead of walking back and forth that they can get what the customer needs from the back of house to the sales floor so that they can make sure our customers are taken care of.

Greg Cathy: 00:08:06

That's a huge, huge time saving for our associates.

Chris Walton: 00:08:11

Time saver and margin saver too at.

Greg Cathy: 00:08:13

The end of the day.

Greg Cathy: 00:08:13

Right.

Chris Walton: 00:08:14

All right.

Chris Walton: 00:08:14

So I was sleuthing your LinkedIn profile.

Chris Walton: 00:08:16

Yeah, sleuthing it.

Greg Cathy: 00:08:17

Oh, wow.

Chris Walton: 00:08:18

And I uncovered this one, this one line in your job description.

Chris Walton: 00:08:22

Actually, I think you said that you are very keen on understanding the measurements that come that are involved with measuring the success of innovation and transformation.

Chris Walton: 00:08:31

So how do you successfully measure the impact of your efforts?

Greg Cathy: 00:08:36

Love the question.

Greg Cathy: 00:08:38

What gets measured gets done.

Greg Cathy: 00:08:40

You may have heard that.

Greg Cathy: 00:08:41

So when we're developing a use case, we would work with our field operations team and we would make sure that we have been very deliberate and clear on what those KPIs are going to be for that product that we're developing.

Greg Cathy: 00:08:57

Typically there's going to be a bit of associate nps.

Greg Cathy: 00:09:03

How do they feel about the product we're developing?

Greg Cathy: 00:09:05

Customer nps.

Greg Cathy: 00:09:07

You know, in order to have happy customers, you got to have happy associates.

Greg Cathy: 00:09:10

So when we're developing something, we want to make sure that our associates like it.

Greg Cathy: 00:09:14

So we will be grading ourself on that.

Greg Cathy: 00:09:17

And then we're also looking at other operational metrics that we would put in there.

Greg Cathy: 00:09:21

The process that we go through, we Test all of our innovation in Dallas, Texas.

Chris Walton: 00:09:26

Okay.

Greg Cathy: 00:09:27

Dallas represents a majority.

Greg Cathy: 00:09:29

We can.

Greg Cathy: 00:09:30

We can carve Dallas up to represent a majority of CBSAs that we operate in, depending on the stores that we pick to test.

Greg Cathy: 00:09:37

So we test everything in Dallas and it has to be operator approved before we scale.

Greg Cathy: 00:09:44

Okay.

Greg Cathy: 00:09:44

So that's Dallas's 50.

Greg Cathy: 00:09:47

Let's call it 50 to 100 stores in that region.

Greg Cathy: 00:09:50

We would go to Dallas, we would go to that region, and then we would pause to make sure that we're getting what we've said we were going to get as a.

Greg Cathy: 00:09:59

As a series of results.

Greg Cathy: 00:10:02

After that, then we would go to one market in every region, which would be about 500 stores.

Chris Walton: 00:10:08

Okay.

Greg Cathy: 00:10:08

And you have to get to about 500 stores in our business to pick up all the edge cases, so.

Chris Walton: 00:10:13

Got it.

Chris Walton: 00:10:13

So that's a very.

Chris Walton: 00:10:14

That's a really interesting.

Chris Walton: 00:10:14

So it's a very rote process.

Chris Walton: 00:10:15

You're basically putting all your testing through one location, and then whether it's successful there determines where it goes next as part of the process.

Greg Cathy: 00:10:22

Correct.

Chris Walton: 00:10:22

That's really interesting.

Chris Walton: 00:10:23

One thing you didn't mention was roi.

Chris Walton: 00:10:25

At what point in the process does ROI come into the conversation?

Chris Walton: 00:10:28

I know that's always a tricky question.

Greg Cathy: 00:10:31

I think you know us pretty well.

Greg Cathy: 00:10:33

ROI is always as part of the conversation.

Chris Walton: 00:10:36

Is it?

Greg Cathy: 00:10:37

But it is early, early stages.

Greg Cathy: 00:10:39

Well, I mean, we have to have a business case before we're going to.

Greg Cathy: 00:10:43

Before we're going to invest.

Greg Cathy: 00:10:44

But now ROI by itself is not why we're doing it.

Greg Cathy: 00:10:48

We start with customer experience and associate experience.

Greg Cathy: 00:10:51

If you get those right, you can build a business case that is going to deliver a return for and you.

Chris Walton: 00:10:57

Can test the business case to see what the ROI could be.

Chris Walton: 00:11:00

Right.

Chris Walton: 00:11:00

I imagine you have the latitude to do that as well.

Greg Cathy: 00:11:02

Absolutely.

Chris Walton: 00:11:03

Yeah.

Chris Walton: 00:11:03

Okay.

Greg Cathy: 00:11:03

Absolutely.

Greg Cathy: 00:11:04

That's what.

Greg Cathy: 00:11:04

That's what.

Greg Cathy: 00:11:05

As we go through this process, that's what we're wanting to find out.

Chris Walton: 00:11:07

Right.

Anne Mazinga: 00:11:08

Greg, you're going to be on stage here at nrf.

Greg Cathy: 00:11:12

I am.

Anne Mazinga: 00:11:13

What are you going to be talking about?

Anne Mazinga: 00:11:15

I hope some of the things that you share with our audience.

Anne Mazinga: 00:11:17

But what are you going to be talking about specifically during that session and what are you kind of looking for the audience to.

Anne Mazinga: 00:11:22

To take away from it?

Greg Cathy: 00:11:23

The big.

Greg Cathy: 00:11:25

Hopefully.

Greg Cathy: 00:11:25

I don't want to give too much away, so I want you to tune in and watch it live.

Greg Cathy: 00:11:29

Whenever we're doing it, it's going to be a great.

Greg Cathy: 00:11:32

We're with the NCR group and so we're excited.

Greg Cathy: 00:11:34

We're Excited.

Greg Cathy: 00:11:35

And Wendy's is going to be with us, that team.

Greg Cathy: 00:11:37

So we're super excited about it.

Greg Cathy: 00:11:39

And the conversation, the big conversation is how are we leaning into generative AI?

Greg Cathy: 00:11:44

AI, large language models.

Greg Cathy: 00:11:46

We've just recently started testing this last year a program using AI and generative AI called Sidekick.

Anne Mazinga: 00:11:54

Okay.

Greg Cathy: 00:11:55

So what we want to make sure that we're doing is using all of the data that we have with inside of Walmart and helping our associates with what the next best activity or action is going to be.

Greg Cathy: 00:12:06

So I've been here 30 years, I know my way a little bit around a Walmart store, but what about someone who's been here like three months?

Greg Cathy: 00:12:15

So how do you democratize all of that learning?

Greg Cathy: 00:12:18

Always giving the associate the right to make their own decision, but giving them a little help.

Greg Cathy: 00:12:23

A sidekick, if you will, to be able to help along the way.

Anne Mazinga: 00:12:27

And what do you think is going to be most important about rolling out that technology, especially given how connected your team is to the associates and testing?

Anne Mazinga: 00:12:38

Is that something that you're going to be kind of following the same approach where you are going in, you're talking to them like, you have this Sidekick.

Anne Mazinga: 00:12:44

Have you used it?

Anne Mazinga: 00:12:45

Is it working?

Anne Mazinga: 00:12:46

Like, is it that kind of mentality?

Anne Mazinga: 00:12:48

Or like, what advice do you have for other retailers who might be looking at something like that?

Greg Cathy: 00:12:52

So we'll certainly be working hand in hand with associates as we build the tech and getting their feedback.

Greg Cathy: 00:12:59

What's working, what's not working, what are they like?

Greg Cathy: 00:13:03

But yeah, we'll also be looking in the background to see, like, what it's teaching us.

Greg Cathy: 00:13:07

One of the things that we're not doing, though, is creating any type of reporting.

Greg Cathy: 00:13:10

Okay, so we don't want any reporting because what I don't want to have happen, what the team doesn't want to have happen, is that we start to get false positives and then we're training algos on bad data.

Greg Cathy: 00:13:21

So what we say is like, Sidekick is always a force for good, so it's going to help.

Greg Cathy: 00:13:26

But there's not operational metrics that you have to click this many buttons or this, this and this.

Greg Cathy: 00:13:32

It is truly a tool using AI, generative AI, to allow our associates to understand what that next best action may be.

Anne Mazinga: 00:13:39

Okay, interesting.

Chris Walton: 00:13:40

Awesome.

Chris Walton: 00:13:41

So anything else that's really cool.

Chris Walton: 00:13:42

ons that you're working on in: 2025

Greg Cathy: 00:13:48

Well, you guys are in the Vuzion Group booth.

Greg Cathy: 00:13:52

We've spent a lot of time with Vuzion Group.

Chris Walton: 00:13:54

You have.

Greg Cathy: 00:13:55

They're a great, great partner of ours.

Chris Walton: 00:13:57

Yeah.

Chris Walton: 00:13:58

Big announcement recently.

Greg Cathy: 00:13:59

A little bit.

Greg Cathy: 00:14:00

Little bit.

Greg Cathy: 00:14:01

It was all stores.

Chris Walton: 00:14:02

Right.

Greg Cathy: 00:14:02

It blew my LinkedIn completely through the roof.

Greg Cathy: 00:14:05

Yeah.

Greg Cathy: 00:14:06

Please follow.

Greg Cathy: 00:14:06

Shameless.

Greg Cathy: 00:14:08

Yeah.

Greg Cathy: 00:14:08

So we, we announced Smash that subscribe button under.

Greg Cathy: 00:14:17

Yeah.

Greg Cathy: 00:14:18

So we've, we've made some really big announcements with Fusion.

Greg Cathy: 00:14:21

We have leaned in.

Greg Cathy: 00:14:22

We announced at shareholder shareholders meeting in June of last year, they were rolling to half the fleet, 2,600 stores.

Greg Cathy: 00:14:30

So we're super excited about the partnership we have with them.

Greg Cathy: 00:14:33

They, it's, they're an innovative company.

Greg Cathy: 00:14:38

They're being a great partner with us and working through these use cases.

Greg Cathy: 00:14:43

And as you talk about, like a thankless task, changing a price.

Chris Walton: 00:14:46

Oh, my God, I've done it.

Greg Cathy: 00:14:47

Right.

Greg Cathy: 00:14:47

Me too.

Greg Cathy: 00:14:48

And it's like there are other things that I could be doing as an associate to add value to my customers or my fellow associates other than, like, boop, there's other things we can be doing.

Chris Walton: 00:14:59

That's what the ROI question's so funny, because if you've done that job and just telling the store employees that they never have to do it again, while it's not measurable, the impact on their happiness is just completely immeasurable.

Greg Cathy: 00:15:09

It's 100% unbelievable.

Greg Cathy: 00:15:11

Happy associates, happy customers.

Chris Walton: 00:15:12

Exactly.

Chris Walton: 00:15:13

Exactly.

Chris Walton: 00:15:13

Right.

Chris Walton: 00:15:14

All right.

Chris Walton: 00:15:14

And well, thank you, Greg.

Chris Walton: 00:15:16

That was wonderful.

Chris Walton: 00:15:17

Love that conversation.

Chris Walton: 00:15:18

Loved it.

Greg Cathy: 00:15:18

Thanks for having me.

Chris Walton: 00:15:19

Yeah, no, it's great to have you.

Chris Walton: 00:15:20

And we'll be back again later today with another interview.

Chris Walton: 00:15:24

the Fusion Group booth, booth: 4938

Chris Walton: 00:15:26

All day long.

Chris Walton: 00:15:27

Stop on by if you want to see us, if you want to see the cool tech on display.

Chris Walton: 00:15:30

And until next time, be careful out there.