Seamless Xtra’s Micah Edwards speaks to Matthieu Houle, Chief Information Officer at ALDO Group about the AI revolution, the benefits of having a physical store in the e-commerce era and how technology leaders can embrace both innovation and human power. Watch the full interview with edited transcript below.
Matthieu, if there is one thing that’s for sure, I believe it’s that the AI revolution is fully underway at the Aldo Group. And when I do my research around the industry, there’s definitely a lot of buzzwords at the moment, Web 3.0, AI and VR and then obviously Metaverse. With that being said why do you think AI is the leading frontier of innovation and what are what is its impact on the retail and e-commerce industry?
When I talk about AI, I like to start with what we see as the success of Aldo Group. It is still and will always be human people and their human qualities such as empathy, creativity and the emotion part of it. So if you think about employees in the store. The shoe designers or the e-commerce marketing manager, they have their human qualities and we strongly believe that this is going to be the success of all those groups. So when I talk about AI, what I see is a way to give them superpowers to help them do their jobs. It’s not something that’s going to replace them, but more how can we use technology and AI to help them focus more on their human qualities. There are big areas where I think it’s pretty obvious where AI is strong, but in the context of retailers, I see it really in three areas.
The first one is automation and just going faster. So instead of using my time as a human to do repetitive tasks, I can ask my little AI friend to do product descriptions. Even if its not the end product, that helps with productivity,
Next, is prediction. Obviously when you look at retail, if you could predict the future of sales, it’ll be quite a great superpower in retail. So the ability for AI to crunch data of different sources and try to predict sales, is something you cannot match. We’re spending a lot of time in the area of demand forecasting. So on top of usual sales we’re able to add weather, consumer sentiment, by region, by store, by SKU.
And the third part is as a creative assistant. This one is a bit more emerging. But definitely when you think about creating a store design or creating shoes or your display marketing campaigns, there’s a lot of assistance that Gen AI can do for the more creative people.
Now, apart from AI, what advice would you give retailers who want to have a really strong online operation to stay ahead of the competition?
For the retailers that are coming more from the physical stores what I’d like to start with is see what’s the differentiator in the experience from the pureplay players. We see a lot of pureplay players now starting to think, maybe I need that differentiator too and actually opening physical stores. And the first one is branding. With a physical store, there are a lot of eyeballs, people walking by and walking in and interacting with your brand in that unmatched kind of experience. So I think the stores themselves are a big brand asset that you could use to differentiate yourself.
The second one is in the era of e-commerce or digital commerce, stores can play a role of an e-commerce pub, and that’s what we do a lot at Aldo. So it makes it easy to go and pick up from the store, return in store, try on some shoes. Sometimes you may like to try them on and then have them shipped to your home. So you have to think how can you use store associates to differentiate your brand and your experience versus pureplay.
Can talk me through your thoughts then of becoming that leader that embraces innovation but still embraces human power?
I have strong sentiment about how to be an innovator and I think it starts with what’s the business outcome that you’re trying to achieve? It’s important to remember that I’m not necessarily looking at these as a technologist.
And a good example would be NFTs, Meta and Blockchain, which is all super interesting. They all have use cases, but is it going to help Aldo in the short to medium term? I don’t think so. AI is now obvious and it’s a given but I do this not because of the technology thinking. I do this because of the business thinking. So when I think about the human beings, I think how can I equip them with superpowers to better do their job? AI is that.
So the first thing I think as a technologist, as a leader of technology is to be a business leader, which means I need to know what’s on the business side and coming up on the technology side. So I need to spend a lot of time with the people knowing the business.Just spending time with the people gives you a lot of ideas that are innovations that will generate business outcomes. That’s the first part of it – to find a fit for that technology in the business.
The second part is you need a team and you need an IT culture that is different than the traditional mindset. Often, the first reaction for tools like Gen AI can be that it’s dangerous and let’s block access and let’s protect what we have. But if people are going to be using it anyway you need a different approach. One of things I’ve done since I’ve been CIO at Aldo is I’ve created squads that are aligned with business capabilities. So we don’t talk about software names. We talk about capabilities, so supply chain and we have a small squad that’s dedicated to solve problems for them and create opportunities with them.
Part of what we’re doing now is we’re going to give them training and the tools to understand how to give these superpowers to their partners instead of creating just an AI team on the side. So I think two things; one is ensuring that the technology matches the opportunities and the second one is creating a different culture and mindset in the IT team.
Matthieu, what are your final thoughts on where this is headed and how technology leaders can facilitate greater use of these tools?
I think we’re just at the beginning of the revolution when you combine the machine learning side of it with Gen AI together. It’s super exciting but a bit scary at the same time. I think for people in similar technology leadership roles there’s a couple of things.
First, is be the ambassador. So part of what I do a lot is give people different tools to try get acquainted at the executive level. Don’t be afraid to try stuff. And spend a lot of time thinking how you are going to use it at your company. There may be a lot of use cases but we cannot build all of this internally. So the traditional buy versus build discussion is very important at this point too.
Matthieu Houle will be speaking at Seamless Middle East on 14-16 May, 2024.
