Retailer Walmart is focused on technology, with a 25,000-strong IT team. Enterprise Business Services is essentially the IT department of a retail giant. Led by Senior Vice President David Glick, the department’s role is to support employees, or “employees” to use Walmart’s terminology.
“When you turn on your laptop, it’s part of your enterprise business services,” Glick says. “Doing quarterly financial results is part of enterprise business services.”
The department also handles payroll calculations. “We touch the lives of our employees on a daily basis. We lead in all technologies that take care of our employees,” he says.
Mr. Glick began his career at Amazon 25 years ago, helping establish infrastructure and fulfillment centers. Reflecting on this, he says: “It’s funny, but 25 years ago nobody wanted to set up fulfillment centers because supply chains weren’t cool.”
He moved into software as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the public cloud began to emerge. “At the time, I had an opportunity to move from infrastructure to software, and the boss who hired me said, “We have a lot of people who can write code.” What I needed was someone who could get things done. It’s the human resources.” That’s always stuck with me.
“We were able to move to Amazon’s automated system to order inventory and set prices.” In Glick’s experience, this works not only for operations but also for enterprise business services. .
When asked how Walmart competes for technology talent with the likes of Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft, Glick said: . We are one of the largest retailers and a major player in technology. Walmart is like the largest technology company, and our technology is used by millions of employees every day. ”
For lower-level positions, Glick employs recruiters who trawl LinkedIn to conduct searches. For more senior hires, look at your network. “It could be someone you’ve worked with in the past or someone who was introduced to you. I’ve met a lot of great people and built a great network,” he says. .
build or buy
Glick said that under the leadership of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Suresh Kumar, Walmart has decided to build software in-house rather than sending out a request for proposal (RFP) and bringing in a software provider. He said he had moved.
He says many off-the-shelf products can’t meet the scale businesses need. “You need to be able to customize exactly what you need, and you need to be resilient and stay up 100%.”
“Generative AI gets talked about every day. You read about it on Twitter, you hear people saying it’s going to change the world and reduce headcount by 30%. But at Walmart… I’m actually trying to use it.”
David Glick, Walmart
Glick said Walmart is investing a lot of money and engineer time in migrating from mainframes to public clouds and its own on-premises clouds. “We have a platform called the Walmart Cloud Native platform that allows us to quickly deploy software by abstracting what cloud you’re using, whether you’re using a mainframe or something like that. “I’m trying to make it possible,” he says. “That allows us to move more quickly with advances in technology.”
One of those technologies is artificial intelligence (AI).
Looking at the industry-wide buzz surrounding AI, Glick said: “Obviously, generative AI is being talked about every day, and you can read about it on Twitter. You’re hearing people say it’s going to change the world and reduce the number of employees by 30%. But Walmart What we’re trying to do is actually use it.”
Glick said there is a two-pronged approach to generative AI within Walmart’s Enterprise Business Services team.
“One of the things we want to do is select an application from the top down and see how it works,” he says. That’s why the company has developed an application to help power its employee benefits help desk. It works by listening to your employees’ questions and helping your helpdesk agents provide answers. “Who’s better at memorizing a 300-page bonus guide? A computer or a human?”
Glick said the company is also taking a bottom-up approach to generative AI by “crowdsourcing generative AI ideas.” Walmart has introduced his AI assistant as part of its app, offering what Glick considers a “safe and intellectually protected way” to try things out. “We can monitor these queries and see what the AI is being used for. This tells us what is important to our users,” he says.
This tells Walmart’s Enterprise Business Services team which specialized features to focus on. Security and protection of a company’s intellectual property (IP) was found to be “very important”.
Walmart uses both public cloud providers and its own generative AI technology stack. “For us, it’s most important that user data, customer data, and IP stay behind the firewall and not be used to train other datasets, so we spend a lot of time figuring out how to do that.” he says.
Effectively, this means that Walmart must work closely with public cloud providers to ensure that commercially sensitive data remains within its internal network. But the company also runs its own graphics processing units (GPUs) for his AI inside Walmart’s data centers.
As time goes on, Glick believes public cloud providers will soon need to figure out how to protect their IP. “We are at the cutting edge of generative AI, so we are working closely with both cloud providers to ensure that our IP is not leaked between what is in the guardrails and what they are doing. “It’s in the public domain,” he says.
Perhaps the most interesting takeaway from my conversation with Walmart’s Glick was his recognition that the industry doesn’t have all the answers. Because off-the-shelf software cannot scale to the level that Walmart needs, and because public cloud providers’ generated AI services have limitations, Walmart builds and manages its own enterprise systems and AI infrastructure. I needed to.