What does Walmart’s Chief Product Officer do? In his own words, “He acts as a hub to bring (people from different teams) together — whether it’s people from design, engineering, or business — to solve customer problems that meet company goals and outcomes at scale.” So if there’s a big project that requires a lot of different teams, Alferness is likely to help lead it.

Alferness joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and talked about his approach to the role, Walmart’s latest product updates, and his philosophy on exciting new technologies like artificial intelligence. He went into detail about how he approaches big product launches that cross departments, as well as the data and research he uses when launching a new project.

The core idea behind all this is that new products must meet a real need. When it comes to AI, for example, the product cannot exist for its own sake. In fact, in his opinion, a new AI project should not even have the technology in its name.

“From my perspective, it’s not important to say, ‘Hey, we built this or that product that now has AI on it,'” he said. “I don’t think customers care one way or the other. I think they just want their problem solved.”

Here are some highlights from the conversation, lightly edited for clarity.

Use of all forms of customer data
“We’re taking information from our customers from all angles and all dimensions available to us — things like customer surveys, feedback forms, emails to myself, to the team, to my managers, to (Walmart Inc. President and CEO) Doug McMillan. All of those things are being taken and incorporated. We’re looking at it. We’re making sure we’re either thinking about the challenges they’re facing or prioritizing some of the gaps they’ve noticed. But I would say importantly, we’re looking at it in a very nuanced way in terms of metrics. For example, when we look at search optimization, it’s not really about: How do we optimize just the total revenue or GMV that we get from search? It’s about: How do we satisfy the query, the question, the intent that the customer typed into the search bar? How do we satisfy that in a way that builds trust and keeps our customers coming back and asking us those kinds of questions over and over again?”

Updating search is the next frontier for AI
“One of our focuses is leveraging artificial intelligence — big language models, all these new technologies — in a way that really magically solves our customers’ problems. Just a couple of examples for you: On the search side of the world, we’ve been working really, really hard to do a number of things to better understand intent: what a customer is looking for. And we’re reflecting that in a number of different product launches, things that we’ve launched recently. One of those things is guided search. So instead of having the customer do all the work of figuring out what they want, breaking down their task into a single query and sending that to us, you just come to the search bar and tell me what it’s about: ‘I’m planning a birthday party for a seven-year-old who’s really interested in dinosaurs.’ OK, I guess you want some dinosaur-themed cups and plates, and maybe these would be matching balloons, and these could be matching toys for others to bring to the party, etc.”

The customer doesn’t care about AI
“From my perspective, it’s not important to say, ‘Hey, we’ve built this or that product that now has AI built into it.’ We can solve problems. We can make it easier for customers to find that unique, special product they’re looking for in a sea of ​​hundreds of millions of products in our catalog. AI can help us make your selection of that perfect ottoman different than my selection of that perfect ottoman or that perfect red shirt or chair or whatever. And if you do it right, you shouldn’t brand it as AI. You should just bring the magic to customers. They’ll be delighted and keep coming back to it. And so I don’t think customers care either way. I think they just want their problem solved.”