00:00 brian
When I pulled the photo out of the slide deck, it was a photo of a flashy, flashy-looking robot. And I joked this morning on X that Walmart is now a tech company. The company moved from the New York Stock Exchange to the Nasdaq for listing. Walmart is a technology company that also sells eggs, produce, bananas, and a variety of other food and miscellaneous goods. What big technology investments are you making this year and how will AI change your business this year?
00:27 Speaker B
Well, I would put AI at the top of the list. Well, we have our own platform for shopping. We call it Sparky. And we rolled this out in the last quarter and saw some very encouraging results related to that. For one, about half of app users engage with Sparky in some way. And we can see that among users shopping on Sparky, their basket size is about 35% larger. That’s because the search results users get are more contextual, more personalized, and more relevant to what they’re looking for. So we’re excited to continue to roll this out in the coming quarters.
01:21 brian
How’s it going, I think there’s an AI component here as well, but how do you get items to people’s residences, uh, homes faster, because it’s not just about Walmart. There are some competitors of yours as well, let’s just say. So Amazon is doing the same thing. But how does Walmart do it? I think delivery speeds have improved dramatically over the past 12 to 18 months.
01:52 Speaker B
Yes, that’s a great question, Brian. And I think that’s something that a lot of people probably don’t emphasize enough when they look at things like agent commerce and channel shifts. Achieving truly great end-to-end in the retail industry is extremely complex. Knowing where your inventory is and knowing when it’s available to your customers and members is critical to the entire process. But what we’ve done is essentially use our 5,000 stores in the United States as distribution nodes for our customers. So you can get the products you need from many stores within 30 minutes. So we’re seeing delivery speeds continue to improve. And what we’re finding is that when you go from a two-day promise to a one-day promise, you see a huge increase in conversions. And even if you change from one day to the same day, you will see a similar increase.
