. King, who joined Walmart in 2011, had been overseeing much of Walmart's digital strategy and also heading up Walmart Labs, the company's technology arm. With his departure, Fiona Tan, senior vice president of customer technology, stepped up into an "elevated role," according to Walmart.
The inside of Walmart's Intelligent Retail Lab in Levittown, New York, where the retailer is testing a slew of new technology.Just a few weeks ago, Walmart opened an Intelligent Retail Lab, also referred to as IRL, at one of its Neighborhood Maket locations, which are smaller than a typical Walmart store and just sell groceries, in Levittown, New York.
"I think what we are expecting to come out of the lab are tools and products ... to scale across the chain," Mike Hanrahan, CEO and founder of IRL, said in a recent interview with CNBC. "We think of this space as an AI factory ... I think [artificial intelligence] will be as transformative to retail as e-commerce has been."
Hanrahan explained what's being tested in Levittown will be "transformative" in the sense that some of these tools should help Walmart — across all of its stores — cut down time spent on mundane tasks and put employees into more customer-facing roles, like greeting shoppers and answering any questions they might have while browsing. "We are very much on the start of this journey," he said. "We want to make sure we are on the vanguard.
IRL was born out of Walmart's tech incubator hub Store No. 8, which is also working on virtual-reality start-up
But now they need to raise prices because they cant cover the tariffs from their good friend the 🍊🤡. 😑