Hi, my name is Matt Marcotte. I am the Senior Vice President of Retail, Consumer Goods, and Manufacturing Industry Advisors here at Salesforce, and we are so excited to spend the next 45 minutes with you talking about a topic that is near and dear to everyone's heart right now, and that is Generative AI and its impact on retail. Now, we have quite a great lineup with lots of people who are, I'm looking at right now, that will be sharing some incredible information with you. But before we do that, it would not be a Salesforce meeting if we did not talk about the fact that we're a publicly traded company. So please, please, please, make all of your purchasing decisions of products and services based on things that are currently available. All right? Cool. Now, the important part, which is to say thank you. First, thank you to NRF for putting on this incredible, incredible meeting every year and for inviting us. Thank you to all of you for spending the next 45 minutes with us. We hope it is a valuable time, and you'll be able to take away a lot that you'll be able to apply to your businesses. Thank you to our customers, our partners, and our employees. Honestly, your success is our biggest priority, so we take that very, very seriously. Okay, now, I know this is a new idea, and you probably haven't heard this before, but we're in a new world. Shocking, I know, right? Think about how different your jobs are than they were two years ago. Think about how different they are than they probably were six months ago, right? We know it's a very challenging time in the world, a very challenging time in retail, but still incredibly exciting. However, we know there are a lot of things that are challenging the ability to be successful. Some of those things like inflation, supply chain disruptions, shrinking budgets, inventory strains, labor disruptions. I swear to God, this is the only negative slide we have. Never mind the proliferation of data that's coming from all of the new technology and sources of customer information. It is a more than a full-time job just to try and figure out how to rationalize, manage, and activate that data. So one more very interesting statistic when you think about trying to do those last two things that I just said, on average, retailers are using 44 systems to manage the customer experience, and 71% of retail systems are disconnected. So we talk about being able to connect with our customer and drive results, it's only getting more and more challenging. So what we're going to do is to talk for the next 45 minutes about how we, as a retail community, can actually think about what to do to not only address these issues, but to also figure out ways to drive more growth, more profitability, and ultimately, and most importantly, better customer experiences. So what do we have in store today? The AI revolution. I mean, honestly, we know that anyone that wants to have a meeting that people attend, just put the letters AI in front of it, everyone's really important, wants to be part of that. So we know it's everywhere. We're going to talk about the impact on retail and share our latest research about how consumers are being impacted, as well as business realities. Number two, we'll talk about the AI playbook. Everyone in this room I know is already either there as far as how important AI is or potentially even testing some things. But we're going to talk about the steps you should all take or potentially we see, the steps you should take today to prepare yourself for the future. And then finally, retail trailblazers. I am looking at two incredible leaders right in front of me, who I will have the distinct pleasure of interviewing later on, people who, like you, do it every single day, that will share with us how they're actually using AI in their businesses, how they're thinking about it, and obviously, what they're excited about for the future. Hopefully, this sounds like a good use of your time. I'm going to stop talking and actually bring up our first real expert, good friend of mine, Rob Garf, the GM and VP of Retail at Salesforce, to kick us off. Give it up for Matt, fellow Bostonian and friend. Boston! Here we are. I gotta tell you, I'm still buzzing from yesterday and the Retail Orphan Initiative event, where we raised money for kids in need. We had Darryl McDaniels from Run-DMC talk about his journey from foster care to icon in the rap and our world in general. By the way, later today, just in a little while, we're going to hear from Marc Benioff in a fireside chat with John Furner from Walmart. In the meantime, I hope to keep the energy and excitement up by talking about the AI revolution, especially how it impacts the customer experience. If you're one of the, I don't know, 180 million people who have tested out generative AI with the likes of ChatGPT, this isn't gonna be a lot of news in terms of impact on your personal life and your business life. By the way, it's also not new. We've been at this at Salesforce for the better part of 10 years with predictive AI, and that's why today, we generate 200 billion recommendations every day. Of course, all the buzz now is around generative AI, how to create productivity, how to create efficiency, oh, but also how to impact the customer experience. We'll hit autonomous types of AI when your agents are talking to other agents to order pizzas at 12:00 A.M. because they know you're going to be hungry, and of course, artificial general intelligence... You know what? We're just at the beginning, but it is also having so much impact already. According to our research in our Shopping Index at Salesforce, 17% of all sales online during the holiday season, November and December, were influenced by AI. Think about that, 17% of all your sales. All right, so as we think about this, it's not just an AI revolution, it's a data revolution. It's a skills revolution, right? It's an organizational revolution, and most importantly, it's a customer experience revolution, including trust. So many of you are testing and learning and inspiring from your artificial intelligence initiatives, and why that's so important as it relates to the customer experience is today, consumers traverse nine different touch points in any given shopping experience. That's why 58% of retail marketers are using GenAI for product creative. We have a customer who has reduced their new product introduction process from two weeks down to two hours, and I mentioned that 17% of sales over the holiday season. For Cyber Week alone, $51 billion globally was influenced by AI. And don't forget about service as well. 88% of service decision makers have increased their use. It's not just for chatbots, and oh, by the way, it's not just in the call center. It's bringing this service into the physical store. So your frontline workers, your store associates, aren't just focused on the checkout process, which is about speed and efficiency, but the check-in process, where you can engage and learn and ultimately break down the friction between inspiration and purchase. And finally, what we're seeing because of it being an AI revolution, there's a 2x increase in the use of data to personalize engagement. That's why you're seeing, in large part, a big uptick in loyalty programs, whether they're being revamped or spun up for the first time. The ability to have a value exchange by learning more about the consumer and then using that to drive personalized and frictionless experiences. All right, here's my wah-wah slide. I'm sorry, Matt, I had to come to the table with something here, just to keep us here in check. There is a gap that has emerged. On one hand, we all are in... Well, we anticipate a vast majority of retailers are increasing their investment in AI. I mean, let's just see by a show of hands, how many of you increased your investments in AI and plan to this year? Yeah, many of you have, but on the other side, us as shoppers, as consumers, there's a distrust. About half of us don't trust AI. Why is that? Privacy issues, data control issues, hallucinogenics, not just hallucinogenics, hallucinations, but that could be part of it too. Toxicity and bias. There's a trust gap that has emerged. You know what? That's why I've been talking to hundreds and hundreds of retailers around the world, and they are talking about AI. What we've done is we've correlated all of this. We've seen patterns, we've seen themes, and what it comes down to is every retailer needs an AI strategy now. What are those themes? Let me walk you through that today. First of all, focus on the customer experience. We were holding our retail customer advisory board just a couple of months ago this summer, and there was a nice, healthy debate around: Is generative AI for bottom-line improvement or top-line growth? Really, what it came down to in an agreement was it's all about the customer experience. Thinking about the customer, working backwards to understand every day, how are you going to solve problems on their behalf? The second piece is around data. This is a data revolution. Data isn't new. Let's face it, we've been collecting data since the advent of the digital cash register in the mid-1970s. We've been understanding the product. In many cases, we've been understanding the people and the loyal shoppers who have been traversing our touch points, but we haven't done a great job of collating that data, aggregating that data, making sense of the data, and ultimately activating that data. And by the way, generative AI consumes a lot of data. The most important data is your own. What you know about the consumer, their preferences, their profile, their shopping behavior, service queries and history. Taking that, coupling that with your product data, the attributes, the style, the color, the brands, and that Venn diagram comes together to create magic in turning that data into action. You also must embed AI in the flow of work. What do I mean by that? Well, according to our research, let's just look at the store alone. I grew up in the store, so I have a very big bias towards empowering our biggest brand ambassador. Today, according to our research, they have to log in to 12 different systems on a daily basis to do their job. So this isn't about opening up a whole new user interface, but it's about embedding it in the flow of work, whether that's at the headquarters or that is in the front line within your stores. We must keep humans in the loop. Almost anybody I talk to, it's not about displacing the human, but it's using digital and AI to humanize the digital experience. If you think about what Gucci is doing with their Gucci 9 service center, they are using AI. They were actually customer zero with Salesforce to be able to create scale, create consistency, to ultimately empower their service advisors to uplift and upskill to be digital advisors. And finally, we must prioritize practical use cases. We can't just look at every shiny object. Again, we need to go back to solving a problem on behalf of the customer. Just over the summer, leading into the holiday, we had the executives from Ralph Lauren in our offices around the corner in Bryant Park, and they challenged us, rightfully so: What can they do this holiday season to have an impact? And we rolled up our sleeves and realized what can be done today. You could also look at Boot Barn. I don't know if you've been in Boot Barn lately, but they actually have what they call a Bandit, which is an AI-generated digital tool to help people find the products they want. John Hazen, their Chief Digital Officer, he's always had the mantra of, "Let's not let technology get in the way and in between the customer and the sale and the product. Let's make sure we can break down that friction," and that's what he's testing out right now. All right, just really quickly before we keep on moving on. Salesforce has been at this for some time now, about a year, and I, being part of Salesforce for the last eight years, have not seen a dramatic pivot like I saw last February and March. We really recalibrated our organization to focus on AI. Why? Because when you bring together AI with data, with the applications embodied in CRM, along with trust, it creates magic. So for marketing, we're helping with that email creation. Commerce, you know, one retail customer once said to me, "AI is the new UI." Think about that. AI is the new UI. Is the search box gonna look like it does today? Probably not. And service, we talked about that with Gucci as well, allowing people to find what they want more quickly and opening up your service agents' time so they can help provide personalized service to those loyal customers. Speaking of loyalty, loyalty also is such a portal into your enterprise. In layering on AI through the app, which becomes the remote control to a lot of what the consumers do with you, really unlocks a lot of magic. All right, I'm gonna take a breath here. We want to bring this to life, so I am going to invite Michael Richards up on stage. You might know Michael Richards as the rockstar Solution Engineer for retail at Salesforce, but today, he is the merchant for the active apparel category at a global brand. So let's give it up for Michael. You're looking sharp, my friend. Are you ready to do this? All right, let's make it happen. All right. We're gonna do this in the context of holiday. We made it through another holiday. I know we have a couple more weeks to go through the end of the fiscal year. I know there are still a lot of returns, a lot of gift card purchases that are being redeemed, but let's look at AI and data through the lens of the holiday season. What you're looking at here, Michael, is going to the Salesforce Shopping Insights page, like many of you are already doing today. And what he's going to do in a moment is click on the peak holiday season. But before he does that, let's just think about what you're about to see. If you think about Salesforce, we are able to see billions and billions of consumers as they traverse the Salesforce platform. We aggregate that up, we have a bird's-eye view, and it becomes the de facto standard. It becomes really the benchmark in digital, and so we manifest that self in our Shopping Index. Let's go right into that today. So Michael's gonna check out the Shopping Index, and you can see shopper engagement. Really interesting that we saw a 37% increase in SMS and push. Email is still there, but let's connect directly to the phone. I really wanna see, or Michael really wants to see, order conversion and sales. So he comes here, and he sees a global view. Oh, interesting! Michael, did you notice that Black Friday and Cyber Monday saw really nice surges? Yeah, it's really nice, actually. They pulled in sales from before and after, and we started to see a spike because retailers like Michael weren't providing great enough discounts. But let's look at the U.S. view, 'cause I know that's really important to you. It's a big part of your business. When you look at the left side and you see the sales growth for the U.S., and then go to the active apparel category, you can see that, yeah, Black Friday looked pretty good, but Cyber Monday saw a little bit of deficit. So he's gonna wanna look into, just in a moment, what correlations might be existing. He has a hunch it might be discounts, so hold that thought for a minute. Before we do that, let's look at order details. He's happy to see that order average order value is basically flat year-over-year, which isn't so bad, given that we were seeing some decreasing signs in that way over the last couple of years. But now let's go to inflation and inventory, 'cause this has been top of mind for both us as consumers and for retailers. What we're seeing here on the left side, for all categories, is a 4% increase in inflation, the average selling price. By the way, that's really good. You know what this told us? It's that for the first time in five quarters, growth was driven by increased demand and not increased prices, and that is because we saw 10%, 11%, 12% increases in average selling price quarter-over-quarter for the last several quarters. Now let's check out payments. Payments is important as well because we're seeing the buy now, pay later trend. Yeah, credit cards are still really strong, Michael. You gotta feel good about that, but when you look at the right side, look at the wallet pay, Apple Wallet and the like, 50% growth. Maybe you should pay attention to that next year and get it more into the checkout funnel. All right, cool. So that's what we wanna see here, but now I wanna look at it through the lens of generative AI. How are we gonna do that? We're going to click on the Salesforce logo and be able to get right into Tableau Pulse. Tableau Pulse is Salesforce's latest innovation that democratizes data, democratizes insights, and puts it in very easily digestible words, text, and numbers. This is our tile homepage with the key metrics that Michael likes to look at every day. And remember I said he was really interested in seeing if there was a correlation between sales and discounts. So why don't we click on that tile right now? It gives you a little bit of verbiage there in plain language of what it means. But you can also see in the bar chart, right, Michael? What's that spike we see in the middle of the holiday season? Ah, a 27% discount rate during Cyber Week. If you compare that to what happened even outside the holiday season during Amazon's Prime Day, that happened in October, it's a 40% increase. Ta-da! There was a direct correlation between with discounts. Consumers were patient. We talked about pulling earlier holiday sales. It didn't quite happen, and here you go. Now we want some more of a breakdown, and that's the great part about Tableau Pulse. Anybody, not just data scientists, can look at this, and he's seeing by week. He sees Cyber Week was the biggest week for discounts, trailed off by the pre-Cyber Week. We started to see a drumming up of demand. Finally, he wants to see and ask the question in plain language through Generative AI: What regions had the highest discount rate? You can see here Middle East and Africa and North America. Finally, how about the segments? I know you really care about, Michael, the active apparel segment, right? Sure enough, you see that the active apparel segment was in the top five of the discount range. So while you were up there, you might need to tweak it a little higher and play with that and do some scenario planning. All right. Thank you so much, Michael. Fantastic! Great job and a very successful holiday season. All right, let me bring this home before I turn it over to my colleagues here. So talked a lot about the why, talked a lot about the what. Why and how is more important. How do we do this? Well, we have our Customer 360 built on Salesforce Einstein 1. It provides you a host of applications from sales, service, marketing, commerce. You have Tableau for insights. You have MuleSoft for integration. Most importantly, you have Data Cloud to have a unified view of the customer. This unified platform brings together data, your own data, AI. It exposes it through an intuitive interface, and it's done and based and grounded on trust, and that creates magic that will allow you to gain market share, create relationships and maintain them, and do it profitably. All right, so now really let's dive into it. I'm gonna bring Julia up on stage, who's gonna walk us through the how around the AI playbook. Let's give it up for Julia. Thank you. Thank Thank you, Rob. Awesome! While I'm not from Boston, I'm still part of the crew, I guess. Welcome, everyone, from NRF. Thank you so much for spending this time with us today. I know you have been hearing a lot about AI, but I'm here to tell you how to make it happen, and that is with our playbook. It's all about getting us started. You heard us mention this before, data plus AI, plus CRM, and you can't forget the most important piece, trust. That's the magic playbook to getting this whole new world figured out. We're gonna walk through what each of those steps really mean to you today. First, we need to build that source of truth. It's all about the data, and I know it's hard. You need to get your data in order, and we can help you with that because it is daunting, but it's the first step. We got to unlock that data to deliver frictionless commerce, personalization, and activate across all of those digital channels. And then we have to learn. That's training these systems. A huge component in the new LLM world and AI is learning about those use cases, figuring out what works best, and making sure that it's all trusted data, whether it's inside or outside of the system, bring it in, make it yours, make it trusted. And then let's do the fun stuff. Let's activate this across all the channels. Ultimately, that's what we're here to do in retail. We want to deliver the best customer experience, and that's at every channel, every point of interaction with your customer. That's how you simply put, you create those new AI experiences we're all so excited to experience. So let me dig into a little bit of these. You probably have heard a little bit about Data Cloud. It's a huge component of Salesforce's new offering all around data and unlocking this. Now, of course, we know it's daunting, but we have a few steps to do first, and I promise you, taking the time to get this step right is the key to all the rest. So you need to unify your data. You got to figure out what looks good, analyze it, generate it, automate it, make it work faster for you, and then let's use it. Time to create those use cases and bring them to life. Then we go back to that training component. We have to make sure that what we're doing is right, it's trusted, and it's good. That data is really important, and that's why we always focus first and foremost on our values of trust. I've been with Salesforce over 12 years. Company's been around for over 20, and this has been part and parcel to everything we do. So we want to make sure whether that data is in Salesforce or coming from one of your other systems, we'll keep it safe inside the Salesforce Data Cloud. Then last, this is the fun stuff. Let's do something with it. Let's activate that data. So whether it's within the Salesforce ecosystem or outside of it, bring it together, make it work for all your customers across all their channels. Did I make it sound pretty easy? I'm sure you don't think it's that easy, but I promise you, we have trailblazers that have done this already. So let me introduce to you Rossignol. Rossignol is an amazing brand out of France. They've been a customer of ours for the last 12 years with service, marketing, and commerce, and they've seen over 28% growth during its time in our partnership. Now, again, don't take my word for it, let's take theirs, and let's see it come live and in action. So he's not a global merchant this time, but Michael is gonna play the role of my merchandiser on my commerce team. So this is how it all begins. This is the central place for our commerce team and our merchandisers to build the launch of a new product, the Super Heroic Bike. It's what we're really excited about here at Rossignol, and we're gonna go ahead and get our commerce website up and running. The first thing we knew, product descriptions, and there's a lot of them, right? We need all of our websites all ready to go. But guess what's here to help me? It's Einstein and Gen AI, taking away the work. Now, don't forget, we saw Rob talk a lot about making sure that the human is still involved every step of the way. You, as a merchant, can go ahead and make sure you have the right descriptions, it's in the right place, you can refine content, but the heavy work, that's already done. Let Gen AI and Einstein take care of that for you. Now, I did mention Rossignol is from France, and so they have one more complication with their product descriptions: translations. How many of us have sat before, typing and retyping and googling and making sure we have the right translations? No more. Gen AI can take care of that. Now, even more so, Gen AI is so intelligent, and it's learning that it can create brand nuanced voice and even understand cultural translations. So one thing we might be thinking about for this new bike is that it is a phrase called "coup de foudre", which means in French, "love at first sight." So it's a beautiful way that I can convey to all my customers about this new bike. But in English, if I make this mistake, I'm gonna tell you that this bike, when you see it, it's like you're being struck by lightning. It's not gonna work. So with one click of the button, voilà! I have translations that are appropriate for each audience. Don't worry, you're not gonna be struck by lightning if you purchase this bike, you're just merely gonna fall in love with it. All right, Michael, let's get those on the website. Let's make sure our product pages are up and ready to go, and let's go ahead and start building our Data Cloud segments. We talked about data. It can be inside or outside of Salesforce, coming in all together into our trust layer. But this is where our marketers are gonna start to take advantage of all of our data unified in one place, making sure that we can unlock each segment at the right time and the right audience. We have, of course, a few ways that you can do that, making it really easy for our admin to generate with Einstein, a classic builder or a package. But shockingly, we're gonna use Einstein because Einstein is helping me take away all the extra work that I don't have to worry about anymore. And with a click of a button, again, in just plain easy text, I can identify a segment that works for this audience. Make sure I get the right fitness enthusiast with the best customer lifetime value. And there's my segment. Now, again, marketers are still in control. You have the understanding of your customer base even better than Einstein, although they're pretty good too, and they can go ahead and help you refine that. As a marketer, you can go ahead, understand your segment rules, refine it, make changes, add it on the fly, but that heavy lifting, leave that to Einstein. Once we have the segment up and running, let's go ahead and start building that campaign. Now, one of the things that we've heard from our customers over and over again is marketing content; it's eating up your time and your cost. It's arduous and a lengthy process to get relevant, personalized content across all your channels. Guess who's here to help? It's Einstein again. So again, one click of the button, I can go ahead, and I can find the best subject lines that are gonna make this email pop. I'm gonna drive those click-through rates and make sure I'm getting the best of all my past email campaigns used for this new launch of my bike. And again, you can always edit it. As the marketer, you have the control. You maintain that, that piece of the puzzle every click of the way. But Einstein's gonna give you the best subject lines. You can edit from there. Now, of course, a few things we can do. We can update the content. We can make it relevant. Einstein's gonna help you build that content, make sure it works for all your segments, and then we can even go ahead and put in a map. I love this option because it gives you one more place to connect your customers coming directly to your store, hopefully, to even try out this new bike before they make the purchase. I know Michael's making this look really easy. It's just a click of a button, drag and drop, get it into your email campaign, then you get your customers into the store. Okay, Michael, let's go ahead and schedule this campaign out. We're almost ready. So like any good product campaign, we launch it, we get it out into the public, and you're all ready to go check it out. Go see that bike. Inevitably, you're gonna have questions from your customers, and that's where service comes into play. With the True Connected 360, you have all of the connected apps within your Salesforce ecosystem, all working together to develop that personalized experience from that single, unified 360 profile of your customer. So sure enough, when someone calls in and has a question about their mountain bike and the suspension system, I have Einstein there every step of the way, making sure I know exactly what the historical experiences have been with that customer, and also providing recommendations along the way. So I can easily answer this question with a recommended post from Einstein, make sure my customer's happy, but I can also take it a step further. I can be proactive with the help of Einstein. What other biking trails might you be interested in because you're looking at this mountain bike? What other trails are open this weekend outside of New York or wherever there's better weather? Where can I go with my mountain bike?" I can go ahead and take that. Now, service is integrated in that 360 I mentioned, which means commerce is here too. I might have someone calling in about service, but I know I'm gonna try to get a sale out of it as well. So I can make a recommendation in one click of a product that would be appropriate for a mountain biking trip this weekend. So here's the new backpack. Now, in commerce, not only do I know who I'm talking to and what their past has been, but I can create and close that sale right inside the chat itself. Good news, Einstein is there to put together an entire summary of everything I just did, because that's gonna live in that connected Customer 360 profile of my customer. Success! We have a happy customer that not only got the answer to their question, but they even have one more step and one more piece of the product of Rossignol. I hope you're just excited about what you saw as I am, and the future for each and every one of you and your customers, because this is what Rossignol has done, and I know you can, too. Thank you. All right. Now, let's hear from some real trailblazers. I'm biased. Sign me up. Sign me up. All right, did this. All right. Oh, yes, thank you. That one? Thank you. Thank you. All right, that was awesome. Thank you, Julia and Michael. I hope you guys are as impressed as all of us were that have seen this over and over again. It never actually stops being impressive. But what's equally as impressive is being able to talk to people, like I said, who are experts in what they do, who are your peers, your counterparts, who are actually leveraging AI in their current business. So please join me in welcoming Ekta Chopra, the Chief Digital Officer at e.l.f. Beauty, and Rochelle Ezekiel, the SVP for Digital Retail at Canada Goose. All right, I'm gonna sit here. Hi. I thought you were gonna sit in the middle. I was gonna try and sit, but it's not gonna work. All right, so let's get right into this. This is my, this is my opportunity to become a talk show host. Hold on one second, please. Okay, so let's start by telling us and everyone about your AI journey. Where are you guys—where are you in your AI journey, and how are you bringing the leadership team and your organization along with you? So, Ekta, do you want to start? Yeah. So I think, you know, people are talking about AI now, but as we heard from Rob as well, like, AI has been around for a while, so in the form of personalization, you know, recommendations, but what we're doing now is taking it even further. And I think that starts with education, because you've been hearing AI, but Gen AI is actually a new novel concept, right, that ChatGPT has made available to everyone. So it starts with education. We have an internal portal called e.l.f. U, which is about learning, and we do sessions there to... And one of my goals is to make everyone in my company a prompt engineer, because it's about: what are you asking? How are you asking it? And really learning sort of the power of the right question. I think that's one of the things that we're doing from just upskilling people, making them comfortable about AI. We're bringing in external, you know, superpowers, we call them, to really educate our exec team on what can AI unlock for the company. It's, of course, consumer experience is a big part of it, but it's also employee experience. How do you make it easy for your employees to really be more efficient? How do you give them time back so they can actually think and do some amazing consumer experiences? It's about, you know, really infusing AI in the external consumer journey, but also internal. It's amazing. Rochelle, how about you guys? What are you doing? So we're early days, but we have... We're a test-and-learn culture, and I think that AI plays so nicely into that test and learn. And we're taking off big pieces of things we know we can demonstrate success in, and how can we, like, really get good at that? So really going slow to go fast. And you asked a question about how do we get people on board. Yeah. I think the best way to get people on board is when we pick these areas we know we can demonstrate success. We're using insights we have about our consumers and how the consumer demand. We can address real consumer demand with what we put in place. You know what? It's interesting that both of you are talking about how you bring your organizations along. I was at this conference not too long ago, listening to a chief digital officer from a company talking about how one of the things that they did was to make it very transparent how they wanted people to use AI, because they were saying they had employees that were using things like ChatGPT, but secretly. So it was very much not a company-driven kind of process. So the idea of educating your employees and communicating and bringing people in and sharing insights, it's really important to get the entire organization to be part of this, right? From an awareness, communication, education perspective. Absolutely. And I think that also, in my mind, gains like organic momentum and the right momentum. Because we are a public company, we have to be careful about how you use AI. You know, if you are gonna go ChatGPT, what are your guiding principles? You know, you shouldn't be putting what's company proprietary stuff. So I think there are policies that you have to create, because I wear an IT governance hat as well, and a security, it's really important for me that people understand that, you know, as we saw on your slides as well, that it comes with inherent risks as well. Yes. Yep. So talk about obstacles, since we're kind of in that whole, like, the inherent risk piece, what are some of the obstacles that you are either currently witnessing, having, or anticipating, and how are you overcoming them? I don't know, Rochelle, you want to start with this one? Yeah, I don't... I think we've talked before about how everyone's a little bit afraid of AI and what it does, and I don't really see obstacles. I think we all have to embrace it and put it in normal course of business, like, how are we moving forward using this technology in the way that's right for us and our business, our brand? Ekta, how about yourself? Yeah. I would say not really obstacles. I think it's really, you know, being comfortable with taking a risk and in some cases, like, how do you do it with knowing that you've got to take that risk? You know, it's about this is a constantly changing, evolutionizing, sort of a technology. How do you take that risk but have the right tools in place to monitor, educate, and really make sure that you're using it to do the purpose, to serve your consumer, to serve your employees, to hit make an impact to the bottom line as well? Ultimately, that's not the first priority why we're testing and learning, but it is going to help the bottom line as well. So how do you, you know, really connect the dots three sixty- Yeah For your stakeholders that are consumers, employees, investors as well? So I do think it's, it's more than. So I don't think it's obstacles, rather, I do think it's an opportunity to, like, really take those risks. Yeah and, you know, refine Yeah -the use. So you both actually used the term test and learn, which I think is really powerful. Having come from one retailer where we used to do 1,200 store pilots, which is really not a pilot, it's a change. It's really important to think about where you're spending your time and how you're kind of ring-fencing certain things. But in the world of reality, how do you all think about balancing the keeping the lights on investments, right? The registers that need to be maintained with the investments for more innovative kind of work that you're thinking about with generative AI and all this. How do you balance those decisions? How do you balance those resources, and those investments? I'll take- Whoever wants to take it, go. Sure. I think and I think it sort of follows the last conversation question, is it's one and the same. I can't really see them as different, because if you want to keep the lights on, you have to be investing somewhat in AI. You have to be thinking about what's right for you and how you scale your business, how you evolve your business, and how you move it forward. Slightly different take. I do see that ultimately they do become one, but there's the reality of running your business, keeping the lights on and what's needed to do there. But then there is sort of, you know, innovation that's coming down the pipe. That means upskilling your teams. That means maybe new superpowers, new people that you have to bring in. That means, you know, new things that you have to connect the dots on. So I do think it's slightly, sort of different right now. It's going to converge at some point because, you know, right now, resources are scarce, and- Yeah ... and it's really high, hard to find that talent as well, and that's just the reality of it. Like, to really unlock AI, the talent is scarce because everyone's an AI expert and no one is. So I think that's where, you know, we're trying to find the balance. Yeah. So to that, I want to kind of ask you this question, Ekta. You know, we think about, you know, AI innovation is actually interesting. AI innovation at scale becomes the kind of holy grail, right? And that's transformational. So you're obviously responsible for kind of deploying digital and business innovation across multiple geographies now, right? So think about or talk to us a little about the implications of deploying those innovations on things like productivity, on things like efficiency, and how you actually think about maybe it's the human capital piece as well, to make sure the right talent to do that. Yeah. I mean, I think if you can measure it, it's hard to sort of, you know, justify it. Yeah. So we do have about five different products that we're testing with right now, and one is in sort of... We have 4 million, you know, Beauty Squad members, we call them. That's our loyalty members. Really understanding their journey and how do you sort of, you know, really personalize and target that messaging and so forth. So there's use of AI that's happening there, and it's, the return is just phenomenal. But then you have other, you know, innovative ways. Internally, we're using what we're calling Alfred. Basically, it's a AI product that we rolled out that helps my support team answer questions internally. What we're seeing is that it's doing the work of one human body. So, how do you learn and then showcase even that? Yes, we are innovating, and we're, you know, asking for more budget here, but guess what? We're, we also have a potential for saving. Yeah. So I think that's where we're testing and learning in translations. It's a great example. As we scale and grow, you know, it's about local hyper-personalization in new geographies, and you cannot keep up with it unless you have a AI strategy. So I do think that there's so many different examples where you can hit the bottom line, be efficient, and really unlock the power of AI. That's awesome. And so, as you said, trying to keep up is such a huge piece, and I think, it's been brought up a couple of times. Rob talked about it, Julia talked about it, I think everyone's probably talked about it at one point about, you know, it's coming for our jobs. Yeah. Right? But there's so much to do, and I know, Rochelle, you feel very strongly about this. I'd love to get your take on where is it important to keep the human in the loop, and how do you think all of this affects both employees and customers from a human perspective? I think there's a lot of talk about AI coming to take my job, and I just don't think that's the case. I think that you'll always need that human engagement with AI to kind of set AI straight. I think especially for luxury, if we think about what AI can do for you and how it can, how is it best representing your brand? How is it best delivering the experience that you want? How are the products done the way you want it to be? And even then, translation. Did you want it to come out that way? Did you want it to say it that way? And I think that it'll just be different. It's not the same, but I think humans are... need to be there. Yeah. You know, it's interesting, both of you, like, you talked about luxury and beauty. Both of those categories are so dependent on a relationship with the brand, right? Like, knowing me, serving up the right offers, making sure you're teaching me the right things or making me feel great about being associated with you as a brand. How do you see generative AI impacting loyalty? Like, how do you think about utilizing it to further what you're already doing or to actually kind of explode that loyalty piece? It goes back to the theme of this whole session. Data is at the center of it, you know? And we, as I said, we have 4 million loyalty members who are happily so engaged. 90% of them actually shop on our app, which is incredible, and really learning about them. So as long as you are actually serving them the right content, the right messaging, you're hyper personalizing their experience, they're more than willing to give you information- Mm. To better the experience. So I think that's sort of... That's the way to build the loyalty is, you know, really don't use it for stuff that's nice to have, but that's meaningful to build that emotional connection with your consumer. Awesome. Rochelle, how about you? Yeah, I think I would echo a lot of what Ekta said, that it's a closer relationship with your consumer. It's all about the data that you're gonna get back. And at Canada Goose, Canadian warmth is our approach to our guest experience, and so it's mixing that human... Going back to the last question, too, it's mixing that human with data. And if we can make that data even better for the humans that are having those conversations or setting forward whatever they're doing on our website, then we just make them so much better at their job. Yeah. I want that T-shirt. "Set AI straight. Yeah. That's what- We do bumper stickers. Bumper stickers. We're merchandising. Fantastic. Okay, so last question: advice. What advice would you give to people who are just starting out on the AI journey for... to either be successful or to kind of mitigate some of the risks? I mean, luckily, it sounds like both Canada Goose and e.l.f. Beauty have a test-and-learn culture. Yeah. You know, and I think that's really important. I do think that testing it yourself. I'm absolutely a strong believer in if you're gonna talk about something, learn about it, and I'm a lifelong learner. So actually playing around with these platforms, testing and learning, prototyping, I think that's really important, and not being scared of it. It's not a scary, big, behemoth thing. I think this is internet all over again, just in a new way. And how do you embrace that, you know? And how do you sort of take micro steps? Don't think about, "I have to create this big, giant strategy with a lot of, you know, things that I have to talk to the board about," but start learning, testing and learning. It's gonna inform your strategy. Awesome. Definitely test and learn, right? You can't do anything without test and learning, but don't innovate for innovation's sake. Mm. Your true, authentic self, and I think then you'll get the right results from Gen AI, Gen AI, right? I think that it will deliver on your brand promise, it'll deliver on who you are, and I think that that's key to this. Yeah. So the idea of test and learn authentically. I love what you guys said about also bringing along your employees with you, whether it's through awareness, communication, education, upskilling them, and transparency, letting people know what's going on, right? Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much- Thank you. for your time. Thank you. Appreciate it. Okay, we are at... I know we're getting close to time, so I will kind of keep this brief, but this slide you've seen a couple of times. If you've ever worked with us, you know you see it all the time. This is a slide that we use to help educate our customers on the importance of a connected ecosystem to create a single source of truth for the customer across all the touch points they have with you as a brand, and it's only becoming more complex, as you are hearing today. One of the things that we're seeing in retail is the shift from point solutions and all of the challenges that those things bring, to more enterprise platform kind of investments and strategic vendor partnerships. In fact, go to the next slide. We actually had Forrester do some research for us on a bunch of retailers who invested in Salesforce 360 for retail, and what they found was over three years... And get this, we think about how expensive it is to invest in things. Based on their investment, both the product services and help, support, they were still able to realize a 257% ROI. I'm sorry, that's pretty world-class. Anyone should be great taking that, okay? So we know that there's an opportunity, but think about that, what the potential is for upside. Now, regardless of where you are in your journey, we hope that Salesforce, and we know that Salesforce, we believe that Salesforce has a solution for you. Whether you're small or large, whichever verticals you are, whatever geographies you're in, we really wanna make sure that we can help you to achieve the success that you want. We are the No. 1 AI CRM, and our job is to help you get closer to your customers and to unlock data that drives more participation, more loyalty, and more profit. We actually have the most capabilities of any CRM vendor, and we are super proud to be able to get a chance to work with retailers just like you. That is the end of our personal segment here, but there's more, always. Don't miss our—the conversation that Marc is gonna have with John Furner, the CEO for Walmart, in about a half... Well, 3:30 today, about half an hour. So make sure to go over there and listen to that, and then come on back. We actually have a great session on data and AI, giving commerce some superpowers. Tomorrow, marketers will not wanna miss: Top Five Ways to Build Lifelong Customer Loyalty with Data and AI. And then there will be a great conversation on Tuesday about Slack and the future of retail consumer goods around productivity. So thank you for your time. We hope it was worthwhile. Thank you to Ekta, thank you to Rochelle, Rob, Julia, Michael, and to everybody. Have an amazing NRF. We'll see you around. Thanks, guys. My name is Alex Bucher, Vice President of Product Management for Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and I'm your host for today's session. We're continuing to fill in here, but we're just going to kick right into it, as we have only so much allotted time. Today, we'll talk about how generative AI adds value in the retail landscape and how it can give your team superpowers to do more. As with every Salesforce session, we start with a reminder that Salesforce is a publicly traded company and ask that you make all purchasing decisions based on current and available products and services. And we'll begin with a thank you. Thank you for coming to this session. Thank you to our customers, prospects, and partners, and those here on stage with us today. We truly wouldn't be here without you. But we are in a new era of commerce. It's a transformative time in technology, where customer experiences are, frankly, more vital than ever. One bad experience can turn a customer away. In our recent State of Commerce report, we found that 84% of organizations have 84% of organizations have tried generative AI and seen significant increases to productivity, operational efficiency, and overall revenue growth. And all at the same time, data is exploding, unlocking unprecedented insights if you can possibly unlock them. So what sits at the middle of all of it? It's AI, combing through those vast volumes of data, unlocking those unprecedented customer experiences and business insights across the board. No wonder AI is the number one priority for CEOs. So what's that mean for commerce? It's a future that's exciting and dynamic. It's a future that's customer-centric, data-focused, and powered by AI. But that also means that the old playbook no longer applies. Today, commerce is embedded in every industry, from media to manufacturing, and the traditional customer storefront no longer applies. Customers demand a more modern experience where they can purchase where they are through the channels that they use and interact with on a daily basis, from WhatsApp to social media. Commerce has become an omnichannel revenue machine, touching every portion of your business. Consumers also demand those hyper-personalized experiences that only generative AI can deliver. What obstacles do customers face when trying to implement rich AI customer experiences? Well, 90% of companies in our State of Commerce survey responded that disconnected systems and the lack of a single source of customer data were the number one challenge. What that means is that it's impossible to glean the insights that they need necessary to personalize interactions in a way that they find meaningful. Privacy and security, trust are more important than ever in an era where data breaches and AI hallucinations make headlines. So how do companies create those customer experiences that the consumers expect? How do they empower their already stretched teams to be more productive? Enter Commerce Cloud, named the number 1 commerce platform for the eighth year in a row. Commerce Cloud powers revenue growth at every touch point in the customer journey, from AI guidance, insights, automation, from storefront setup to revenue growth. It unlocks your team's true potential and personalizes its scale with data from every aspect of your business through Data Cloud, while connecting digital commerce to sales, service, and marketing channels. It's the trusted AI, those pieces that really drive this overall experience and give your team superpowers. Commerce Cloud is no stranger to AI. We have over 12 years of AI innovation, driving an average revenue uplift across our customers of 8%. So today, I'm excited to announce Commerce AI for retail, giving your team superpowers to do more. First, it starts with commerce for merchandising, empowering merchandisers to leverage technologies like our announcement of Gen Page Designer AI, allowing anyone in your organization to build beautiful shopping experiences. And our Copilot for shoppers goes beyond search. It conversationally allows your customers to browse and connects consumers to products in ways never seen before through natural language conversations. And of course, finally, AI that grows revenue everywhere. AI insights for inventory with our inventory insights, recommendations on how to improve returns with return insights, and customer and product insights to improve merchandising across the board. All of that is possible because of the Salesforce Customer 360, seamlessly integrating customer experiences to platform, to data, to Einstein through commerce and service. Because Salesforce is built on trust, it's the only platform that can unify your data in a way that impacts all of your business. So with that context in mind, I'll pass it over and introduce Genna Gwynn, SVP of Sales for Commerce Cloud, to kick off a discussion with some of our amazing customers and partners. Thank you, Alex. And can everybody hear me okay? Well, thanks for being here and... Maybe I'll use this. Now you can hear me. All right, so thank you for being here, and thank you, Alex, for that great presentation. I'm super excited to have an awesome group of panelists here today to talk to you about the reality of generative AI. You're gonna walk around this hall and hear so much about AI. What we would like to do in this quick panel here is just bring a little bit of it to reality. What are some of our top brands out there doing today, and how can they make it possible to do something, hopefully by next holiday? So with that, before we get into the discussion, I wanna ask the panelists to introduce themselves. So, Jenna, I'll start with you. Does everybody just wanna come to the podium? It's not gonna be that effective. Try now. Check, check. All right, we're in business. This is great. Hi, my name is Jenna Flateman Posner. I'm the Chief Digital Officer of Solo Brands. We are a portfolio company that owns brands like Solo Stove. Not sure if you all saw our awesome Snoop campaign that hit the universe last month. Had a lot of fun there. We also own Chubbies, which is a men's swimwear and leisurewear company, Oru, ISLE, a bunch of outdoor lifestyle brands. Really excited to be here. Thank you, Jenna. Jason? All right, I'm Jason Purcell. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Salsify, and I've had the honor of working with Jenna, 20 years ago at Endeca, so we've been in the commerce space together for years. Hi, and then I'm Scott Lutz, the Global EVP of Technology and Innovation for Esprit. Hopefully, some of you in the audience remember Esprit. We're relaunching in the U.S., and then we have a strong global presence in Europe and Asia. So excited to be here today. Thank you. Jenna, I'm gonna start with you. Can you provide some examples of the way that Generative AI is really impacting the retail landscape? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, first of all, it really put the power of AI in our hands as retailers, which is really, really empowering and exciting. I think I'll talk through three scenarios here that I think would be helpful for this group. One is bringing AI to your existing your peers, right? Your executives, is actually really hard. One thing that's really worked for me, which I'm sure you guys are all trying to figure this out, is dig into your existing technology, right? Salesforce is a great example. How many retailers in the room right now? Lots of retailers. Do you guys all have fraud providers? If you all have fraud providers, you're already using AI, right? So helping your executives, helping your peers understanding the fact that AI does have value, you're already using it, is a great way to get alignment. The way that we've seen success in market is actually twofold. One is on the copy creation side. I'm sure that's a no-brainer. ChatGPT put all of the copy creation power in all of our hands, which is cool. We saw a lot of success there, a lot of efficiencies. Some of the major challenges that I think a lot of retailers think they have to face is that their copywriters are going to not be interested in using tools to actually generate copy. That's not the case. What we found is that doing more of the mundane tasks by utilizing efficiencies that you get out of ChatGPT and OpenAI, actually frees these resources up to be more creative. They actually get to create better content that's ultimately more valuable for SEO. It's gonna do more storytelling and ultimately add more value to the brand. So we saw a lot of success with that. The second use case that I think is worth bringing up... I wanna keep going. Let's keep going, yeah. The next use case I would, I'd love to walk you guys through is the concept of chatbot. I know we've heard about it before. A lot of us have chatbots, but a lot of those chatbots actually require human intervention to actually create the flows. You have to think through, okay, if a customer says this, then we're gonna have the bot reply with that. And you have to continue to evaluate and understand utilization and use those utilization metrics to determine what the next flow should be. It takes human capital to do this. The benefit of having generative AI into these chatbots is that they can actually learn, and they can actually decrease the workload in order to maintain those bot experiences. So in our experience, we actually saw a 37% decrease in workload when using a generative chatbot versus a manually supported chatbot. That was really great. Additionally, we saw 40% of the outreach that was happening in chatbot was actually solved for by the bot, and so that meant that we had customer service agents and representatives who are actually available for our customers that needed escalation, and that was incredibly valuable to us. Overall, you know, I think getting some of these use cases in market, looking at content creation, copy creation, asset creation, looking at chatbots as a way to augment your customer service responsibility to your customers, is a really great way to get your feet wet, and happy to share that with you today. Well, Jenna, thank you. I think what's really interesting about your answer is that, you know, when you're gonna come back from NRF and talk to your executives about this conference and what you learned, it's also bringing back to helping them understand they are doing things with AI today, and you gave some really great examples. And it's about how you can do that better now with the capabilities of generative. So it shouldn't be this big, scary thing. It's something that you are doing today. How do you continue to iterate and leverage what generative is bringing to the table? So with that, in all these areas where you're using generative, Scott, in your experience, just a question for you: Do you seen areas of the business that have been slower to adapt these types of technologies, and why? Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question because I look at AI. If we were here five years ago, maybe a little bit longer, we'd be talking about omnichannel, and I think AI is very similar. There's a lot of different definitions that are out there. So Jenna's example with how it's leveraged with chatbots, and I think that's a challenge for a lot of retailers, is where to start. Because obviously, ChatGPT exploded on the scene, and I think a lot of times it's easy for us to look for, okay, what's that shiny object? What can we implement really quick that's gonna give us that positive customer experience or upside on the business results? And I think that's where it's an inherent challenge for retailers to figure out where to start. For us, I look at it more as a journey, because if you think back, we've actually been using a variation of AI, and this is also part of the complexity around machine learning. That was kind of the first incarnation. So for us, and for other brands I've worked with, to prepare for machine learning, it was about taking a very specific data set but making sure that was your gold standard. So transactional data, whether it was from POS, eCom, what you could get from wholesalers, it had to be pristine. And now AI is kind of shifting that a bit, where it's more on: how much raw data can we actually ingest, and how do you strike that balance? Because also you can pull in as much as our marketing team would love to ingest everything from Facebook or Google's API, there's a cost with that. So I think for retailers, it's how do you strike the balance where AI can be much more intelligent? Everything you were speaking about on learning and being prepared from behavioral, transactional, is a challenge for brands on where to start. So for us, I think it does go back to a couple of paradigms that we're looking at, tying customer experience, so really understanding acquisition costs and our customer, because that piece, when rising medias, can we afford to acquire new customers? What type of new customers do we need to acquire? And then how can we leverage the capabilities of AI to tie that back to future performance? And that doesn't always mean profitability. It could be tied to product behavior, product that we've bought into, and how can we have quicker wins and insight to performance? So I think those are some of the challenges, is where to actually start. And if you think back, I equated AI to where the iPhone was 17 years ago. We all knew we had to be aware of it and participate with the iPhone, but we had no idea what it was going to unleash for us. I think that's the same with AI, is starting with a very principled, principled approach on what do we expect to learn and how do we think it'll benefit. So you do have to take that step back, and I think that's also difficult for a lot of retailers to have that introspective to say, "Okay, what is the business case or challenge or customer experience we want to solve? Let's focus AI to help us in that path first," versus saying, "Okay, let's go do everything," because it can be too much. Yeah, I think you bring up a really good point, and that kind of leads me to Jason, a question for you, 'cause you can't do this all in a vacuum, and you clearly can't do this all yourself 'cause you have a business to run as well as a retailer. So how, Jason, from the ecosystem perspective, you know, running a company, founding a company like Salsify, do you see generative AI really helping these retailers with the time to market and with the demands and the consumer expectations that are out there for what they want? I think a lot of that's gonna come down to how much can AI help ease the collaboration between the retailers and their ecosystem of suppliers, right? It's. There's just a ton of processes that to get a product listed at a retailer, you have to go through. And I think, you know, generative AI is gonna help a ton of them. It's gonna help with promotion, suggestions, and price negotiation and all of those. But I think, you know, one of the ones that we're seeing people actually do real-world things with today is improving the content onboarding, right? So, you know, we have a customer who's taken the entire Walmart style guide, taken their entire catalog, and rewritten, you know, the product detail page information through the lens of the Walmart style guide, right? And it's something they could never have done. Maybe they could have done it for Walmart, but they could never have done it for that broad set of retailers that they work with. So I think a lot of it is, as a retailer, you know, Generative AI is really reducing the burden of things that you never would have asked your suppliers to take on. It's changing that balance. There's now a lot more that you can ask of those suppliers than you could before, and I don't think we're gonna go back to the world where the retailer does it all. I still think that there's gonna be a human in the loop. The suppliers are still gonna be very engaged in owning the brand equity and representing the product, but, you know, I think that the balance is shifting where retailers can actually ask more of suppliers than they could before. Can I get in on that? Yeah. Cool. I, I think from a PIM perspective, too, I'm gonna put a lot of pressure on you right now. I think it's an unbelievable place to be implementing AI use cases. Many cases, a lot of retailers are racing to get their products live, right? And so your product enablement process is your path to cash. The faster you can enable your product, the faster you can sell your product against your competitors, the more you can gain momentum on Google, et cetera, and your rank and your performance. And so having the ability to actually utilize PIM, whether it's content creation or it's rewriting or it's dynamic attributing or it's automatic categorization, or I'm just writing your product roadmap for you right now, I think that PIM is an unbelievable place to help augment that process, and I love the work that you guys have done with them. So it's awesome. Great. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, can I add one piece to that? Because I think it goes back to what you were asking. That's one of the bigger challenges, is everything that both Jenna and Jason just spoke to, is how do you have that right foundation? So you touched on a little bit before you kicked us off around governance. So governance is key, having the right foundation, that if Jenna's team is saying, "Okay, we've got to push for product," like you were saying, that's one aspect. We touched on marketing, we touched on planning. So for us and for retailers, I think it's coming back to the same type of foundation we would talk about for an e-commerce tech stack, is you have to have that scalable solution in your data infrastructure first and foremost, before you can start unlocking AI. I think you can't leave governance and privacy out of that conversation. That's the other challenge with it, because it sounds great to pull in all this data, but in GDPR, it's really, really tricky because you can't handle some of the data unless you have explicit permission. How do you take full advantage? That's where it comes back to that foundation and framework's key. You know, you touched on how do you even get started with this. Some of it is just forming an intuition about what's possible and, like, not getting caught up in the AI buzzword. So I honestly think practically everybody should be trying and, you know, get out there, you know, build a GPT. It sounds daunting, and it sounds difficult. It's not hard. Like, anybody can go in there and actually try out little experiments that you're interested in personally. I'm telling you, it's hard even for me as a tech company, to keep up with the flow. There's, like, just forming that basic intuition about, like, what's hype and what's legit and real, and I don't think you can do that if you don't actually put the work in and spend a few hours actually trying it out, and it's the burden is so low. I think that's true of executives, and I think that's true of the people that are out there doing the work that Jenna was talking about. Like, who's launching a new product? They need to be exposed to what's possible. I think without that, it's just gonna stay in this ether of, like, I don't even know where to start. I understand. I think what's interesting is during the last presentation, I think the stat that was used is 14% of consumers are not satisfied with their online shopping experience. When does that change, right? And how do we get that to change? We are at a really interesting time with generative that I think if you think about, you know, some of the comments that were made earlier about the quality of the data, how the data gets to the consumer, there's an opportunity to really improve that stat and really meet the customer where they want to be met. Jenna, when you think about that stat being 14%, which is just so daunting, and that's not everybody's... I'm sure Solo Brands score is much, much higher. You know, what, what are some ways that you think Generative AI can really just lean in and improve that experience in the near term? I hope this is the near term. I've been talking about this use case for a couple of weeks because I'm trying to speak it into the universe. But, you know, the more and more I think about it, I was actually sitting at a client advisory board meeting with Salesforce when I... this came out of my mouth for the first time, so pressure's on. Pressure's on. So, I mean, listen, when I walk into a physical store today, I have an incredibly great experience. I come in, I'm greeted, I'm asked what I'm looking for. I say, "I'm looking for a pair of red shoes." They say: "Okay, cool. Like, what are you doing? You going hiking? You playing basketball? Like, what's how are you gonna be utilizing these shoes?" I don't know if they use utilizing. That's a really tech term. So I answer, "Oh, I'm going hiking." And they say: "Okay, what's your size?" "7.5." "All right, let me go in the back stockroom, I'm gonna come back and bring you a couple pairs of shoes." Come back, try them on, get my shoes, make my purchase, and walk out. Today, when I'm on an e-commerce site, and I try to find a pair of red shoes, I go to a search bar, and I type in "red shoes," and some poor store associate goes in the back and brings back every possible red shoe they have in every size and every gender. And as a consumer online, I am, I am expected to wade through those results and find my way through the stockroom to actually get to the shoe that is meant for me. I think that generative would be a perfect place in search. I think that having a conversation in that search experience, much like you would when you walk into a physical store, to inform what that result should be, I think it's a huge missed opportunity right now and something that could really smooth out getting our customers to their desired outcome as quickly as possible, which is our desired outcome, too, right? Get them to the purchase. I like that one. Yeah, I do too. I mean, I think about my first Esprit purchase way back when, about 20, 30 years ago. And, Scott, I'm looking at you for this question: As you think about, you know, continuing to improve the experience for that new young consumer out there, how do you see generative really helping shape the future? Yeah, I would say what's interesting to me is... Just quick question: How many people in the audience have gone into a store or doing a store tour while you're at NRF? Wow, that's it? How many people still shop in a store? Okay, much better. The reason I bring that up is because I do think you're seeing a little bit of the pendulum swing back. So as you alluded to with Esprit, I mean, it's a loved brand by a generation of people that were my age, Gen X, eighties, remember it, but how do you bring that back? And I think what you're seeing with technology is five or 10 years ago, was, to your point, push more tech in front of the consumer, whether that's in-store, magic mirrors, you name it, even on e-com, and I think that's why it's so challenging for the e-com experience. What I think a newer generation or the shopper, or even generation my age, is looking for is getting back to that paradigm where tech is running behind the scenes, and you have the brand and product and creativity is becoming more at the forefront. That's where I think generative AI will have the most impact, is what I'm excited about is internally, because retail, as we all know, is in the moment. It's hour by hour, minute by minute, but there's so much friction internally. How do we come to the decisions, what we're trying to sell, what do we market? That I think generative AI will make businesses much more efficient. That being able to get their brand story and product out into the marketplace. And I think if we go back to that first and foremost, that's what customers are really looking for, is getting to that experience and saying: "How do I interact with the brand and the product the same way I've done with stores for 100 years?"... So to me, Generative AI gets us on that path where it's more behind the scenes, surfacing brands in the creative product and enabling us to just be much more nimble, with how we serve our customers. Yeah, I, I think we're finally at a point where we can actually look to see some results if we think about next holiday, based on what generative AI is gonna bring to the table. And that's exciting. And I think, Jason, as you think about, you know, talking to retailers and how we can help them, how the ecosystem can help them, what are some of the ways that, you know, do you think we can help people future-proof these plans so that we really can improve those stats next year and delight the consumer in all of us? I think there's a few things. So I honestly would reiterate the point about building that intuition yourself so that you can engage in the discussion, right? It isn't a lot of work. I think it's pretty low-hanging fruit, but without that, without that foundation, it's really, really hard to talk about what's even possible. I think, you know, one of the easiest things to do to future-proof is we're all conditioned to thinking of workflow as, like, this process that requires many, many, many people. And I think what is gonna change is that there's gonna be processes that involve one person, one creative person that you would never put into the workflow in a Salesforce flow or a, you know, your PIMs workflow. I think you need to start thinking about doing that now because that's gonna be the natural hanging off point, you're gonna be able to automate this. You're always gonna have a human in the loop, so it's a really natural point to plug this into. I think the other one that's maybe a little bit more far-reaching as you're thinking about your roadmaps and how you're designing your product and your retailer site. I think you got to start thinking about the language models almost as a bit of a consumer, right? Like, to do what you talked about, Jenna, to have that experience where somebody doesn't just come and, you know, search or browse for red shoes, but it actually understands who you are and, and what you've done and what you'd be looking for, that context has to be surfaced, the models, right? There's this whole, you know, retrieval, augmented generation is kind of where I think this is all going. And so you have to start asking yourself: Am I surfacing the customer's purchase history? Am I surfacing what they've searched on in the past and what they didn't click on? All of that in a machine-readable way, so that it can be incorporated. Incorporating it is actually really easy. I think the hard part is gonna be getting that data surfaced, you know, into the hands of the model. So it's counterintuitive. You don't think of the language model as the consumer, but I think you have to start thinking about that, 'cause some of those are gonna take a year or two or three to actually do. We've talked about generative AI being this superpower, right? That's gonna supercharge these sites. And as you go back to your teams and you think about how do we really do that? You know, Jenna, what's just one piece of advice for, you know, the folks out here in terms of how to get there? Yeah, I mean, test, test and learn. I mean, don't be afraid to fail. I think that, you know, we learn through our failures just as much as we learn through our successes. You know, it's not gonna be perfect. I mean, I'm a very big ask for forgiveness, not for permission, kind of leader. And so we've had the benefit of being really early on adopting some of these use cases and technologies. You know, I personally am waiting for the day where I can just have a giant swath of unstructured data that is simply sitting there, that can be supported and augmented by AI, that is using that to determine how and when to communicate with my customers. There are great tools that are already out there, though, that can help you really measure the value. There's the Session AI, there's the Offer Fit, there's a lot of tools out there that can really help you put AI to work just on the top layer of your site, to start making sure you're communicating the right promotions at the right time or engaging those consumers most effectively, and I just really recommend that you try them out. We all need data to support these investments and these priorities, and the tools are out there for you to start testing. I agree. Scott, I'm gonna just turn it to you for probably our final question today. As you think about, similar to the last two questions we asked, just how to get started, right? How to think about this test-and-learn concept that Jenna's been talking about here with generative. What are your final thoughts for the audience out here on how to get going? Yeah, I would say it's kind of what Jenna was saying. I think, one, just asking yourself: What's the biggest challenge we're trying to solve for? And really being clear on saying, "This is what we need to solve for, where we think there's a need to leverage AI." Second piece is you have to define what success looks like, so that you know you can go back and determine, is it working or not? And so that could be around merchandising, it could be around just workflow efficiency, and it could be around just product. But you have to start with that filter, and then you can prioritize from that based on the business or customer impact. So I think that still holds true. Then AI will help you get to that path of saying: Are we on the right direction for success or not? And if not, how do we course correct? Awesome. Well, as we wrap here, I just wanna thank our lovely panelists and thank Alex for the presentation earlier. Look, I think we're all excited about the future of generative and where it's gonna take us. And hopefully, we'll be sitting here next year, and the stat is gonna be all of us are extremely delighted with our consumer experiences, conversions off the charts, and we're all just starting new brands because we're so excited. So anyway, thank you all for the time. Great. And, please feel free to check the QR code and get the State of the Commerce report next. Thank you. So I am Kathy Kimple. I am your master of ceremonies for tonight, this afternoon, before the snow rolls in. First, a little bit about the topic today: supercharging your retail strategies with data and AI. You're gonna have learnings from GoPro. Kacey, who's here, is going to talk, as well as Rob Garf. First, I'm Kathy Kimple. I head up digital strategy at OSF Digital, and for those of you who don't know OSF, OSF is a digital transformation company. That's a big mouthful, but what does that mean? That means that we do at OSF, we can do strategy, we can do product innovation, we can help with technology solutions, we can integrate those technologies, we can help you optimize, and we can also help you with something that we get to hear a lot about now: change management. How do you change when you implement new technology? Last but not least, we can help you optimize and manage the technology that you do implement. I run digital strategy. My background is all retail. I will not say how many years I've been coming to NRF, because, quite frankly, it scares me, and I always swear NRF in January is nothing but the best. Snow coming in tomorrow. My background is retail, both brick-and-mortar stores for over 13 years. I ran distribution and transportation for Children's Place for a number of years, and I've been in the digital space since 1999, working with retailers like Linens 'n Things, Dick's Sporting Goods, and then The Knot, which is a retailer, if you didn't know, but also a media company. The consultants who work in the digital strategy group are folks like me, who have retail as their background, and I refer to myself as a recovering retailer quite often. With me today is Kacey Sharrett. Kacey also has extremely deep retail experience, and starting with, let's say, where she is today, she's at GoPro, VP of Direct to Consumer, handles global direct to consumer, all of customer experience for direct to consumer, so we're going to lean in on her skills there a little bit. Her background is also very deeply seated in retail, with 5 years at Barnes & Noble and 21 years at Toys R Us, and she reminded me earlier that she was the first person in the country with omnichannel in her title when she was VP of omnichannel in 2008. Not that we're dating you, Kacey. No. We're going to go with that, though, unless anybody wants to challenge it. Also with us on the stage is Rob Garf. We are thrilled to have him here. Rob is a wealth of information, so if we don't cover things on the presentation today, make note of Rob. Find him. You could ask him a million questions. He always has the answer. He's VP and GM of Retail at Salesforce. So ready to get going? Ready. Kacey, a little bit—you want to do a little bit about GoPro before we get started? I would love to. So, so just in case anybody doesn't know what GoPro is, a lot of people know us for our cameras, but we like to think about our business as a, as a place where consumers go, where they are connecting and collecting their memories, and it's an opportunity for them to share them with the world. So we have platforms, that we use to go ahead and, and allow customers to do that. We like to think about kind of powering up those extreme experiences that a lot of you know about, but there are many, many people out there that share them for the everyday fun in the backyard and the pool with their kids. I love the company. I've been there for three years, and, it is just, it's an amazing place to work. The content is rich. We get a lot of user-generated stuff. It's like a wealth of, of really, really neat people and a lot of good fodder for, for fun on the site. So yeah. Rob, anything you want to say about Salesforce? Yeah, sure, but my first GoPro memory is my son losing the GoPro in the bottom of a lake while he was water skiing. So I need to get the latest model. I'll talk about that after. But, Salesforce. So Salesforce generally is the world's number one AI CRM, but in retail, think about it as the platform to fuel the unified shopping experience across marketing, service, commerce, with data and AI in the middle. And I have to say, it's a thrill, Kathy, to be with you and OSF. I came by way of the Demandware acquisition, which is now Commerce Cloud, and OSF might be the longest-standing partner. I like to say that you are integrating Commerce Cloud into Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud before Salesforce was. So it's a really nice partnership with- Take that note. Yeah, take it. Great. Good to be here. So after the kudos to Rob about data, we'd be remiss if we didn't talk a little tiny bit of a look back on 2023 and holiday, and then how that might affect what we think about for 2024. So let's get into it. Yeah, let's do it. So just for context, part of my role is overseeing our Shopping Index, which looks at all of the data that flows through the Salesforce platform. It's billions and billions of shoppers on a regular basis, and that allows us to have a bird's-eye view of what's happening in the industry. It's available on Salesforce.com, again, built on Tableau and available for everyone. And over the holiday, you can imagine a lot of you, a lot of retailers are looking at this data, crawling through it to benchmark what's happening in the industry. And when we think about the holiday, it really wasn't a big surprise where we landed. We had forecasted 3% year-over-year increase globally and 1% in the U.S. I don't think many executives I talked to, I'd be interested, Kacey, what you saw is anticipating a blowout holiday. So getting out a bit unscathed, being at a good inventory position was a main, a main objective. But that doesn't tell the full picture. First of all, sales followed the discounts, so we were really low in the discount rate early in the season. Actually, Cyber Week, we saw a 40% higher discount rate than Amazon Big Deal Days in October. The other piece, which was really encouraging, for the first time in five quarters growth came from demand largely, rather than just increased prices. So we saw for the first time, people were actually buying a little bit more. So when we think about the themes, I'll just click through this really quickly because it really sets up what a lot of what we're gonna talk about today. How many of you have heard AI over the last day or so? Yeah, if I got a nickel for every time- Come on, let's get AI to go. A nickel, a dollar for every AI mentioned. That would be really nice. Yes. Inflation, I guess. I was, I was quoting Fletch, but yeah, right, that was actually 30 years ago, so it probably should be. Anyways, AI. So according to our research, 17% of all sales were driven by A, by predictive and AI. This was really the first AI holiday. Returns played a big role. We'll get into this a little bit more, but retailers were pulling back their returns, their once liberal returns policies. We saw that 20% of orders, and we still have a little way to go working through it after the holiday rush, but 20% of the orders were returned, and that was basically flat, so that was actually a pretty good sign. BOPIS played a huge role, especially after the shipping cutoff date. So those that had buy online, pick up at store, they saw one in three orders were from buy online, pick up in store after the shipping cutoff date, which doesn't make a huge surprise because consumers wanted to either, A, not spend the high price for expedited shipping, and they wanted to make sure they got the product before the holiday. Social was big. Actually, it drove five times higher traffic than other traditional media, and then service was big as well. More automation to help with more of the rudimentary questions, so the service agents could help more with the higher value, more complex. So a lot of interesting things. What often people say when I go through this is: "Okay, great. That was a holiday. We're behind it. We're wrapping up our year. We're trying to close the books through the end of January. "Who cares?" Actually, a lot of people don't say that, but it sounds good. But really, we should just acknowledge that oftentimes we see the shopping behavior and what happens in retail during the holiday becomes really the new watermark for the coming year. So I think these things will transcend itself, and I think Kathy will walk through some of these details. Yes, we're gonna go through some of the details that all will relate back to the points that are on here, but I wanted to put Kacey on the spot a little bit. Did number 4, social, surprise you or not really? No, I was actually gonna definitely comment that... Well, number one, AI, I guess, it's here to stay, so- Yeah. Let's get that straight. But no, social shopping is something that I think really started to emerge probably in the second half of the year, and you saw a lot more. Also, I've seen a lot of brands put it on the sites, too, so complementing, you know, their product detail pages with video and then taking that out. And I think headless infrastructure has really allowed for brands to be able to take those experiences off-site and be where the customer is, so yeah. Great. What I think GoPro has in its benefit is that the social is oftentimes outsourced and crowdsourced by your, loyal customers, right? So it's so authentic. Yes. The other aspect we're seeing, actually, is that social isn't just for social media managers at the headquarters. More and more store associates are becoming social media managers, so there's a lot of authenticity to that, not just looking to the paid influencers, but—and creators, but actually, the people, our biggest brand and, ambassadors in many cases. And then traffic is a critical element that we hear from our clients over and over and over again of the cost of marketing, getting more traffic, and it is very interesting to see how much social is starting to drive in the way of traffic. Yeah, I mean, it is the top of the funnel, and you know, conversion is still a little bit relatively lower than other channels, or still making a little clunky for people to actually break down the friction between seeing something they like and actually buying it. But with embedded payments and other ways, especially through mobile, we're making a little bit easier time by time. Great. So let's talk about the Omnichannel Retail Index. So the Omnichannel Retail Index is a multi-year study. We launched this in 2015. I was pleased to be involved with that launch, in conjunction with NRF, and we have been running the index every year since then. And why? What do we do, and why do we love this, and why do we do it every year? Because it's a big undertaking. We benchmark 120 retailers and brands, sometimes a little bit more. We look at 14 different verticals. So we wanna make sure that we've got retailers and brands in all of the verticals that might be important and that we have good cross-representation. We benchmark 200 features and functions, and since we've been doing this since 2015, we have the ability to say: How is one vertical performing against another? How is a vertical upping their game in terms of digital features and functions, web, mobile, cross-channel? And where do we see traction starting to happen with new features and functions? So one of the things that we do, and we're gonna move into some numbers, but we look at it and say: If there are 120 retailers and brands, what percent of them have adopted a feature and function? So for example, 95% may have auto-suggest on search, but if you don't, and we then say 95% do, it becomes a conversation starter. But we also look at some cases where a feature and function a year ago was at 20%, and today it's at 45%. And we're starting to track and get a sense of, well, why are those features and functions picking up in utilization by retailers and brands? Our hypothesis always is, adoption means success. So if something is successful, retailers are gonna adopt it, they're gonna lean in. So we use this index when we work with retailers to help inform, and if you're not part of the index, and the List is here, we could benchmark you against the index, show you where your gaps are, and work with you to identify priorities, because not every vertical has the same priority. So a vertical of apparel or jewelry might have the need to have a fit and to be better able to see fit, whereas a vertical like GoPro might want to have more in the way of recommendations and comparisons. So the index is very powerful. We use it every year, and we benchmark every year, and we use this extensively in our work with clients. The other thing we do is it's about numbers, 'cause we're a very data-driven group, but it's also about what does good look like. So it's not just: are you doing faceted navigation? Are you doing BOPIS well? But what does good look like? And that's something that we bring to bear when we work with clients, and we'll do a little bit today about what does good look like and some of the cool things we may have seen during holiday. So first up, the theme of NRF, as I walked in the building today and noticed it, was "Make It Matter." So we stole a little bit, and we're gonna make - basically have a theme of "Make It." So first up, we're gonna talk about make it easy for your customers to find what they're looking for. And these are stats. Remember, I talked about those percentages from the, the index from 2023. 95% do autosuggest. Okay, not something to get terribly excited about. I think Kacey said to me, "Well, that's old news." On the other hand, we know that customers who use search convert 3x-4x higher than customers who don't. Only 38% of retailers who are doing really looking at search, remember the search terms that I used. 43% this year, and a number that's growing and growing up from 26% last year, populate the search bar with top searches and top trending items. What a smart way to do of getting product right in front of your customer. Kacey, you had mentioned when we were talking about search, the difficulty of understanding where the customer comes into your site and how you handle search. Absolutely. You wanna weigh in on that a little bit? Yeah. Yeah. I think first I would say, search for me is probably one of the biggest opportunities that I think is kind of across the board at a lot of retailers, and brands in particular probably have smaller assortments, so not as critical as some of the larger retailers that are out there. But when you think about search and you think about comparing that to a store experience and, you know, we're woefully behind. You get a lot of results, and they're not necessarily tuned. The consumer has to do a lot of work to get it there. I think we're at a turning point. I think AI is gonna facilitate that, and I don't know if anybody's used ChatGPT, but, you know, you get into this kind of conversational, you know, search, where you're looking for something, and I think we're training customers now to start to be a little bit more conversational as opposed to just, you know, kind of keyword focus. But I think search has a lot of opportunity, and it's going to be inherent on retailers and the brands to make sure that they've got the underpinnings of the data, for the AI to get there. And AI is not a strategy. Like, there's a lot of talk about it, like, how do I, you know, have an AI strategy? It's not a strategy. AI is the foundation on which you need to build all of your other customer experiences that draw upon that information. So I know Rob has some good things to contribute there, but. I would just say, like, I made the mistake of starting online to try and find a new washer and dryer in December, not by plan, but because I had to, and it was incredibly difficult going through four different sites, and I gave up, and I had to go to the store. So I think we have a lot of opportunities still ahead of us to make it better, so. Rob, what's happening at Salesforce with search? Lots of good things. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, AI, again, is a word that we're hearing or an acronym a lot, and what I hear from our customers is finding practical use cases. We don't want to boil the ocean. As an analyst, we used to call it management by magazine. I don't know how much we read magazines anymore, but you get the idea where it's like, you see something interesting, you want to implement it. But search is a very practical way. I talked about it before, between breaking down the friction, and where you can apply AI to make that happen. It's interesting. I know we'll talk about AI a little bit on the next slide. I've mentioned that 17% of all sales online for the holiday were driven by AI. I didn't mention the actual number. It's a big number. Over Cyber Week, it was $51 billion globally. Amazing. Over the entire holiday season, we define that as November and December. It was $199 billion. So the impact is real, and search is a great way to apply it. Okay, I'm gonna reinforce, Kacey said, starts with the data, because we've talked about this session, and I think the title, we talk about data AI and the omnichannel retail index. All the omnichannel retail index is, is serving up some conversation, but it is all about the data and how that enables AI. So when we talk about what does good look like, just an example, so here's an example from Etsy. You know, they're tailoring search results. They're looking to see how—what the user is doing. In this particular example, I was looking for a customized hat. Did some work, looked, did a little searching, favorited an item or two, and then, "Oh, dear, conference call. I'm late for a Zoom." Walked away, came back two days later. The beauty of this example is, when I came back two days later, and we look about how AI powers this up, they were smart enough to remember what I had favorited, served up back to me. I had favorited... Oh, I was interested in customized hats with dog monogramming and things that will reflect my lifestyle and my pup. So how brilliant is that? Because it's not forcing me to start all over from ground zero, and it's helping me convert and really feel great about my customer experience at Etsy. You want anything you want to add on this one, Rob? No, I think we can go on. I think one point I will make really quickly is that there hasn't been a lot of innovation in search over the last 20 years. I mean, you talked about type ahead and faceted search, but, you know, the big, I guess, revelation was moving it from the left sidebar to the right, you know, at the top. So I feel like there's a, a lot of opportunity there. I think a common drumbeat you'll hear from me is mobile, because that has been back in style. We made a huge surge for it over a bunch of years, and we got to a point where we felt like we plateaued in terms of traffic and sales, and then the pandemic happened, and we went back to computers, which was really interesting because of the large form factor, and we weren't traveling. But I think there's an opportunity relative to search as people are in the small form factor and wanting to get what they want much quicker. Great. So let's talk about what, what are we going to make next? So make it relevant and fun. So when we talk about relevance and making it easy for the customer, as we look at guided selling, that has increased. So a year ago, guided selling was 26% of the retailers in the index. Today, it's 40%. 81% of those guide shoppers based on fit or size, so again, it's where fit becomes more important. 15% of folks in the index, and this is new and trending, and this is something we're watching to, you know, and see how we can use visualization tools to help people understand fit, how it fits on the body, how it's a virtual try-on, how it can drive experiences. Kacey, GoPro certainly makes experiences fun. You certainly tackle that challenge, but how do you get people to the right products? Yeah. So, as you can imagine, right, we have a small number of SKUs. Unlike a former life, we had 50 million that we had to manage, and search was a completely different story there, but to a smaller number of SKUs, but, it's a higher ticket, and there's a lot of technical components that I think a lot of our consumers want to understand with specs, but it's also because it's a big purchase. It's one that there's a lot of, you know, thought that's given to get the consumer, you know, to a place where they're ready to convert. So, we have several paths that we offer, just depending on where you are, on the GoPro site, and, so two of them, you know, kind of speak to the guided selling. So one of them is a product finder, which is, a bit of like a quiz. So if you don't know, you know, what the GoPro is, that's right for you, we kind of take you through a List of questions, and then, you know, you get an output of, of recommendations, which is great. By the way, our younger consumers love the quizzes. They love the quick cut hits, and they love kind of getting, you know, getting in and getting out. We also have our shop by activity pages. So these are really amazing, beautiful, visually, you know, prominent pages. They do a lot of storytelling, but these are designed around activities. So if you're going to, you know, go look for something for snowboarding or, you know, water or what have you, or you're a creator, a content creator, we have a page that basically takes you through, a lot of, you know, how you would use the product and what mounts, what accessories, and what things kind of to consider as you go through. That's really a hit for some of our, we'll say, more mature consumers who like to kind of sit and take in content. We also find that that is also, as you were saying, a little bit more of a desktop component, whereas the quiz is much more utilized on mobile. So, you know, a little bit of an interesting dynamic there. So we have a couple of different ways that we get consumers to the product. I do think you said a keyword. It's intense. The more signals that you can take in with your data to understand where the customer has been and what they are trying to get to, and, and this is where AI is going to be such a critical component. The more of those pieces that you can put together and the better results that you can serve up, you know, the better off your brand is going to be. Yeah, the key to that Zero- Party Data is gold for you, especially when you're getting it direct, and then you can turn that into segmentation and trigger certain engagement with them. Certainly. It's also worth mentioning, the customer expectations have gotten higher and higher and higher, and AI just drives it even higher because suddenly it's like: Wow, this is really cool. Why, why can't you do that? So, you know, it's how do you make it relevant and fun? How do you really drive engagement? This is an example from a Kohl's campaign using Generative AI, and you're inputting in a little bit of customer data. The wonder of it all is, this is about, I think this is about Jeff, and we'll see a little bit more as it moves on. Yes, it's all about Jeff. And Jeff is very into baseball and grilling, and as a result of that, this generates an absolutely cool ode to Jeff. So that's sort of whimsical and cool, and I probably would have told one of my friends, "You should go check this out." But it's not just about whimsical and cool, it's about converting. So with links in the document that are shoppable, and it'll take you right to the product. So you've, in essence, sent this to Jeff, and it can become a Christmas wish list. So let's talk about make it convenient and clear. Before I do that, Kathy- Yeah. Do you mind if we jump back for that? Oh. -one moment? Make me go back? I know. You don't have to go back. Everybody can visualize it. All right, we're back. What I'll say, too... Oh, look at that. Voilà! That AI must have heard us. First of all, I want to say, every year I'm up here, I love seeing everybody take out their phone and take pictures. It just shows how good this index is, so I encourage you to download it. What I was thinking about when you brought this up is, one customer said to us recently that AI is the new UI. Think about it. AI, artificial intelligence, is the new user interface. And so when we think about the evolution of search... more and more customers, more and more consumers are going to be using AI as the portal into what they're trying to find, whether that's through voice. There's a cosmetic portal now that you can go to, and through Generative AI, figure out what cosmetics are perfect for you, and it's an affiliate marketing program. It gets you to the brand, and they then get a credit for it. The other piece, too, I'll say, with relevant and fun, but also the Guided Selling you talked about. I don't know if anybody has a chance to go to Boot Barn. I actually didn't, but Michelle Grant on my team, who is always seeking out the most innovation, and she tweets about it, so follow her on Twitter or X, I guess it is. She talked about this, and this is John Hazen, who's been in the business forever. His whole mantra through his career is: let's not let technology get in the way and in between the store associate and the consumer. That's what he's deploying through what he's calling, Bandit, which is a digital app within the physical store to guide people through, based on AI, what they ultimately will want. So it's relevant, it's fun, but it's ultimately solving a problem for the customer. It's breaking down that friction. It's making it more personalized as well. I think, I think there's something important because for that customer in that moment, that's certainly really helpful. But then think about it from a brand or retailer perspective. The data that you get by following a consumer's journey then becomes to be predictive, right? So the next time that you, you know, have a, a similar kind of opportunity to present information, you're now using insights, real data, as opposed to, you know, just it being a one- once and done. Yeah, that's a good point. Even if they don't buy it right there, you then can continue the journey- Right. Where else? Huh. Benefits all around. So make it convenient and clear. This one is a personal favorite of mine because I launched BOPIS in 2004, even though I didn't have the title. Kacey's deeply been involved with omnichannel and BOPIS, but only 59% of folks in the index allow shoppers to refine their selection by store availability. The example on the screen is Carter's, because anyone who has worked with or knows a young mom who is on the go and doing everything on her mobile device, she wants you to make it easy for her. She wants to know, "I can pick it up curbside, I can pick it up at my local store," and she wants to know where that availability is. So we call them out as someone who has really leaned into BOPIS in doing this, right? We also talk about how we make it convenient and clear to offer back-in-stock notifications. That one's a little controversial because sometimes it's sell what you have versus telling someone, you know, "You can take a back order." Kacey, anything you want to say about that one? I have tons to say on this topic, but I'll keep it brief. First of all, the best thing that you can do if you're an online retailer is just be in stock. So let's just start there. Like, everything you can do, just be in stock, right? Consumers, when they go to a store, there's a high substitution percent because I can look at things, and I can pull different things off the shelves, and they came there with intent, but you will—they'll move on to the next site. I saw a lot of things over the holidays that were super disappointing because when you go in stock online, there's a whole network, a web of other items that potentially you lose sales on because that one item wasn't in stock, and the consumers don't, you know, they don't want to buy a piece now. They want to buy everything together. But, you know, related to being in stock, consumers also want it now. So I share your passion and, you know, convenience and clear, like, that's table stakes. We shouldn't even be talking about it at this point in time. You know, the UX should be clean, it should be super apparent to the consumer when the product's available, where it's available, and you know, how long it's gonna take to get there, and the product details. One of the things that still frustrates me to this day, having been in omnichannel for, you know, many, many years and, and a little bit less so from a brand perspective at GoPro, because we don't have stores, is that we don't really have a great way to get the consumer the product, like, immediately, right? So you think about BOPIS. We really need to figure out, and this is for all the tech providers that might be in- I know. Anybody else that's out there on the floor that needs to hear it, but we really need better solutions to make store inventory available for brands so that the consumer can legit shop any way they want to, any way... you know, anywhere they want to, and get the product when they want to. And so it's critical, but we really don't do a good job as brands, you know, applying pressure to our partners to make that product available to consumers. It's a huge opportunity. For same-day delivery, buy online- Maybe I should take that on. I'm with you. I'm with you. We'll take that on and try and solution it because we believe in it. So let's look at an example of Best Buy, and they do a lot really, really, really well. They remember, you know, my home store, where I shopped last. But where they take it to the next level is: "Well, gee, I forgot my power cord while I was coming out here to NRF." So they start to basically give me insights of where it's available for in-store pickup, where it's available with store lockers, where it's available in seven other locations that are near me to help my shopping journey. All looks easy, all looks fun, but all the underpinning there is accurate data. Sending me to the store that, oh, I thought I was going to be able to get lockers, or, sending me to a store where I could do an alternative pickup. The data that powers this is amazing, but what a great experience when I don't have a power cord and I'm here at NRF. Yeah, I mean, I'll jump in. You talked about the convenient and clear, and I love that in terms of the store inventory. It's so critical. And what, you know, one of the things the pandemic taught us is you really need to break down that friction and be able to help people find what they want anywhere in the network. I'll take it from a slightly different angle, and that's returns. I brought that up as one of the key findings. Our prediction coming, or one of the five that came into this year, was that 21% of orders were at risk because of poor returns experiences. What we did is we looked at the top 1,000 sites, and we graded them on their ability to be clear, to be easy, and to be reasonable. And what we found, based on our Shopping Index, if you didn't have all three, you had a much higher bounce rate because people just didn't have the confidence, and you had a much lower repeat purchase rate, so you weren't keeping that loyalty. And what we like to say is, "You can't play hide and seek with your return policies." And so, unfortunately, what we saw is more of flat growth, which is good in terms of the return rate. We still had it at across the various verticals at 20% over the holiday. But it's really important to keep in mind, we got very liberal over the last couple of years in... As an industry with return policies, 'cause a lot of people couldn't go in the store, and a lot of people were bracketing, so they were buying three products and returning two of them. But, you know, we don't wanna over-index. We don't wanna make them not clear, we don't wanna make them hard, and we don't wanna make them just unrealistic, right? And so it's important to have that balance a little bit. By the way, this is where loyalty—I know we can talk about loyalty in a little bit, but that's where loyalty plays really well. If you know the customer, if you're segmenting the customer, you know they are valuable, they may have a different policy and experience than someone else, and so that might be another benefit you can consider as well. Fabulous. So make it helpful and quick. Not... Again, this is sort of like search, not that sexy topic, but lots and lots and lots of opportunity. 83% of folks in the index have live chat on their site. Of those, 48% offer live chat and cart. So still not hitting them in the cart when I'm getting stuck, and I have a little bit of friction. 72% have automated live chat or chat bot responses, as well as being able to handle interactions with a customer agent, customer service agent, or store associate. So we'd love to see a little bit more interaction with store associates because they are a wealth and a treasure of knowledge. Kacey, you had some passion about service and chat. Did you wanna- I always have passion about service. Yeah, so, so number one, I had some great experiences, I think, myself, over holiday, and there, you know, that's... You mentioned the return experience. The thing I would say, number one, gosh, try and sell the customer the right product to begin with, so they don't have to return it. But then if they're they have to be forced to go through some return funnel, right? Try to make it quick and easy. I'll shout out to Home Chef. I had a great experience with Walmart Chat, where, you know, it was just it was something as simple as a return and, you know, maybe a little bit of complexity in there, but, you know, within two minutes, I was done with both and a fabulous, I think, handling of it. You know, there's sales chat and there's service chat, and they are two very different things, and I think that's also something that we got to keep in mind. You know, the support chat, a lot of companies had it, and it was built on if/then statements, you know, that, that trailed off, you know, 50x down a decision tree. Yeah. And you know, it's not AI, but you know, it's at some point it dead ends, and you end up with a representative anyway, and it's like, ugh, I just you know spent several minutes kind of feeding information, and then I have to start all over validating my name and whatever with the agent. And that is not helpful and quick, and that's definitely, you know, one of my pet peeves. But, you know, I think sales chat is where we're gonna really see expansion of AI this year because, you know, there's a wealth of information that, that, number one, retailers and brands have on their sites, but that's also out there, you know, in the World Wide Web, and that becomes available to, you know, get into these repositories that will feed these interactions. And quite frankly, I, I see our search bars, you know, you get into that natural language search, and you're asking a question. I see that, you know, potentially going off into chat, and I think Salesforce is powering some of those experiences- Yep ... where then it just becomes, you know, kind of a conversation outside. But imagine, you know, they don't even leave the homepage, so I think that all the information is there. We just need to get those pieces put together. Yeah. So I'll give a personal example where we bought a ski rack from Thule over the holiday to go skiing, and we got it, and we realized one of the feet didn't work, and I was very proud. I used duct tape and made it work. But I called Thule, they picked up right away, and they realized this was, like, a $60 replacement part, which probably cost... I won't go into the margins, but they were doing pretty well on it. And without any, like, going back and forth, they went, took me on the website, and they said, "Which part was it?" I got it. They're shipping it out to me for free, and that's gonna make me a loyal shopper. It's a quality product. I would have been cranky if I had to pay for it, but, I also was able to fix it on my own, for the record, again. But the real point here is, I don't know if anybody was in the keynote yesterday with John Furner from Walmart and the Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff. Aside from bashing social media, he also talked about Gucci. It's a really good example, and I know the head of customer service really well. And, you know, what they did with AI and thinking about service, and it's a lot around what you talked about in terms of selling, Kacey, is that they went into this, and they have what they call Gucci 9, and they worked with customer service from Salesforce. They call themselves Customer Zero 'cause they really helped develop this with us. Their objective was to create scale and create consistency, meaning their advisors can do more, and they're speaking with the brand voice, 'cause they're using AI to take in all of the material from brand to advertising, to every other service chat that happened. And what that ended up doing is it serves up a draft reply for the agent, or they call them the service advisor, to Gucci-fy the response. And what they found is they didn't only gain productivity, but they also gained sales. So it turned into not just scale and really consistency, but also really empowering those digital advisors. Where I could see the next step happening is put those in the hands of the store associates. I mean, they're pretty smart, they're pretty passionate, they're pretty knowledgeable already, especially in a luxury market or if you're calling a GoPro call center or chatting with them. But think about putting that in the hands of the associate. It really changes the paradigm a bit from a checkout process, which is all about just speed and efficiency, to a check-in process, which is like: Let's engage the consumer. Let's use what we know about them to actually make a better engagement. Great. So following on that, a quick look is Sephora. They use chatbots, they use generative AI, they analyze tons of product. They analyze how I'm shopping. And when I can't find the item I want, and I engage in chat, they can actually make a recommendation and make a suggestion to me, a little bit about your Gucci story. They're actually knowing what I've looked at, knowing my skin tone, knowing what I'm interested, closing the sale. We're gonna watch time now, and we're gonna make it worthwhile. We're gonna develop a connection. So loyalty is something we hear about quite a bit this year. Marketing costs are skyrocketing. Retailers are, are really concerned about customer data, zero-party data, so folks are leaning in in a big way to loyalty. In the index, 77% offer some sort of a loyalty program. Of those, 42% are offering a tiered program. 39% are starting to offer loyalty points based on actions. Now you take loyalty to the next level, and you start to think about what can AI do to loyalty. I'm gonna quickly skip over this, but loyalty programs driven by AI allow for greater personalization, allow for ways that you can move those customers through your tiers based on what they're interested in, based on their frequency, or based on whether or not they're interested in attending an event. Your loyalty program with an AI background can come that much faster. Watching the time, what is the theme here? On every one of these slides that we have touched on or every one of these examples, it's data, data, and data. So really, it's about how you develop a con... Customer centricity model in somewhat of a crawl, walk, run, really looking at a customer 360 view. Build a foundation, how you enable growth, and then how you capitalize on future opportunities. Now, all of this just sounds so easy, and once upon a time, I had a CEO who was like: "Oh, it just happens. It's on the website. It just happens." There are teams of people, and there's technology that has to make it happen. It's not magic, even though my CEO did think it happened by magic. It requires team, it requires change, it requires change management because for some companies with small teams, this is fundamentally a huge change. So as we work with companies, we're working with them to understand: What's the strategy? What's the data strategy? What's the change management elements? How does your team has to change? And then, how do we capitalize on, you know, maximizing this data to deliver on the promise of AI, which is where Rob can explain how very easy this is. That's- Is it a... Yeah, Yeah, right? That's a lot. I'm saying. Yeah, boy. How very easy this is. Go, Salesforce. Well, I mean, if I back up and just kinda underscore what you said, we've been collecting data for quite some time in retail. According to our research, retailers have 44 different systems to manage the consumer engagement. That's just a lot, right? And, you know, we talk a lot about the AI revolution. It's as much about a data revolution, it's about a skills revolution, it's about a trust revolution. And that's really important because it's your data, it's your customer's data, and you need to really keep that really close and secure. And so at Salesforce, we really put Data Cloud at the heart of our strategy with Customer 360, and the idea here is, again, being able to aggregate all of that data that exists, and then being able to normalize it, and ultimately activate it, is really key. Because in order to make AI work, you need the right data. By the way, the right data likely isn't everything out there in the internet. The right data is the data within your enterprise. What you know about your consumers, what your consumers, in many cases, like that guided selling example Kacey talked about, provided to you already, and even the product data as well. I think there's a lot of magic that we haven't even started really diving into yet as an industry, the Venn between consumer data and product data, and then really being able to serve up that experience. Again, you know, when you combine data and AI, and being able to deliver it in the flow of work, there's a lot of magic that can happen. I love it. There's one other piece, though, that I think is important because past the delivery, you now have to have people that are curating and, you know, tuning the information, right, the outputs, because- Yes ... AI is still AI, right? And it's still the underpinnings are still, you know, a lot of fact gathering, but that doesn't always mean that the output is gonna be what you need it to be or what you would put in front of a consumer, which I think is, you know, one of the watch-outs.... So, you know, I think the great thing here is that AI is doing exactly what we need it to do. It's gonna power up experiences and make people's jobs easier. Yeah. But hopefully, you also then are able to kind of create this economy of people around it that are taking that data and then are making sure that it, it gets put to the customer in a very suitable way, and one that's, you know, in your brand voice, and so on and so forth. So, you know, there's, there's a lot, and I—this is a lot of systems on board, but I think- Yeah. It's a lot. It's magic. There's a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff. Yeah, yeah. Magic. Magic happens. But there's real people, right, that are- Absolutely. Have these efforts, It's change. To get it. Yeah, it's a really good point. You have to ground the data. Prompt engineers are the big buzz, and they should be, because they'll be able to make better outputs. It also has to be trust. We have a, what we call Einstein Trust Layer, to make sure we try to, as much as possible, remove the hallucinations, remove the toxicity, remove the bias. But if there aren't people looking at it, if there aren't humans in the loop, if you're not using and understanding your data, you really are gonna ultimately break down that loyalty that you've gained with your customers. Fabulous! And with 1 minute left to go, we'll call this close to a wrap. So we are at OSF Digital is at Booth 4139. You can come scan the QR code, get a copy of this presentation. We could hook you up with a copy, a little bit more information on the Omnichannel Retail Index. We've done some work working with our partners at Salesforce on demystifying the Data Cloud AI. So also, you could scan the QR code to get access to some of that information, and I thank you all. I don't know that we have time for questions because we're hard up on the deadline. So thank you, and stop by the booth- Thank you. Or we'll be here for a few minutes after. Thank you. All right, everybody. Thank you very much for coming. Welcome. My name is Peter Larsen. I'm Vice President of Multi-Channel Fulfillment and Buy with Prime at Amazon. And believe it or not, this is my first NRF, so I'm very excited, and please be kind. Okay, so in a couple of minutes, I'm going to invite Michael from Salesforce and Jenna from Solo Brands up on stage to talk about our latest Buy with Prime integration and how it's helping brands grow their D2C business. But before that, let me just take a few steps backward and set the stage a little bit. As many of you probably know, Amazon has spent $ billions and $ billions creating a fulfillment network that gets millions of items to shoppers really quickly and on time, every time. We thought to ourselves a year ago, Prime members love this experience on Amazon.com, so why shouldn't that experience also be available off of Amazon.com? The answer is, it should. That's how Buy with Prime got started. Let me show you how it works. Do you have a business to run, products to make, orders to process, and customers to connect with? While worrying about attracting and converting shoppers who seem to know what you've got. Introducing Buy with Prime. Imagine offering Prime shopping benefits on your own site, like one to two day shipping and a seamless checkout millions of Prime members trust. There's even unique marketing solutions to help you reach more shoppers. Oh, wait, we forgot to mention, Amazon handles the payment, processing, storage, packing, delivery, and yes, even easy returns, all through Amazon's fast fulfillment network, while you build direct relationships in real time with control of your customer data. Pretty cool, right? Let us do what we do best, so you can do what you do best. Prime members can now use Buy with Prime on your site. Okay, so we have thousands of merchants have been signing up for Buy with Prime every week since we got going almost exactly a year ago. One of the exciting things we're seeing is that three out of every four shoppers that use Buy with Prime are net new to brand shoppers. That, of course, as you all know, is the Holy Grail for those D2C businesses trying to grow: how do we acquire new shoppers? All right, so that's acquisition. How about conversion? Well, we're also seeing that on average, shopper conversion is increasing by 25% for merchants using Buy with Prime. What does that mean? It means more shoppers are buying things more often on products that are enabled with Buy with Prime. Why is that? Well, many of these Prime members have grown up as e-commerce shoppers on Amazon.com, and they've come to expect the same Prime experience, one and two day free shipping, reliable delivery times and a promise, and they wanna see that on sites beyond Amazon. Let's take a look at one of our customers, bareMinerals, one of the most recognizable cosmetics brands. They've added Buy with Prime 6 months ago or so. They did some A/B testing, and they saw a 60% uplift in shopper conversion. Also, this past holiday season, they used Buy with Prime to give shoppers an extra week to shop. So I'm not one of these people, and I know you're not any of these people, but there are some people out there who wait until the very last minute to buy their Christmas gifts. Those people now, with Buy with Prime, for years, they've had a chance to go to Amazon.com and wait until the last minute to buy their products to get it by Christmas. With Buy with Prime, those shoppers can now go to D2C sites, and they can have that same experience of procrastination, which we all know and love. Okay, so let me talk a little bit about our newest integration, which is Buy with Prime for Salesforce Commerce Cloud integration, a snappy name if there ever was one. Salesforce reaches over 2 billion shoppers, and they're across a number of industry verticals, and that's why we're super excited to work with them. We're also excited to work with them because we built some net new Buy with Prime features directly into our Salesforce Commerce Cloud integration. Number one, there are no new tools to learn. Buy with Prime data and Buy with Prime operations seamlessly flows into all the Salesforce Commerce Cloud's tools that you use today. So there's no net tools to learn, and it actually makes operations of Buy with Prime, with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, really easy. That's thing one. Thing two, one of the things, merchants have been asking us since we launched Buy with Prime a year ago, is to make the Prime brand more prevalent through the shopping journey, just like Prime members are used to on Amazon.com. To date, a shopper can only find Buy with Prime on the product page. That's the only way to find out what it's all about and, and to use it. With this new integration with Salesforce, you can now integrate the Prime experience throughout the entire shopping journey, for example, in search. So you can search in your, in the D2C site. You can find out which items are Prime enabled. You can actually filter your search on Prime or non-Prime, just like you have on Amazon.com. Note, this is not an Amazon or a Prime branding takeover of your D2C site, 'cause we've also built in many options for merchants to customize exactly how the Prime brand shows up on their D2C site, which of course, they've spent a lot of time and effort to customize to their own particular brand look, and feel, and vibe. So it's really the best of both worlds. You get the best of the Prime experience on Amazon, but you also retain all of the things you love about the D2C site itself. Number three, merchants don't add all their items into Buy with Prime right away. We know this is the case. Many merchants start out, they wanna try a few products. They wanna see how it goes. I, for example, tell them about the conversion. They say, "Mm, like you, not sure if I believe you, wanna see it for myself." So they put a few products into Buy with Prime. Now, what that means is that as a shopper, you're gonna go through a particular D2C site that might have, let's say, 50% of their products on Buy with Prime, and you might add a Prime product to your cart. You might also add a non-Prime item to your cart. In this new integration, the same cart, which is the Salesforce Commerce Cloud checkout, can handle both Prime and non-Prime items, so shoppers can choose whatever experience they want to. We think this is gonna work out really well because, again, these Prime members are used to this experience on Amazon. Okay, so don't take my word for it. Let me invite my colleagues, Michael from Salesforce and Jenna from Solo Brands, up to the stage. Come on up. Hello, hello, hello! Thank you again for coming. Really appreciate it. Well, so, I guess we can start off. And, is it true, Jenna, that brands really only have to do one thing for massive success in everything they're doing with e-commerce, and that's add Snoop Dogg to one of their marketing? Yeah, it's, it's really easy actually, to predict a viral campaign. I suggest everybody does it. No, it was, it was amazing to be a part of this campaign. Snoop performed. He gave us so much more than he was obligated to, and, it was a blast being a part of executing this, but did a great job putting us on the map and driving some unbelievable global brand awareness. We saw... I think the latest count was roughly 19 billion impressions, so that means everyone on the planet saw it, like, 2.5 times, which is insane. But, yeah, it was a great way to start out the new year, for sure. Yeah, that's an amazing campaign, actually. You have an amazing background, from USA Rugby superstar to retail superstar. Tell us about it. Yeah, sure. So yes, I played rugby for the U.S. Sevens national team for a bunch of years. I was in the pool for about seven years, and being an athlete really set the stage for my retail journey. You know, and being an athlete in general, you know, learning teamwork, and grit, and resilience, and all those wonderful qualities. You know, people often ask me: "When did you stop being an athlete?" And I always say: "What are you talking about? I'm just a professional retail athlete now," right? Same qualities, same, same needs, just different, different gigs. So my career is actually pretty interesting, I think. You know, I began actually on the retail tech side, so selling software, enabling integrations, partnerships, go-to-market strategies, sitting on partner advisory boards with the likes of Salesforce. And I had an opportunity to come over to the retail side, and I was so inspired by it because I was gonna be able to see how the other half lives. You know, I think as retail tech execs, you know, we're selling into a buyer that we don't really necessarily always understand. We don't know how budgets are built. We don't know how cross-channel stakeholdership is really born. And so being able to come over and do that was a really, really awesome gift for me. So I came on as VP of Digital at Snipes, which is a global sneaker and streetwear retailer. Was promoted to CDO there, wholesaler, really cool opportunity, and then was recruited to come over to Solo Brands, a public portfolio company. We own Solo Stove, Chubbies, Aisle, Oru, a bunch of others. But yeah, really excited to be here and share that journey with you guys. That's amazing experience, that's for sure. Thanks. Your background, Jenna, was one of the reasons, you know, I think we clicked when we first met, and you've been such a great partner to Salesforce. But, maybe tell the team and everyone gathered here that, you know, rugby, sneakers, and now stoves and pizza ovens. Why Solo? Like, what's cool about the brand? Why do you like it, and what's going on? Yeah, it's a really good question. So when I was at Snipes, you know, we're a brand of brands. We sell Nike, Adidas, Puma, Jordan, et cetera, gave me a really interesting, unique perspective. But the opportunity with Solo was really interesting to me because, number one, we're public, so that's a whole hairy beast to deal with and great experience to grow into. But what's really interesting, too, is that we're vertical. So we're direct to consumer. We've got a budding wholesale channel. But really, being able to get involved in product development and manufacturing, to me, really felt like I was gonna be able to round out that retail journey and really just complete the whole picture. That's cool. Well, needless to say, it's been an interesting last couple of years. It has. My understanding is that you've had to adjust how you think about the wholesale channel versus the e-commerce channel along the way. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. Absolutely. So our wholesale channel is only about a year old. And so we're learning as the business continues to evolve, the impact of wholesale growth on the rest of the business. I kinda feel like my superpower in all of this is that when I was at Snipes, we had over 300 stores, and so I got to put in all of the hard, you know, channels and hooks to enable some of those omnichannel transactions, right? BOPIS, ROPIS, buy online, ship to store, ship from store, you know, deal with all the alt payment methods on the front end, et cetera, to actually make these omnichannel experiences really, really come to life. When I came into this new direct-to-consumer environment, saw the massive impact that wholesale was having on the business, I thought, "Wow, you know, why not bring this, this omnichannel experience into the D2C world?" You know, we were able to measure this, right? We could see that an omnichannel consumer is 300x more valuable, or 300% more valuable than the average consumer. Being able to come in here, enable some of those unique use cases, has got me really excited to push the boundaries on how D2C and wholesale historically have either battled or worked together. You've been busy since you joined, I hear. I've been very busy. So one of the first, Solo Stove that I bought, as we've talked about, I bought in a Walmart, right? And then I got this little insert inside my box. I went to your website, I bought some of the extra accessories, and- Oh ... created a membership, and then you guys got me hooked, right? Sure. That's a pretty common experience that you guys were driving. And I remember when we talked about you bringing Commerce Cloud on, that was the first thing we started talking about, was that conversion of the in-store person and the wholesale experience to online, right? So maybe you could talk a bit more about, like, why was Commerce Cloud helpful in what you were trying to accomplish with Solo Stove and that journey from in-store to e-com? Yeah, the old insert in the package. Yeah. Yeah, it's really rocket science. No, it's actually really worked very well for us. It works. Yeah, it did. Exhibit A. I think what's interesting, too, is that looking actually at our new customer acquisition strategy at the intersection of category, it's really, really interesting. So being able to measure that our first-time consumers are now entering their life cycle with us through the accessories category is giving us more validation that they might be getting their picks at a, you know, Dick's Sporting Goods or at Costco or at Walmart, but we're successfully getting them to convert over into our direct consumer site and continue to evolve their relationship with the brand. You know, when it comes to Salesforce, and it comes to blurring the lines between these—this direct consumer and wholesale channel, you know, we went to market, and we looked at all the top e-commerce back ends that you could imagine, and it was my goal to break all of them, right? To figure out which were the platforms that weren't going to be able to get us there. And obviously, I couldn't break Salesforce. I tried, but I couldn't. And so, you know, we're really excited to embark on this journey. You know, the vision for this is just because consumers come to our site doesn't mean that their expectations change. We have omnichannel consumers. It's who they are. It's who all of us are. And if our consumers have the expectation that they wanna understand where an item is, where they can pick it up, or they wanna touch it and feel it before they buy it, they want same-day delivery, next day delivery, willing to wait a couple of days, it's our responsibility, even as a direct-to-consumer brand, to give them that experience. So historically, today, D2C doesn't offer that convenience. We don't have a store footprint. So how can we leverage OMS? How can we leverage Salesforce Commerce Cloud to tie into our wholesalers inventory and expose that position to consumers, enable us to route orders to them, right? Whether it's for fulfillment, micro-fulfillment centers, or it's for BOPIS transactions, and we can work to actually push our customers across the lease line of their stores. We believe that we're winning, and we believe that Salesforce is the tech platform to get us there. I appreciate that. I remember the evaluation process was, as Jenna said, very, very rigorous, I would say. Yeah. It was insane. Yes. You didn't break us, but we came close, and I think the thing I appreciated about that evaluation process that anyone who's worked with us knows is that it's actually the beginning of the partnership, right? We spend a lot of time trying to understand the movement of the stoves through the customer journey. What are the different ways that customers may actually lose trust in the brand because something not good happens, right? And how can we help make that better with our technology? And, yeah, just really proud to have you on the platform and to continue to partner with you. So thanks for that. Sure. Yeah. I guess part of the journey that we're all on is that when a shopper comes to your site, you don't know who they are half the time, or even more than half the time rather. Half the time. I wish! Yeah, true, true. That'd be a good thing. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's a really good point. You know, I, I think we all know that the average conversion rate is roughly 2%, right? So those customers become identified, which leaves 98% of our consumers anonymous. We don't know why they're there. You know, we're not quite sure. They could be there to discover the brand, they could be there to check out Snoop, all sorts of reasons. They could be buying a gift, they could be looking for store inventory. And so, you know, it's, it's really up to us to figure out how do we meet those customers' needs? How do we meet them where they are? How do we have the right experience, the right payment methods, you know, and the right third-party integrations that are gonna make sure that we can convert them as aggressively and effectively as possible? And so, Michael has just made it through his journey of trial and error with Jenna and Solo, which has turned out really well. You're just at the beginning of your evaluation of Buy with Prime. What are your thoughts so far? I am, yeah. It was very interesting. So we actually did a test, and I'll caveat with the purpose of this was more of a proof of concept, less pilot, less rigorous AB test. This was: Is this a thing? Do our customers care about this? And so we went through the integration, which is pretty seamless. And we actually did the test over a six-week period. We started on Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Risky, I know. But we actually let that run for about six weeks, and what we found is that we tested three SKUs, and of those three SKUs, 35% of the throughput was actually through Buy with Prime. So 35% of the consumers that bought those SKUs during that six-week window opted to Buy with Prime. There was a little bit of a period of time there where there were some incentives that were incentivizing co-consumers to Buy with Prime, but the majority of the time was actually absolutely their decision and their choice. We actually bucked the trends a little bit. 95% of our transactions were actually almost existing customers. So for us, it was actually an unbelievable retention play. Additionally, of the three SKUs that we had live, we had two Yukons, one in an ash, which is like a black colorway, the other was in stainless steel, and then the third SKU is actually a Pi Prime, which is our latest pizza oven, everybody. And so what was very interesting is that roughly 90% of the sell-through was on this pizza oven. So these existing customers came to our site. They'd already bought a pit, which is great, but we were actually able to drive throughput on our pizza ovens with existing customers by enabling Buy with Prime. So if this is a retention play for me and an acquisition for everybody else, I- Yeah ... I'm fine with it. But it... Yeah, it was definitely a success. And I, I will say another interesting data point was on December sixth, 72% of those SKUs were actually paid for with Buy with Prime. And so what I see as an executive is consumers that are doing their shopping, and they are putting their trust and their loyalty and faith in service level with Amazon to make sure that those items bought for the holiday were gonna get there on time. It makes me a little sad that they didn't trust us, but, hey-- if it's gonna drive the conversion, I'm, I'm all for it. Well, whether it's acquisition or retention, we're just happy it's working for you so far. Yeah. That's right. Yeah, we're psyched to get into a more rigorous pilot through February to have some more, defensible data around conversion metrics. Looking forward to being put through the wringer. Yeah. Can't wait. It's very cool. Jenna, I'm sure if any of my team members are out there... Any Commerce Cloud team members out there? There we go. Yeah. I'm sure they're as triggered as I am by hearing the words, experiment, change, holiday season, December. Why and how is it possible to actually experiment with something so close to such a critical time when most retailers are just completely locking down their e-com infrastructure? Yeah, I mean, my, my perspective is actually twofold. I've been, I've been broken over and over again. When I was at Snipes, you know, we were selling hype sneakers, right? 1,000 people... or 1,000, a million people showing up for 1,000 pairs of shoes, right? So dealing with Black Friday, three days a week, really put us in a position to build the appropriate infrastructure on Salesforce, by the way, to manage that level of volume and velocity, to keep everything safe and thriving. So I'm a little maybe riskier when it comes to pushing the needle. We, we never went into code freeze at Snipes. We just kind of blazed through. So, between that and the fact that it's a JavaScript widget that layers over the site, requires a little bit of testing, but it was pretty seamless. Getting this live really wasn't that big of a risk for us, and we took the risk, and it paid off so. I'm so glad it worked. Michael, how do you, how do you think about the Salesforce integration with Buy with Prime? Well, I love it. You know, the thing- What? What a surprise. That's right. You know, I made the joke to Peter when we first started working together that as an Amazon customer myself and a, you know, a frequent user of Buy with Prime in our home life, I feel like Commerce Cloud and Amazon Buy with Prime coming together, it's like... It's kind of cheesy, but we're like two best friends who somehow just haven't met yet, you know? And the reason I love it is, as you can see here on the screen, is that we're bringing the power of Buy with Prime directly into Commerce Cloud. And as Peter mentioned, it's not just empowering a checkout method and some fulfillment options, which are very powerful, it's actually deeply connected to our order management infrastructure so that our customers can actually interact with the Buy with Prime orders and manipulate them using our order management system. They'll see the Buy with Prime information, enriching the Customer 360 profile that every Commerce Cloud customer can use to look at who's coming to their site. And this is why Commerce Cloud is a part of the larger Customer 360 from Salesforce. So customers like Solo Brands that use more than one of our applications can actually see the Buy with Prime experience from a merchant perspective, traverse the whole life cycle. Service agents can actually look at and manipulate the orders. They can help issue the refunds, and they can actually see the transactions, just like something that processes through the normal checkout options. And that type of unification from the commerce experience through the service, and even at the top line through the marketing journey, is a really powerful multiplier of Buy with Prime plugging into Commerce Cloud. I think we're just at the beginning, Peter. I think there's so much more we're gonna do together, and I'm just so excited that we're getting to start our partnership today, so thank you. Yeah, me too, as well. It's great to work with great people, too. Yeah. It's really fun to get to know you and a little bit you. We're starting to get to know each other, which I'm happy about. I appreciate that. Yeah. What about your thoughts on what's next for Buy with Prime? Fantastic question. So glad you asked. I mean, listen, I was super honored to get to see this, this integration before it was GA. You know, what I will say is that one of the most complex parts of the customer journey, the thing we covet the most and protect the most, is the checkout, right? It's the cart. The benefit of this integration is pretty interesting. It really helps you jump the line on the mixed cart use cases. And so being able to actually treat individual SKUs differently within the cart, this cartridge really allows you to kind of springboard development and to create an experience where it can recognize the fact that this item is eligible for X or Y or Z. X could be Buy with Prime, Y could be Both, Z could be Shipped to Home. And so that's always been something that's been a little bit nebulous and hard to navigate. So knowing that through this integration we can have a more seamless go-to-market strategy when it comes to Mixed Cart, I'm pumped to test it out. Should be really interesting. Are you thinking about inventory any differently in this experience, or? Yeah, definitely. You know, I think, as we manage our marketplaces, we're always dealing with inventory, right? Those, sorry, dreaded storage fees, right? We have to be very specific in what we put into Amazon from a marketplace perspective. We know that Buy with Prime requires us to have inventory that's with Amazon because they're the ones actually shipping these items out, right? Transaction takes place on D2C, gets routed to Amazon for fulfillment. All is good in the world. So what's interesting, though, and I kind of flipped it on its head a little bit, what I noticed is that we might be able to take some bigger swings on our assortment in Amazon by utilizing Buy with Prime as a way to de-risk that inventory position. So if I know that I'm gonna put core products in Marketplace today because I know we're gonna drive that sell-through, maybe I can drive some more accessories. Maybe I can create some more unique bundles with some more accessories. Maybe I can actually try to widen the assortment within Marketplace to test that in the Marketplace environment, but know that in the moment that that sell-through isn't hitting the volume or velocity that I anticipated, boom, I can turn on Buy with Prime, and I can all of a sudden use my direct-to-consumer selling power to actually drive throughput on those units and de-risk that storage fee, or have to pay to actually bring those units back into our distribution center. So I'm. I know it's a little bit of a nerdy perspective, but I think from a logistics standpoint, it's a cool way to de-risk that inventory. It's those little nerdy things that actually make e-commerce work, right there. Lots and lots and lots of them, right? It is, for sure. Listen, Jenna, thank you so much for beginning this journey with us, with Buy with Prime. Michael, thank you so much for being a partner with us. We're really excited to work with you both. Thanks for showing up here today. Really appreciate it. For all of you, that's what we have to talk about today. For those of you who are interested in the Buy with Prime for Salesforce Commerce Cloud integration, you can go to the Buy with Prime site and sign up for early access. You can also see a Salesforce and Buy with Prime demo in the AWS in the Buy with Prime booth, which is in the AWS booth, which is 60 20. Immediately after this, we're gonna take that concept of free, fast shipping, and we're gonna go to the Salesforce booth, 5125, for a free, fast shipping happy hour. So please join us. Thank you very much. Thanks. Of course. Hello, and welcome to... We're gonna talk about five ways to build customer loyalty through lifelong customer relationships with data and AI. My name is Blake Miller, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Salesforce, and I've got Kent Zimmerman, VP of E-commerce and CRM at Shoe Carnival. We're gonna dive into two cases of how loyalty is changing with data AI, and how Shoe Carnival is taking advantage of all the changes. So we have an agenda. Oh, there we go. So, we've done welcome and introductions. We'll talk through top trends in customer loyalty, then deal, talk to Shoe Carnival and what they're doing. And then really dealing with the approach to customer loyalty and talk about what's next. As we dive into how customer loyalty is changing, we all know this as consumers, but it really is changing the way we engage with brands, the way we engage with our customers. Customer loyalty, we want it to be a personalized experience. We want it to be a connected experience across all of our devices and all of our interactions with every brand. Again, it costs a lot more to acquire new customers than it does to retain and sell to our current customer base. Really kind of personalizing that experience and leveraging data and AI across the entire customer life cycle to achieve these goals and provide those great customer experiences. How do we do that? We really think about how AI is changing customer loyalty. When we think back, customer loyalty, those first versions have been around for years. It really started to change with the modern kind of loyalty program in the 1980s, when airlines started giving rewards for passengers. So you flew more on one airline, you kind of go, and you got more of that experience from those airlines. So you got more, you kept booking on the same flights, you got rewards, you got points. Then we moved to the punch card idea. So you buy 11 donuts, you get the 12th donut for free. So really kind of that idea, that, that card experience, and then everything went digital. So it became the digital experience. Became that, a digital experience, that loyalty cards and other things to really move that program online. And now we're moving into that new era, where AI and personalization is gonna shape and change customer loyalty. It's gonna be about experiences. It's also gonna be about personalizing those experiences because individual customers want different experiences. They want different rewards. Not everybody wants $10 off after they spend $100. They want discounts, benefits, first looks, and really building that customer loyalty program differently than thinking about all those different ways you want to engage with customers. So as we think about that, it's not only leveraging kind of how we wanna deal with customers differently, but thinking about it as we connect that entire customer life cycle and that entire, entire customer experience. We start by knowing our customers. The great thing about loyalty programs, it's a great way to get more data about your customers. They give you a lot of information, the way they engage with your brand, the way they give you information and provide information and reward, in exchange for reward or loyalty points. So really leveraging that to know more about your customer. It allows you to personalize the experience. You're connecting all of that data, and it really ensures that people give you their information, give you their loyalty number when they're engaging with you across all those different channels. It allows us to engage differently across those channels and make that experience frictionless. And then really kind of delivering that immersive experience, so we're connected across every channel, and not only our online channels, but also our offline channels. So when they call into customer service rep, they know what the loyalty status is. They know potentially recent cases or other things. So you know when you're talking to a gold or a platinum member, that they're a highly valued customer and connecting that entire customer journey. And then it really allows us to drive unique customer service experiences and really elevate our most loyal customers and really build that and leverage all of that data and interactive experiences across the entire customer life cycle. And then it all starts to go back to that data. We talked about that rich first-party data that we can get on every engagement that we have with our customer, that we have with our loyalty members. It allows us to bring all of that data together to create that single source of truth, that unique profile that then we can engage and engage with our customers, leveraging all of that data that we have, knowing that people have two or three different email addresses. They may have different phone numbers. How do they engage with us in the app on different channels as well? Bringing all of that together in that connected experience. Now that we've laid a little bit of the foundation for getting all of our data together, creating those experiences, we're gonna go ahead and talk about how Shoe Carnival is leveraging a lot of these experiences. Kent, I'd like to welcome you. Tell us a little bit about Shoe Carnival. Yeah, thanks for having me. So Kent Zimmerman, I run e-commerce, CRM, digital marketing, analytics. I stop there. They try to give me more stuff to do. That's enough. Who knows—Just, I'm always curious, how many people know Shoe Carnival? Raise your hand if you know Shoe Carnival. You guys don't count. Okay, not very many. So, and that's fine. We're in New York. We don't have... We have 400 stores under two banners: Shoe Carnival and Shoe Station. We're largely based in the Midwest, Southeast. We're not up the I-95 corridor, and we're really not on the West Coast, right? So, interesting thing about Shoe Carnival is like, yes, we're a shoe store, but it's kind of a gamified, right? The name Carnival, it's a bit of a gamified experience. We've been around for about 45 years. In the early days, they used to do crazy stuff, had money machines in the stores. But, you know, today you'll see the wheel, maybe iconically, it's iconic to our brand. We've got a mic person in every store where they have the latitude to call out real-time promotions at any given time, based on what they're seeing in the store. So it really, you know, and music, high energy music, so it's really kind of a fun shopping experience. Sounds like a lot of fun. Yeah. As we really think about, like, what does loyalty mean for your business, and how does that drive Shoe Carnival and what they're trying to achieve? Well, it's huge. It's a huge pillar for our business right now. We started our loyalty program, I'm gonna say, excuse me, 12 years ago. Had no idea what we were doing. Just, I don't even think we were sending emails to anybody. We didn't have a any kind of CRM program or direct communication, and we outsourced it, right? Until we kind of outgrew the handholding, wanted to bring it back in-house, and it's just been an evolution. It's key to our business. It is the way that we communicate and build relationships with our customers. We have 34 million members right now in our program. Obviously, they're not all active, but you know, once you're a member, you're always a member, right? On any given day, if you go into, like, if you look at our store transactions, at least 70%, sometimes as high as 80% of our transactions are loyalty members. You'll see, like, we don't have a horribly complex program, right? Yeah. It's pretty simple. You get, you get a point for every dollar. You spend 200 or get to 200 points, we'll give you $10. You can use that reward in the next, over, like, 60 days, I think is what we've stretched it out to now. So... And just little perks, right? So I think competitively, it's on the same plane as a lot of folks in our space. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So we really think about, driving loyalty and, and building these programs and kind of having that experience that keeps the customers coming back. And it's like, you talk about the large percentage of your customers that are loyalty members and transactions. How do you think about it across the entire customer life cycle, and really engaging with those customers? Yeah. So, you know, the difficult thing about having a loyalty program our size is we get really good at marketing to the same people over and over again, right? So, the... Our best customers know us. They shop more often. Their basket size is typically higher. And it just kind of creates some challenges in terms of, you know, if you think about 10, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, pre, you know, phones- Yeah ... right? How it was wasn't that hard in retail, right? It was pretty simple. They've got a device. You've got, you know, a call center maybe. So it wasn't that bad to organize around. Now, it's extremely complicated. Yeah. Right? So, we're in a constant battle to acquire customers, right? Build the top of the funnel, try to explain to them why it's important to get into the program. Yeah. Once they're in the program, nurture that, keep them in the program. That's, you know, it's just an evolution. Sure. I'm not saying we're the best at it in our business, but we strive to be, you know, world-class in terms of that. Well, now we'll get to kind of everybody's favorite topic of the day, and really talking about AI and how artificial intelligence is changing marketing programs, it's changing loyalty programs, and really driving that. What has been your experience in bringing AI into your program? So this is the only time I'm using the words A and I together, or the letters A and I together today. You know, we're like a lot of other retailers. We're finding ways where it's really useful for us from an efficiency standpoint. You know, if you're in the e-com business, it's really easy to take things like generative AI and build out product descriptions, right? We have thousands of SKUs on the site, and we take a lot of pride in building out really engaging, rich product descriptions. So that's just one area where, like, all right, a person could do 10 in a day, and now they can do 100. Yeah. Right? We have. We made quite a bit of investment in photography around our product, so I think we have some of the best product photography out there. But, you know, when you start getting into lifestyle photography, it's like that's all of a sudden amps it up because now you're not in a studio with a robot that you know just take 20 pictures. It's like you gotta have a model, you gotta go somewhere, you gotta shoot that. So we're starting to explore AI as a way to say: "Hey, here's 20 views of this shoe. Put it on, put it on, you know, a woman running or playing pickleball or whatever. Yeah. We can do that quickly, and I think it helps, you know, again, at that point in the cycle, it helps to sell the product. That's what the customer is interested in, is the imagery and description. When you get into the marketing side of what we do- Yeah ... right, we really started using AI this year in terms of helping the team be more efficient and helps us get programs out faster. So the obvious one, there's just a couple of examples here. The obvious one is Send Time Optimization, right? It's such a silly, easy thing to do- Right ... but it's really important because if you're like me, you've got a Gmail promotions tab that just feels like if you check that tab or if you, you know, get notified, and you look at it at four o'clock, and I send you an email- Right ... at 7:00 A.M., I got zero chance that you're gonna find my... You're not scrolling to the second or third tab of your promotions tab. Right. So we use AI to be more effective about getting the email in front of you. The really big win, I think, you know, in some of the beta AI stuff with Gen, with Einstein, is helping our team, and I have a very small team, right? We're retail, so- Yeah ... you know, we're not, we're not Walmart, we're not Amazon. We've got a very small team. Is helping them segment customers beyond just basic RFM type segmentation. So we had a pretty big challenge last year. Nike is a big part of our business, really big part of our business, and, you know, they had some supply chain issues post-COVID, and it really led to that coming into play in 2022. It's just really hard for them to get product to their wholesale distributors. And, you know, they started doing a little more direct, and so the limited product that was coming in was just not making it to our shelves. So we have stores where, you know, two or three aisles of orange boxes, and in 2022, the customer's coming in, and it's sparse. There's not a lot of product there. So those customers either left or they just moved to a different brand. A lot of them became, like, an Adidas- Yeah ... customer. They're like: "Okay, so the swoosh, I'll buy, you know- Yeah ... buy the three stripes." So, when those supply chain issues kind of got resolved and product started flowing in, it's like, how do we tell our customers, you know, our best Nike customers, how do we tell them that we got it back? So that was kind of our first foray with AI, and it really helped, I think our, our marketing team, develop those segments. Yep. Super effective. Then we took it one step further and said, "Okay, we've got a really huge file," you know, 30 at the time, maybe 33 million, but probably half of that file inactive, hasn't been to a store in three years, sometimes longer, right? Yeah. As long as we've had the program. We just started getting creative with the tool about, okay, find customers that are emailable, and let's send them... Let's use the loyalty program, instead of just sending them a coupon, 'cause we send coupons all the time, right? Yeah. Instead of sending a coupon, send them a voucher. Just send them a $5 voucher. No threshold. Buy whatever you want with it. Buy a Coke and a candy bar. I don't care. But it's only valid for three days.... and we've had a lot of customers who we haven't done business with in years, show up in store with that, with that coupon or that voucher, and we're like: "Okay, that's the first step now." And then we start looking at, like, workwear buyers. Who hasn't bought workwear since the last kind of voucher cycle for workwear, which is typically happens in February, January, February. And it got really successful. So we got to the point where using AI, we were probably running on-- in any given month, we were running 20 campaigns. A lot of them... Some of them were successful. A lot of them, like, that's not gonna get it done, right? So you just move on from that. But it gives us the, like... And the reason I think that it was that we couldn't have done it without the tool is just there's you don't have the time. We don't have time or the resources to be able to really analyze the data and pull those segments out as quickly as we did. I think that's, you know, the thing that the promise and the stuff that's really exciting about AI is talk about, for example, you know, the things that marketers have always wanted to do to test, to try new things, to do the A/B Testing, and it really... There are some great examples of how you can start to do that and start to leverage the ability to- Right ... make these things possible, where it's like, oh, that's, you know, a nice to do, and you get to it- Yeah Three months later. Yeah, we, you know, I like to say we do a lot of testing, but we actually do more trying than testing. So, you know, but sometimes those lead to, like, you know, "Hey, I found a thread, and let's just keep pulling on the thread until it stops working. Yeah. Right? It's awesome. Yeah. So we think about as we kind of really bring all this together and think about how we're gonna kind of leverage and move forward, what do you see is next for Shoe Carnival? What are some things that you look for, those new, those additional strings that you want to pull on? Yeah. So, I think this year, I don't know when this year, but I think this year will be kind of reimagining our rewards program. I mean, it's obviously successful in the current construct, but it's a little stale. And if I look at, you know, your timeline or, like, the timeline of loyalty, right? It feels like we're still kind of at 2.0. We haven't really embraced some of the things that I think consumers are coming to expect. So, you know, pretty soon, we're gonna roll out new ways to earn points. Okay. Think about, you know, geolocating our stores. If you have our app and you visit our stores, there's, you know, 20 points. Yeah. Or, you know, from a referral standpoint, if we find a subset of loyalty members who are highly referable, we could give them additional points. And the net result of that, right, is it just gives our customers more ways to earn points quicker, right? Yeah. Results in more rewards for them, full cycle back into the store. There- Then, of course, we got... We just have to give them more ways to redeem those points than just, "Here's $10. Yeah. Right? So we've got a lot of fun things. It's like we've got 50 ideas, and then we have to distill it down to 10 executable ideas- Yeah ... within the next several months. Right. Yes, I think, you know, as we really kind of look at the different programs and the opportunities and the ability to test and try a lot of kind of exciting- Right ... fun things to try and really leverage AI. Yeah. So yeah, we're, and again, I don't know how AI necessarily is gonna- Yeah ... play into this, right? Yeah. But, again, I think right now it just empowers the marketing team- Yeah ... to be more successful doing what we do as marketers. Gives you a little bit more time to try those- Yes ... to try those things. Yeah. So just really kind of think about the five things that we want to walk away and, as we walk, kind of wrap up the kind of things that we've done today and the five tips or takeaways that really are gonna play into that modern loyalty program. I really want to start with kind of getting your data strategy in order, and really kind of taking it, having that connected data strategy. The five takeaways are really having that, that single view of the customer, being able to leverage all of that data, understand where your data lives, what it's coming in, how you can enrich with first-party data, how you can bring that together to activate that. When we talked about really kind of leveraging all that first-party data, putting AI to work, putting AI to work to make your personalization better, to make your. To identify new segments, new audiences, being able to leverage AI to do better personalization. Make your marketing teams, make those teams more effective with generative content, and audience segmentation, and really being able to leverage that. Again, think about the entire customer life cycle. How do we move our customers leveraging loyalty, leveraging that program, to all the way through from that first connection to turning those people into advocates for our brand, to turning them into our referral customers and really driving that? The one that I love, and this is one that I think sometimes as marketers, sometimes as brands, we forget, is to be your own customer. Go through, have that beginner's mind, that day zero, go back and go through your loyalty program. I think we look at a lot of these things, and we build things in industry. We're gonna test this, and we have this in the industry segment. But going through and mapping that entire customer journey from that first kind of initial all the way through to where is it easy to sign up? Is it- can I have that experience on, on the app as I do on a desktop or as I do in store? So really thinking about those, all of those experiences and how that comes together.... to create that connected experience and really thinking about those things as your, as your customer, to understand the gaps in your program or where there's opportunities to, to optimize. And then finally, turning your existing customers into marketers. The opportunity with referral marketing to take your best advocates and have them where not only are you gaining new customers, but your most loyal customers are also getting rewarded for those points. With that, I do think we have a couple of minutes for questions. So if you're game to take a couple questions- Yeah. Well, Kathy's got a mic. If anybody wants to, questions, raise your hand and we'll, have any questions, anybody... We've got one over here. It should be on. There you go. Can you give a little more explanation on integrating loyalty into the full customer life cycle, like, an example of that? It sounds kinda cool, but it could mean a lot of things, so integrating loyalty into the full life cycle. You talked - you asked about integrating - Yeah, integrating into the life cycle. Yeah. Yeah, so, you know, so I'm gonna talk about, like, pre-Salesforce and post-Salesforce, because we, we kind of blew up our MarTech stack when we, when we added Marketing Cloud and Loyalty Cloud and moved the program over to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Pre-Salesforce was kind of a best of breed. We had, you know, a different vendor for email and a different vendor for loyalty. And we had it all stitched together in this super complex, like, Rube Goldberg CDP customized thing. It was very effective. It could, it could handle any sort of campaign or channel that we, that we wanted to work in, but it was so complicated, like, no one could, no one could get anything done. Like, the easy things were really hard to do. So when we, when we decided to blow all of that up and think about what does the full life cycle look like, you know, we started looking at it, like, who cares about loyalty within or, like, as far as our group, who are the constituents for loyalty? It's your customers, first and foremost, right? So we had to make sure that we had real-time connectivity to wherever our customers were. If our customers were walking into a store, and they asked a question to somebody at a cash wrap, they need to be able to get that information, right? Customer service is the other constituent. That's who really matters because that's another important touch point if and this happens all the time, right? Customers will come in, and they'll just forget to give us their information. Maybe, you know, maybe the associate doesn't ask them if they're a member, and they just assume it's automatic, and they're like: "I didn't get credit for that," so they'll call, like, sometimes in the parking lot, they'll call customer service. So they need real-time access to that data. And then the third is our marketers, right? We care because that's the basis for all of our relationship with the customer, but we don't need real-time access to everything that they just did, right? So we were given the opportunity to simplify the ecosystem and how it affects the life cycle, right? Because, again, you know, you see it from a lot of vendors, like, "Here are all the touch points of a customer in retail today," and there's, like, 30 of them, right? Well, you don't have to have real-time connectivity and you don't have to have a super complex architecture to satisfy what really matters. You just have to think about how your customers and how your loyalty customers interact with your brand. You, another question? Oh. It should be on. Thanks for the session, it was really insightful. I have a question around Shoe Carnival's thought process around customer acquisition versus retention. I understand customer loyalty is more geared towards the retention part, but how are you balancing both, and how are you measuring ROI on your customer loyalty program? I need help 'cause all I hear is the- Yeah, measuring the ROI for the customer acquisition and customer loyalty. How are you measuring the ROI? Oh, yeah, sure. I mean, there's a lot of ways to measure loyalty and the ROI of loyalty, right? Customer lifetime value, which we measure a few different ways. You know, we like, say, the program that we did earlier this year, you know, came with a cost, right? So we knew that we were reactivating lapsed customers, and that was gonna come with a little bit of a margin risk in terms of what's the acquisition cost for that customer, 'cause we have to treat them like new customers. They're gone. Like, we've got their information, but they're not really loyal customers anymore, so we're trying to bring them into the funnel. Yeah, I don't know that there's a, I don't know that there's a... There's very common ways, like, again, customer lifetime value is the most frequently used one. But honestly, it we think about it differently than we do, like, pure acquisition, right? We have different acquisition campaigns that come with different costs. But when it comes to a loyalty member, the fact that they used to be a loyalty member, they used to be a shopper, you know, we just treat the cost a little bit, a little bit differently than just, you know, pure prospecting, I'll call it. Does that answer the question? Okay. Awesome. Well, I wanna thank everybody for joining us this afternoon. We would love to have you come by and connect with us at the Salesforce booth upstairs on the third floor. Thank you, everybody, for joining us today, and enjoy the rest of your show. Thank you. Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming to our session today, for braving the weather, for elbowing your way into this, to this room to come to our session today. My name is Duane Peck. I'm the director of industry marketing for Slack. We are a Salesforce company. And I'm delighted to be here with Leo and Christina, who are going to be talking to you about how HanesBrands is using Slack in their day-to-day, including in their stores. Before I hand it off to them, I just wanted to set the groundwork, talk a little bit about what is Slack. So for those of you that may not be familiar with Slack, you may... Or if you are familiar with Slack, you may just think of it as a chat tool or a direct message, something you send messages and emojis to your friends or your colleagues. But we think of Slack as an intelligent productivity platform, one that helps our customers bring teams together and drive new ways of work so that they can, first, accelerate work with AI and automation. This is really important. Slack has a really easy Workflow Builder tool that allows you to bring all the apps that you're using in your workplace already directly into Slack, and then apply very simple point-and-click automation to those, so that you can be more productive, more efficient, and save time every day. Second, Slack helps our customers search and share data and knowledge from any source, right within the flow of their work. This is one of the, I think, the greatest and possibly most underrated things about Slack. First, it has really powerful search features, but the way that we work in Slack is that we work in what we call public channels. So you organize channels around projects, around teams, around different topics. Could be anything. And everyone that works in Slack is encouraged to do this in a public manner, so that when you search for things, other people can find that information. They can find information about a project that they may be tangentially involved with, but they'll benefit from learning from. And then, with the release of Slack AI coming here in a few months, we're gonna turbocharge that search. We're gonna apply a GPT-like conversational interface to the search within Slack, where you essentially allows you to just talk to your Slack instance, your search bar, and ask it anything. We've been piloting that internally here at Slack, and pretty much on a weekly basis, I'm surprised I learned something that I learned the answer to a question that I didn't even know I had prior to putting something in the search bar. And then finally, Slack helps our customers connect and engage everyone. And this is sort of our bread and butter, what everyone knows Slack for, the direct messaging, the multi-direct messages and the channels, the collaboration, the threads, but it helps them keep the work moving between teams and helps those customers benefit. So let's take a quick look at how Slack's flexible architecture makes all of this possible. We've already talked about the big three areas of automation, knowledge sharing, and collaboration that you see on that outer purple rim. But what I wanted to call out were a couple of things of importance on this slide. First, our deep integrations with the Salesforce Customer 360. As I mentioned, we're a Salesforce company, and pretty much every Salesforce products has an integration, a constantly improving integration, or will soon get an integration with Slack. And this allows us to apply all that automation and pull that data from all your Salesforce Customer 360 products into Slack, so that you can benefit from more productivity and automation and keep that work moving without having to constantly switch back and forth between the different Salesforce apps that you use all day. And then second, the integrations layer here, and this extends into many third-party products. So it's important to note that we're built on an open platform. So while, yes, we're a Salesforce company, all the Salesforce things work really well with Slack. Just about all the apps that most of you are using in your day-to-day work can easily be integrated into Slack, and many of them can be done so with one click from our App Exchange. And so what does all this lead to for our customers? Here's one of my favorite slides. This is partially results from our 2023 Customer Success Survey and partially results of some studies that we did with Forrester about the economic impact for different teams using Slack. And as you can see, sales teams are boosting their productivity by 35%. Service teams have 32% faster response to customers. Marketing teams are making decisions 30%. 37% faster with Slack, and IT is transforming the way that they deliver with 338% return on investment, and that one, in particular, is a customer-reported number. So with that said, I'm gonna hand it off to my friend, Tina and Leo, who are gonna come up and hopefully bring to life a lot of the things I just talked about. So give a hand for Leo and Tina. Hi there, everyone. My name is Tina Stilianos, and is the microphone okay? Okay. Ooh! Oh, is that okay? Okay, perfect. And, I'm a success manager here at Slack on the retail and consumer goods team. So in my work, I bridge retail and technology to help our largest customers, like Hanes, grow their vision and strategy through our software. Leo, I'll turn it to you. Leo, it's great to be here. So my name's Leo Griffin. I lead the consumer technology stacks at HanesBrands, which means e-commerce, all of our retail store technology, our marketing technology stacks, and our customer service technology stacks. And HanesBrands, for those of you who may not be wearing our products, and you don't have to show us, we are a multi-brand apparel company. We have about a dozen brands, about half a dozen of them here in the US. Hanes is in nine out of ten households, and probably on a number of you. Champion, Maidenform, Bali, Playtex, et cetera. Thank you. Gosh, it's so cool to think that so many of us are familiar with the global house of HanesBrands, including Hanes, Champion, Maidenform. Gosh, knowing there are a little more than 45,000 employees, can you tell us a little bit about your role specifically at HanesBrands? Yeah. So, so it is looking after, globally, all of those, all of those technology stacks. You know, really, my role is to, I, I think, to collate and enable talented people, and enable them to do great things. And I'm really privileged to, to get to work with some, some fabulous people, as well as fabulous partners like Slack. And, that's, that's how the magic happens. Yeah, incredible. Can you share with us a little bit on what your journey has been like with Slack at Hanes? Yeah, sure. So I've been at HanesBrands for about two and a half years. I came from another big apparel company, where I think my main focus was on: why are we using Slack instead of this other application that seems to do the same thing and that we get free with, you know, our enterprise suite of applications? So when I arrived at Hanes, I was a little skeptical about Slack. But I rapidly, you know, day one, I got a login, and I started to use it. You know, I manage a set of development teams in a Scaled Agile organization, and so my developers were using it in different parts of the world. I saw, really, first of all, how powerful it was to really break down the walls of communication, that it allowed collaboration across my team, that it actually allowed collaboration between my teams and my teams and external partners. So, that really was a superpower of Slack, where we were able to open up channels with, with vendors and partners, and just, it's like they've got the desk next to you, right? I actually work remote. And so for me, it was an incredibly good way to be able to engage, and I think for people on my team to feel like my door is always open, right? Whenever I'm speaking to my team, I always say: "Guys, if you've got any questions, if there's anything I haven't answered for you, you always know where to reach me, it's on Slack." Right? And so I'll have people, you know... When we're in a constantly evolving world, and, you know, lots of stuff going on in our corporation, and people will say, you know, "Hey, what's going on, Leo?" And it is a way of my door always being open. So, you know, I really fell in love with the product. And, you know, we began to invest in it much more. We had multiple instances, and we merged those into one instance, so we had a global instance, and the Slack team was, has been, you know, great in helping us with that. You know, we... One of the most powerful ways that we use Slack in the e-commerce realm, and I know we're here mostly talking about retail stores, but in e-commerce, we use it, it, you know, to run what is a 24/7/365-day business, right? And so if our websites go down at 2:00 A.M., you know, we have a whole set of Slack automations and integrations such that, you know, we, we have developers who are on call at different times of the day. We manage all of that through Slack and that scheduling, and then, that, that messaging goes out, and we'll have people, you know, jump out of bed at 2:00 A.M. and make sure that the sites are operating, and Slack really enables us to do that. So yep, it's a, it's a fabulous tool. Yeah. Gosh, I'm glad you mentioned all of these things, because here at Slack, we really work and sort of strive to improve productivity and automate acceleration through these different apps and integrations that you've mentioned. I'm curious, in addition to being able to triage, which we also believe is sort of a bread and butter instance here at Slack, are there any favorite apps or integrations that you'd like to share with everyone? Well, I think anybody who works with me for any significant period of time learns that humor is something that's very important to me, that I process what goes on in the world through perhaps a dry British sense of humor. So I would have to say Giphy is core to my use of Slack, and the ability to find that- Yeah dumb video and send it to somebody. Also has Dad Joke. That's a pretty cool integration. But for those of you who might be a little more enterprise-minded, you know, I think ServiceNow and that integration is great. It allows us to, you know, bring tickets in and collaborate around them. So yeah, those would be some of my favorites. Yeah, those are some great ones. In addition to sharing an affinity for Giphy, and I has a Dad Joke, I think we both share an appreciation for something at Slack called No-Code Workflows, and this is essentially a way for you to repeat processes or things you might do every day at, you know, similar times in a way that's really easy, and it streamlines your your simple tasks that you have. So I'm curious if you'd be willing to share either one of the workflows that I know HanesBrands is so proud of. Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing that I want to say is that, you know, I, I'm an enabler. enabler. I view my role as an enabler. The two gentlemen sitting right here, Stuart and Robert, these are, you know, the members of my extended team who've made all of this magic happen, and so kudos to you guys. You know, I get to sit up here and pretend that it was just, you know, to take the credit, but it's them, not me. So with all that being said, you know, some of the things that we've done on the retail side, there's three or four areas that we have focused on with Slack. You know, we are really quite early in our implementation, but I think, the thing that's caught, you know, your attention has been how rapidly we've been able to move. You know, we have 800 stores around the world, about 180 in the U.S., and so we've focused so far on those U.S. stores. So the first thing we've done is around automating workflows around some crisis points in our business, right? And so we have got five of those. And so we have an active shooter event, we have a weather event, we have a kind of post-crisis event, we have a major loss event, and we have a scam event, right? So these are five things that, you know, unfortunately, our associates have to deal with from, you know, from time to time. What the automations that we've built in Slack have enabled us to do is first of all, there's one clear channel where all of our associates go when these things are happening. You know, it provides clarity about what we need them to do. Secondly, we gather all of the information that we need, whether that be for insurance claims or other things, we've got that information that we're getting to be able to triage. Thirdly, it is making sure that everybody has that information, and we're, you know, we're sending that information out to management, through, you know, various different channels, as well as having a shared leadership Slack channel that they can see all of these, you know, see these events in. So across the landscape of our stores, it allows our leadership team to be able to know what's going on, to know that we have the information, and that we're reacting in real time. So that's the first area that we've- Yeah. -we've automated. Yeah, I think that's great. Even having the right channel strategy in place to be able to disseminate information to the right people at the right time is huge. So it's something we really respect and appreciate as a part of your overall Slack strategy. Sure. Gosh, thinking about sort of like the dissemination of information, actually curious if you'd be willing to now share something else with the audience. Knowing that of your 800 stores, about 200 now have Slack at their fingertips, how do you share that critical information? In what shape, in what form, knowing that it was just maybe weeks, months, not so long ago, many of these people were using whiteboards or chalkboards to share really critical information? Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, we have... It's enabled us to already begin to simplify our tech stack, to take out some other communication platforms, and, you know, we're, we've got a plan to really, you know, focus in on Slack as our sole communication platform. And, you know, we're really excited the way that the platform is being developed, and the responsiveness of your team to kind of our, you know, what we need. So, you know, we're working with the Canvas functionality in Slack, which I think really turns Slack from a collaboration tool into a co-creation tool. And so we're using that, for example, when we are, you know, we're resetting the store or when we are for communicating, you know, the week's priorities, what we may have on sale, what the promotions are, and so on. And so that allows us to, you know, to put together rich media, and then, you know, where we're going with that next is to then use the List functionality within Slack and to be able to create checklists. So you can say, "Okay, have you done these five things to reset the store?" and, you know, driving that down so that we'd be able to check at an individual store level, and this is, you know, we're future case here because I know that the product's still being developed to kind of get to where we want it to be, right? And where other retailers are going to need it to be, but it's really close. Being able to have those, kind of those to-do lists and be able to see, do we have compliance, store by store? That's gonna be, you know, really powerful for us. So that's kind of the second major use case that we're working on. We also you know, because retail is about, you know, it's about energy and motivating your team, and we see when we can drive that motivation for our teams, you know, it's really important. So we have automations around kind of congratulating our team members, and kudos, right? And being able to do that. We allowing, again, through that rich media, our stores to be able to sort of do shout-outs and show, you know, "Hey, here," you know, "Look, look, look what we did." And then, finally, we just started with kind of, you know, competitions, right? So we're saying, you know, and this Rob had a beat CVS who can have the longest receipt competition. So, you know, that's how many items can you ring up in a transaction, and we've seen just, you know, great, great results coming out of that in early days, but, you know, lots of fun things we're able to do. Oh, gosh, absolutely. And to think about being able to bring to life a contest like this so instantly, whereas email or a chalkboard, it might take a little bit longer. That's really exciting. Yeah. You know, this kind of reminds me of another way we really admire you engage your employees, which is through your own Emojipedia. Do you care to share a little bit about this? I think that one of the magical things about Slack is the speed with which people adopt the platform, right? So we saw 100% of our stores adopting and starting to use the platform within two weeks, which, you know, for those of us who work in enterprise technology, getting to a 100% adoption within two weeks, you know, we've got, you know, 1,500 store associates or so, and so really getting that level of participation. And we did this, by the way, in Q4, right? Which we all know is not generally the time that you launch new technology platforms in retail. And so I think what we found is that, you know, our associates love the platform. And one of the reasons is. I think there's two reasons. You know, the first is that I think it's just a very intuitive communication platform, and we're all looking for intuitive ways to communicate. The second is, it's fun. Yeah. Right? And, you know, the fact that, I mean, you know, it's Slack has just this amazing set of emojis, which make it really fun, and I think that we've all become so used to texting, and emojis becoming a critical part of how we communicate, right? And Slack has really turbocharged the emoji world. You've got some crazy emoji artists. And so that just, you know, is really fun. And we actually also have some business purpose around it because we use some of those emojis, for people basically to, you know, for our stores to say, "Yep, seen it. Check." Right? So it actually allows us to make sure that, you know, it's like the message received and understood emoji, as it were. Right. We love that, too. A simple reaction using an emoji can save one to two minutes of time, which can really add up over the course of a day. Well, something that I think would be really nice to hear next is kind of, you know, seeing how far you've gotten, all of the change, whether it's through employee engagement or whether it's through accelerating automation. Can you describe what life was like at Hanes before Slack and what it's like at Hanes now that you have Slack in about 200 of your stores, as well as your corporate entities? Yeah. I mean, it wasn't as fun. I think it was probably. It was more. I mean, within retail, I think probably, I would say less, a lot less two-way communication. Yeah. You know, we had, we had channels for pushing content down to the stores, but I think much less for getting response back from the stores. You know, we relied more on the sneakernet of people, you know, our regional managers and so on, having conversations. We relied more on email. You know, not everybody was necessarily getting those emails, and so on. So I think the... You know, we're able to move much faster. We have richer two-way communication. I think we also have. I think we're really at the early stages of this, but the opportunity for stores to communicate between themselves, I think, will drive best practices faster. When things are working, we'll be able to communicate and share that out much faster. We'll have better visibility to it. Right. So, you know, at the end of the day, retail is an incredibly fast-moving environment, and succeeding in retail requires great communication, you know, across your stores, between stores and HQ, within regions, and Slack has really just enabled all of that for us. And then I think within my, I would say, the sort of before and afters, what I would say within the e-commerce area, so I think we're much less hierarchical as a result of Slack. That everybody on my team knows that they can reach me. And then, you know, we're super responsive. You know, we've had 100% uptime through, you know, through all of our peak for the last couple of years. You know, our e-com is, you know, up 99.99% of the time, at least. And so, you know, it's, it's because we're able to jump on things and bring in the right talent and collaborate to fix a problem. Right. Right. I also think that part of what we admire is something you'd mentioned earlier on the magic of Slack, being that you can get a real feel for who someone is without even having met them before, whether that's, you know, sharing your favorite dessert in your profile or just being able to instill your own tone of voice. Yeah. That's great. I think that's absolutely true, and because I work with a, you know, a global, virtual team, there's actually many people on my team I've never met in person, but, you know, you can still have a great, relationship over Slack, which is well. Definitely. Well, you may have heard, especially if you visited our booth, that Slack AI will soon be launching within our own instance, which we're excited about. But curious, especially with AI being such a buzzword at NRF 2024, how HanesBrands is starting to think about implementing AI within your strategy. Yeah. So, I think that AI is going to transform the nature of work. No, I don't think AI is going to replace our jobs. Don't think AI is gonna replace your jobs. But I do think that people who understand AI are going to replace the jobs of people who don't understand AI, and understand and are able to use it, right? So it's a superpower that we all need to learn to harness. You know, we are working with you know, a number of our partners on piloting some of their AI capabilities, and I think that in many cases, AI is going to get integrated as you're integrating it into Slack. It's gonna get integrated into the tools that we use, and that will be a very effective way of benefiting from it. But I don't think that's gonna create competitive advantage. Right. And so there are some areas that we're looking at, you know, where do we think we can create some differential advantage by perhaps, you know, building our own tools, but we're super early in that and really trying to figure out, you know, what are the different use cases and where will we do that? So I'm very excited about it, and, you know, I think, you know, I certainly have got my own vision of where Slack may go with AI, so, you know, I'll be interested to see what you guys do with it. Yeah. Well, gosh, dang, part of your role is managing the development and the future of a major tech stack at all of HanesBrands. This is no light feat, so we're excited to see how AI will be inclusive within here. As we wrap up, wanna kind of ask you what's next for HanesBrands, and what can we expect to see both as consumers and friends of retail and technology? Yeah, I mean, I think that, yeah, my team is really focused on removing friction from our consumers' journeys and from making their experiences as pleasurable and effective and productive as they can be, whether they're, you know, browsing or shopping. You know, managing, as we do, a set of different brands, you know, we have slightly different approaches for each of our brands, but, you know, one of the things that... So we just launched our mobile app for Champion, which I'm super excited about. I think integrating that experience in with our e-com and our stores over time will be critical. We're also just working on a single global experience for champion.com, and so that's that should be fun. And then, you know, weaving in, AI, into that, I think, so that, you know, I'm really excited about things like, you know, conversational commerce, for example, and, you know, where, you know, where we can, we can have more of a guided journey for our consumers. And then I think in our stores, you know, I think one of the things that we will look to do with Slack is, and using that AI, is for, you know, a store associate who perhaps, you know, perhaps someone's out, their manager's out sick, and they, they need to close the store up. You know, being able to have the: Okay, so what do I do? How do I, you know, how do I close the cash wrap? What do I need to do in terms of, you know, security and closing the store down? And for Slack to be able to, you know, through that conversational AI, to be able to guide the associates, you know, perhaps pull in some, you know, a 15-second video, you know, give them a checklist and so on, so that, you know, we can really help our associates in the moment to do a better job of serving our consumers and helping to run our business. Yeah. Wow! Well, we have a lot to look forward to in 2024. Thanks so much for sharing all of this and for your partnership and your successes with everyone here today. We appreciate it. Thank you, Tina.