All right, we're gonna get started. My name's Ron Thurston. I'm the host of the Retail in America podcast, and the author of a book called Retail Pride: The Guide to Celebrating Your Accidental Career. The reason that we're really here today is to talk about three things, and one is to talk about employees and frontline employees who are incredibly proud of their work. I know this is a kind of a story about T-Mobile, but the idea of technology and how it supports frontline work is a really important message that we're gonna cover today. So I am very honored to have three very impressive leaders with us today to have this conversation. Roopi Crowley and Al Lettera and Mark Edwards. So thank you guys for being here today. We're gonna mix this up, and I think you're actually gonna learn a few really interesting things about digital twins that I didn't really understand, so Mark's gonna take us through that. So, Roopi, you know, as I think all of us have spent the last couple of days walking the floor and learning about new technology, the idea of new and really consistent coverage and tools in stores is really important and what T-Mobile does to support that. So can you kinda walk us through new things that T-Mobile's doing? Sure. You know, as I've been here, like you said, Ron, for a few days, and in this industry, a lot of things that retailers wanna do today, they sometimes can't do because they don't have the reliable connectivity or the infrastructure in place. So, you know, several meetings today, they said, "Well, we have old infrastructure in the stores. Half our fleet can do this, and the other half can't." So what T-Mobile does with our network is we go in with our solution engineers and evaluate where we can help. It's like your house. The foundation has to be strong before you can build upon it. So if you wanna put in a patio, like my husband, he calls a solution engineer, right, to check it out, or a architect. in the same thing at T-Mobile, we will go and help you create that infrastructure, so then it enables you to go and deliver the solutions that the business needs. It could be anything as, you know, all retailers are looking at AI. You know, okay, I have this data. Does the data sit in the cloud, or does it sit on the edge? Well, you can't get to the edge if your infrastructure isn't fixed, so it'll cost you more money in the long run. So to deploy AI and solutions that generate AI, it is so important to look at that. So, you know, when Al and I started to work together at Tractor Supply, they also looked at their infrastructure, I think at the first set, and they've now helped their employees, their team members, as well as to give them the best experience. That led to better customer experiences. So as Tractor deployed Honeywell devices for their associates to, you know, deliver the best customer experience there was... So if they're picking orders, right? A lot of retailers are doing pick, picking to get the last mile faster and less costly. They said, "Okay, if we're out of stock, how do we communicate live with that customer when I'm picking the order so they're not disappointed?" So they'll do a live chat and offer other, others, other seeds, let's say, to make that customer more happy, and the employee's job is easier now. Those are some of the things that are happening based on the technology that's out there, but you have to look at your connectivity. Yeah. Just a quick follow-up to that, so, you know, as I started and kinda mentioned, our ultimate goal here is to also to improve the employee experience. Yes. How does that play into that? So now, you know, your employee retention is going up because that associate that's, you know, asked to pick ten orders, they actually picked them and fulfilled them, and the customer was satisfied, right? And so they might get a higher score, right? And their, their manager is happy with them. They're also able to... I know at Tractor they used to have ten devices. You know, all of us in retail, a Zebra device. You know, maybe it's a handheld push-to-talk device, right? And they're wearing a tool belt of these things. So now the associate, who wants to work for a company that has all those? So they've streamlined with one or two technology solutions to really help that associate deliver. Right. Thank you. Kind of follow-up to that, Al, so as you think about your partnership with T-Mobile and how you've integrated that into your stores. At Tractor Supply, we think about it as enabling people with technology. When we think about people, we think about our customers and our team members. From a customer perspective, we break it down into really three categories: product and product information, customer and their customer interaction, things like loyalty, frictionless checkout, and then the last thing's in fulfillment. So how do we make sure that you can get the product anywhere you want? When you think about the team member, we break it down into really, how are we making their lives easier? As we digitize the store more and add more and more tasks to those team members, productivity is mission critical, you know, in the day. So fulfillment activities have to be streamlined, and we're doing that through technology. The network is obviously part of that, but we see it as an application ecosystem that really brings new capabilities, such as product information prompts, as, product finding, you know, information about, you know, sustainability on the product. Those are the types of things that we're bringing to light in the marketplace today. Yeah. So you have a solution for the front line called Hey GURA. So I would love for you to kind of share what that is and how you use that, 'cause, you know, I think I'm personally obsessed of how that could enable an experience at the front line that's really incredible. ... Yeah, so Hey GURA, GURA at Tractor Supply is the way we brand our selling process in our stores, and it stands for Greet, Uncover, Recommend, and Ask. So that's the DNA that our entire team member, our 50,000 team members in our stores use to, you know, service our customers, which is extremely important. So Hey GURA is actually a generative AI capability that we developed to basically prompt the team member to ask all kinds of information. Gives them access to expertise, it gives them access to product information, pricing information, findability, and it's all integrated to a headpiece that they actually talk into, so it makes it very easy for them to interact with the technology. It's not in all of our stores yet, but we're in the process of rolling it out to the chain as we learn more. It's been a great journey in the generative AI space for Tractor Supply. Amazing, too. And kind of the same follow-up with Roopi, how has that improved retention, like employee retention? Like, what do these incredible frontline people say about Hey GURA? So it improves retention, but it makes their jobs easier. You know, when I started the conversation, I said, enabling, you know, people with technology. It's not taking anything away from them. It's not streamlining people out of the stores. What it's giving them the ability to do is service our customers better, and that gives them an incredible sense of pride, and then that translates into, you know, just being part of our culture. Our mission and our values at our company is second to none. It's nothing like I've ever seen. And, you know, this is in line with that, is to work hard, have fun, and make money. And that's what this does for our team members, is it gives them the ability to work hard as efficiently as they possibly can. You're talking my language, Al. I love it. So, Roopi, when you... With Al's, you know, deploying this to 50,000 people, consistent connectivity and coverage becomes really important. You can't have the tools and the enabling with the tools without great coverage. Sure. You know, it's really table stakes. So when we started to work together 2 years ago, over 2 years ago, you know, they had many providers, right? So it wasn't consistent. And when the system goes down, we know we've all been there, the store's POS is down, and now we're like, "Oh, what do I do? Do I order online? Do I get it later?" The manager's coming over, the associate is, like, hovering and feeling bad because the customer is, like, getting irate. So now that we've put 5G into their stores, and they have a consistent solution, it's really table stakes for them. Right. Right? And if you are a retailer and you have mobile tablets, right, there's inventory stresses. You know, the back rooms are now becoming fulfillment centers, so we're stocking less in the stores, right? But we still want the customer to know they can buy everything online and in store at the same time. So enabling that associate with a mobile device is critical. And if they're trying to transact on that device and they can't, you know, you're losing a sale, and- Right ... it's a bad brand experience. So we wanna make sure those associates can do their job efficiently and make the customer happy, and they feel good about it. Right. Exactly. Thank you. You know, I think, Al, we still have your slide up here that kind of talks about your, your goals, key initiatives, and major milestones. And, you know, as a major retailer, these milestones are really important to you. And so can you talk a little bit more about what some of these are? Sure. You know, just to add to Roopi's statement real quick, though, Here's what I would say. I can see some of my team out here in the audience, and I'm looking over at the infrastructure. I'm the applications guy, so, I'm the one that's out there trying to, you know, deploy more capabilities. But here's what I would tell you that the 5G network does, and, you know, we are in 2,200 stores now, across 49 states, and, you know, it brings reliability. And it- the reliability's, you know, it's paramount to our success because it enables us to deploy more and more either team member tools, customer tools, whatever the case may be. You know, I talked a little bit about our gen AI journey, but we're not stopping at just the Hey GURA prompt, and this network has to be in place in order for us to be able to keep going. Other things on this list include the work we're doing with something called computer vision, where we're actually taking loss prevention cameras and really digitizing that information and bringing it back in so we can get more insight into what's going on in the edge, right? We have 2,200 unique locations. Each one has its own culture, almost, so to speak. We've got to make sure that we have some insight into what's going on, right? Well, we can understand now, it's not just how many people are walking into and out of a store. We can actually see things like dwell time. We can see if we're out of stock in certain inventory. So a number of things going on there. You know, our mobile strategy is obviously very critical, so our customers, you know, they... life out here. It's all about working on their farms. It's that rural marketplace. So we've got to be able to meet them where they are. So think about the things that they're buying. They're heavy. So we've got to have a mobile strategy and one that doesn't allow, you know, for lack of use of hands. So just a lot of things going on within the company right now and servicing our team members and our customers. Great. Thank you. Mark, I haven't forgotten about you, I promise. I think... So Al mentioned computer vision, and we're gonna take a deep dive on what 345 Global does here in a moment, but how does computer vision work with kind of what Al's describing? I think the interesting thing for me is, as an architect, how did I get into this world is quite interesting. My CIO invented a piece of software called Revit. You know, for those of you who know what Revit is, it's from the store planning department. It's the industry standard of how we build 3D computer models, et cetera. So the excitement of this level of conversation, the fact the conversation is coming to life, hearing what Al's saying and all those bits and pieces, it really excites me in terms of where we can go. I've always believed that the store is the bucket as opposed to the planogram, and so if we can take a store, and we've got maybe 350 planograms and 30,000 products, et cetera, macro space optimization is the first key. And so if we can start to bring that to life, which means we've got to get the store, get the fixtures, get the products, now we start to bring other bits in terms of computer vision, in terms of planogramming, and we'll talk more about that in a second. But the key part of that is to move data. And, you know, our relationship with Roopi and T-Mobile is, it's just been exceptional, that whole 5G conversation changes the dynamic, or more importantly, makes it the conversation. And that's what really excites me. Amazing. Increases the capabilities to expand it further. You know, everything you're doing is about growing the opportunities to support some of your retailers. There's so many disparate pieces of software in retail at the moment. You've got something that optimizes here and optimizes there. What the digital twin and what 345 does is bring it all together. So instead of working in a vertical silo, we're moving data across. Now, we need to be able to move that data seamlessly, quickly, and what have you, and that's what T-Mobile bring to us. And you can see it from the different levels. I'll go into more of this in detail in a second, but- Okay, we'll come back to you in a moment. You know, I just wanted to kind of end here. So you guys were together on this stage last year, Al and Roopi, and so how has the last year transformed your business together? So I think for me and the T-Mobile team, it's making sure that our clients are always connected, right? They can deliver on the solutions that they need to. So many times I sit with a client, right, or a future client, and they're like: "Well, we can't innovate 'cause 200 stores are down on a daily basis," right? And they don't have the infrastructure in place, or they don't have great primary coverage, right? Or the cable is cut somewhere. So, you know, it. And when we started to work together, Tractor might have had those problems, but we put those to bed, and if a retailer is really going to be successful, they have to look at their infrastructure. Then they layer on, you know, platforms to deliver the solutions that they need to. It's kind of like a pyramid, but on the bottom sits that connectivity. Yeah. Right? And then the second thing T-Mobile does is, it's not just about selling you something. It's about, day one, to understand what you need. Day two is execution. Day three is being there when there is an outage, right? That does happen. I'm not gonna say it's perfect, you know, and that they can call us, whether it's Thanksgiving, Christmas, anytime they can give us a ring, and they can reach out to me, my team, our leaders, to say, "We have a problem." We have SLAs in place to make sure that is put up pretty quickly back on track. And I think why we work so well together, it's not just that we're a vendor, we're a partner. So we understand what they're trying to do in the future and then bring them solutions, right? "Hey, I was at NRF. Did you see this in this booth? You should go check it out." That's the type of relationship that we have. Amazing. Yeah. Here's where what I would say. Last year, when we were here, we were still talking about infrastructure, so to speak, and the investments that we needed to make to be able to go faster. When we start talking about pushing the boundaries of technology and pushing ourselves forward in pursuit of really servicing our customers and our team members, that fundamentally has shifted now to back to capabilities, and I think that's the real key, and it's because we have reliability in our network. Yeah. You know, we don't have incidents. We have the speed and the broadband, so we can go and ideate virtually anything. You know, I gave you the example of what we're doing with Hey GURA, right? I gave you the example of what we're doing with, like, computer vision, but they're not stopping there. You know, we're redeploying our loyalty programs and our features and capabilities in our stores and how we're serving that up real time. What are the types of things that we're offering the customer at the register? Like, we don't wanna ask the customer five times, you know, if they've enrolled in our credit card program when they have a credit card, right? So it's not just stopping there, and now the shift is just to what is possible. And, you know, it's about empowering those team members, and they're getting engaged in it, and it's just a really, really exciting time. Great. You're really painting the picture of the future- ... what you're describing. Current and future, so thank you. Speaking of future, because I want to turn over to Mark, and I think that I have a statistic here, you know, around digital twins. According to Forbes, digital twin market is projected to continue growing at 42% compound rate annually to $53 billion by 2028. So I was, until you and I met, I would tell you I didn't really understand what this is. I would imagine there are people in the audience that feel the same. Can you walk us through what this is and what is a digital twin? Yeah, I'd love to. I think there's too many words, whether it's metaverse or this, that, and the other, that are used, which people don't really understand. People use the idea of a digital twin 'cause they've got a 3D model. A 3D model isn't a digital twin. It's a very complex level, and you can see that we've got seven levels, is how we bring this to life. At the base is the catalog, and you just heard Al talk about 2,200 stores, and in those, he's got a variable amount of fixtures and a whole host of products, et cetera. So getting that database right in the first place, 'cause if you can trust that, if you can build your stores, your fixtures, and your products, and you can place all of those, you start to get the basis of what a digital twin is. If I know the exact XYZ position of every product, every planogram, every fixture, I start to get a whole series of spatial data that's never been available before, product adjacencies, planogram adjacencies. We start to be able to ask a whole series of questions.... So once we've got that catalog put together, we now need to be able to communicate and move the data really quickly, hence our relationship with T-Mobile and that connectivity layer, so we can move things around. From a planning perspective, at the moment, there's too many people. If we can just leave it on the slide before, that'll be great. There's too many people who are creating planograms, though, at headquarters. They'll create a whole series of planograms, throw them over the wall in the hope that they're going to land and fit in a store. I've had too many stories where there's 1,000 calls saying, "It doesn't fit. What do I do here?" So if our store knows its merchandising capacity, if every fixture is built from a cut sheet, it knows its linear, square, and cubic merchandising capacity, now all of a sudden, the store knows what it can hold. So why would we send less or more data? If it knows its demographics and all these sort of things, why doesn't the store request its assortment? But if we can request this assortment, and we've got a planning tool that's web native, that's cloud-based, web native, not a combination of Citrix or this, that, and the other. And then if it's built in the right way, we can optimize and start to write automations because we know what the store is, we know what the products are, and we know where they should be. So that gives us a whole planning layer. We take that up to the next level. That means in the first part, we can create a digital twin, but how do we keep that up to date? And that's where we start looking at RFID. We start looking at robots, and we've got our own planogramming tool where we wave a phone in front of the products, and through computer vision, back to what we were saying before, it'll recognize the products, place an augmented reality marker in 3D, and when I hit save, it instantaneously creates an editable realogram. I'm always pleased when I've got that sentence out. But if it's created planogram, and it's created it on the edge, I can compare that against the planogram that should be there. Now, all of a sudden, I know my out-of-stocks, I know what's on-shelf availability, what is or isn't there, and I can tie that to an ordering system. Now, all of a sudden, with that power of connectivity and knowing all of my stores, et cetera, I can now, whether it's daily, hourly, start to have the store tell me what's on shelf. So if I get through the course of the year, and I come to do my analytics, and I've got my POS and my data, if I think I've sent a planogram there, and there's been four products on shelf, if on average, there's only been two, my analytics are completely wrong. It doesn't matter how good your analytics are if your data is incorrect. So that living, breathing digital twin starts to give us data, spatially understanding facings, what's there, what isn't there, et cetera. And it starts to build a story which enables us to make really smart decisions, automate decisions. Go up to the next level in terms of insights. Insights to us means we can create this digital twin. It means we can make some different changes, bring some new products in, and send it out to 1,000 consumers just like that. We can have them test that on their phone or their... If they're on the train on the way home or in the - at home, et cetera. So from a research point of view, from a tracking perspective, we can now start to track people moving around a store. But if I've got a digital twin and I've got it, I can do that. I can now start to hotspot where spend - people are spending most of their time. I've got all of my data coming in from my products. So if now the hotspot of where they're spending most is where they're spending most of their time, that digital twin thing will never grow. Wow! But I can guarantee you it's not. So that spatial data will tell us where people are, where they're spending most of their money, and now we get into a really rich conversation. That digital twin, if it's kept up to speed, it means that we could log in digitally into a Tractor Supply or any store, and I could now shop my local store with what products are actually available on the shelf. That's not me choosing something from a list and then having somebody else make a decision for me. It also means I can optimize the pick route for an online order. I can get my people to go around and actually move to the store in as fastest space possible. You start bringing all of these layers together, and the knowledge and insight really starts to grow. We bring that to life in terms of collaboration. We've built all of our software on a gaming platform. You'll remember Pokémon Go. I remember seeing that, and that thing went crazy. Everybody was doing it. Everybody was doing everywhere. So my thought process went, could I take a series of business applications, store planning, merchandising, marketing, et cetera, and build it on top of a gaming platform? Well, it's taken us 5 years to do it, but all of you have got kids who play Fortnite at home, and when you say, you know, "Jake, can you come down and, you know, dinner's ready. Jake, dinner's..." They're not gonna leave. Why? Because they're in a rich, interactive 3D environment. They're shooting and killing people. We'll keep that to the side for a second. But they actually know how much ammunition Al's got, how much, how little Roopi's got, or that could be us. That information they got is fantastic. It's real-time data, real-time storytelling. That's what we want to bring to life here. So the store, we want the store to... It's always had the information. We want to empower it to start telling us the story, to unravel that complex DNA and let it start to come to life. So now we can fly over the store and the products, whether it's sales or movement or profit, it's now telling us this story. It's telling us where we should be going, et cetera, et cetera. So that collaboration leverage, either visualization, true visualize and making it real, or from a data perspective, how well am I performing? That's all B2B. And then GEO, guide, engage, offer, is a variation on GURA, and that really excites me when I start hearing your implementation of how you're doing that. 'Cause if we can guide you around the store, if we can engage with a product, or more importantly, if they know where you are, we can get the product to make you an offer, now we're into some really, really fun space. Well, you're- That combination. You're connecting it, right? And then in an area that traditionally wasn't connected, right? It was very static. So the fact that you're actually connecting those two points now, refreshing it, gives the store insight, it gives the Store Support Center insight. It's really very powerful. So- Depending on what question you're asking, it's a combination of layers one, three, and five- 2, 4, and 6. And, you know, Roopi gives me, as long as she's being nice to me, allows me to move data up and down seamlessly. … I think, Mark, what you've said is so important. Like, we all lived and breathed planograms, and so, you know, at my local supermarket, I was shopping a few weeks ago, and they had planograms up, you know, the typical. Then, the associates were complaining that nobody at corporate knows what actually fits on the shelf. Typical. And I was like, "Wow, they really need this solution," right? Because now they can use this device, their phone, to actually scan the shelf. The planogram comes up, sees what's missing, tells them what's the inventory in the back room, and they can fill the shelf. So, you know, now, actually, that associate might want to stay working there because we've taken that daily task that can be hard and automated it, right? I think as a district manager or regional, you're walking in, the Planogram's not set, or even the store manager, they can just take out their phone and see if it's set correctly or not instantly, instead of, "Where's my visual guide? It's on paper somewhere else, so let me go into the app. Let me navigate my app. Right. Right? So, so it's seamless. It's the same planogram everybody's seeing on any device, anywhere. That's the web native bit, which is- Right. But, but imagine the idea of the employee experience then translating into the customer. Yeah. And so all of a sudden, you're articulating a story of how, as an associate, how a brand is utilizing technology to improve their experience and therefore the customer. I mean, inventory management and the right product at the right time available to all and knowledge of it and kind of what you're describing with the layers, I mean, it sounds kind of unattainable in some ways, yet I know that it's real. It sounds like a dream. One of the reasons I created 345 was to change that customer experience. If you're in front of a product, you can talk to it. It's best to do it through the phone because it gets a bit, otherwise... But if you can talk to the phone and you know it's one of those three that you want- Yeah ... the chance of you putting it in your basket is just that much higher. Right. That's why the whole GURA thing, GEO thing, it, that really excites me. Yeah. Thank you. So we have a few minutes left, and so I want to be able to, Al, just talk a little bit more about any of this other, like, smart data that's coming through. So you have all the layers, you have, I'm sure, everything from Hey GURA, you have all this data coming through in your world. So how are you using that today? Yeah. So here's what I'd say: everything, you know, we've digitized things more than ever before, right? So what does that do for us, is it gives us the ability to take it and then, you know, massage it to get insights into what's going on. Here's what I'd say: I think you're seeing us make strides right now in the loyalty and the customer personalization spaces and really starting to gain an understanding for, you know, what our customers' needs are and how can we communicate to them more effectively. I still keep going back to the team member and the productivity of the team member and the store. That's where a big investment is being made right now. And it's... I talked a little bit about Hey GURA and some of the computer vision, but we've also created a platform called TSC Me, which is, it's in its early stages, but the idea for it is it's really a interactive portal for the team member to be able to, you know, interact with their jobs, their career at Tractor Supply. So we're leveraging that information, you know, to push tasks out, training out, things of that nature, just creating an overall experience for them that's better. You know, it's interesting, when you were talking, and you guys were going back and forth, you know, we all have retail, and I think a lot of people in this room have a retail background. You know, there's nothing that's worse than when you're with a customer, and something's going wrong, right? Right. So, you know, the vision that I'd say we have and that I have in the technology department is that leveraging all this information should create better tools and services so that our, you know, team members and customers never have to experience that. Now, obviously, that's not necessarily an attainable goal, but, you know, if we can help in any way, shape, or form, that's how I see things focusing, you know, from our perspective for the future. Yeah. And the fact that you can say it out to the teams, we're developing things to support you. You told me yesterday morning you'd already spent how many days in stores? We spent about 50 hours in stores. Fifty hours. By the middle of January, which I g ive you much credit for. Thanks. You know, if you can say that to them during those 50 hours, these are things that we're utilizing, exploring, making your job easier and the power of those 50,000 people. Yeah. Well, and you're getting constant feedback. You know, we joke around about it sometimes, but a few years back, we developed a button on our mobile app that just notifies a team member through an earpiece that they're out of propane tank, you know, in the back. And think about how valuable that is this week when it's, you know, 10 degrees outside, and I need a propane tank filled. I can hit a button, and somebody comes outside, fills it up. So those are the types of interactions you can't predict when you're in a store to get those types of use cases. Right. And then they turn into real things. And think about the meaning for the customer, for the team member. It makes them efficient, so they're not standing outside in the cold, and makes it better, you know, just altogether, and they can go out and check the person out with a mobile device, so. Amazing. Amazing. Well, we are out of time, so thank you. I wanted to thank T-Mobile for this. Make sure that you visit them at booth 6703, and learn more about what you can do for your, your retail business. So thank you, everyone, for attending. Have a great rest of your conference.