Chris Walton: The Art of Merchant, E-commerce, Gen AI in Retail Market - AI Portfolio Podcast #014

Chris Walton, a top expert in omnichannel retailing, has nearly 20 years of experience in retail and retail technology. As Co-CEO and Founder of Omni Talk, one of the fastest-growing retail blogs, he's a leading voice in the Retail Technology industry. Chris brings deep insights with a background at Target as VP of Store of the Future and Merchandising for Home Furnishings. He holds an MBA from Harvard and a BA from Stanford.

Chris Walton Socials:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chriswaltonretail/
OmniTalk Retail:https://www.linkedin.com/company/omnitalk/posts/?feedView=all
Twitter: https://mobile.x.com/OmniTalk

Mark Moyou, PhD Socials:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmoyou/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkMoyou


Chapters
00:00 Intro
01:58 Gen AI in Retail
04:53 E-Commerce
06:10 When E-Commerce boomed
09:15 Advancement of Retail with accelerated compute
11:03 Fast Commerce is eating business of large ecommerce players
12:43 Labour Dynamics in Retail (Indian vs US market)
14:40 Real Business Value of Gen AI
17:03 Electronic Dynamic Tags
19:35 Computer Vision and Personalization
22:10 The art of merchandising
24:02 Importance of Merchant
29:30 MerchantGPT
35:07 Customer loyalty
37:39 Segmentation of Retail market
39:45 Impact of Gen AI in Retail Market
42:00 Shift in Retail Market
48:28 Marketing with Gen AI
52:07 Why AI can't replicate sale associates and customer service
55:44 Challenges of data in Retail Market
59:54 Doing my own way mindset in retail
01:01:07 Executive Big Bets
01:03:13 Search in Product Discovery
01:06:13 Retail Media Networks
01:08:20 Retail Ads, YouTube and Brand Recognition
01:11:47 AI Generated Content
01:14:40 Are Malls dead?
01:15:20 AI Agents in Retail
01:16:40 Career Optimization Function
01:19:23 Three Book Recommendations
01:20:04 Career Advice
01:22:15 Rapid Round