Do you think your organization needs a Chief AI Officer?
AI is going to be more and more part of the strategic agenda of every company, so a Chief AI Officer makes sense. I think the focus of such a person will be to make sure that the company delivers business value with AI. But also, it's important that it is done in a way that matches the ethics of the company.
What are the cultural changes required to be leading in AI in your industry?
AI is not about putting something on top of an existing process. Sometimes AI is about rethinking your process from scratch, and saying, “Okay, we've done that in this way for so many years. Now with AI, we can do it totally differently in a much more efficient, precise, and forward-looking way.” Sometimes the changes need to be really deep. The people who will lead and participate in those changes need to be ready for that.
In the end, I think one cultural aspect that is very important is the ethical responsibility. AI is a great tool; AI gives us a lot of power. But with power comes great responsibility. AI needs to be handled in an ethical way so that we build a relationship of trust and we maintain that relationship of trust that we have with our customers.
How disruptive do you expect AI to become in the consumer goods and the retail industry and how much disruption do you expect for your own leadership role?
Major disruption … it has already started!
I would say that AI has to become part of our DNA if we want to be competitive going forward, so we need to be stronger advocates of adoption and a mindset evolution. Generative AI is only going to amplify this and probably in a way we don't know of today.
We need to prepare the organization for increased speed and agility, as well as encourage an innovative mindset to embrace all the ways we'll be able to drive business and efficiency in this new world.
How do you personally embrace AI and prepare for the AI future?
I'm personally very excited. Because of my background, I want to know how AI works, so I dig deep into the mechanics of the box. It's like all new technologies – it's a tool, not magic.
Do you think AI is rather an opportunity or a risk for the consumer goods and retail businesses and why?
To give an example in the context of Decathlon, we inject AI everywhere along the entire value chain of the company. That means end-to-end forecasting. We predict demand, store replenishment, and e-commerce logistics stock turnover. We want to predict the right quantities of products at the right place because of the phenomenal impact on our business.
We also need to implement expandability and traceability to create trust and reliability for our customers. If we don't, that only brings additional risk to our company because we're offering a new experience to our customers, which can indeed degrade the credibility that the customers have if they don't fully trust how we've been doing that.
What are the key factors for your organization to get prepared for AI-related changes?
Often at Decathlon, when we talk to the company and the different stakeholders about AI, we say 30% of the job to be done is about the techniques and technology of data, and 70% is about the change – change with people, with the processes, and how AI gets injected, embraced, and leveraged by the company.
I think the key factor really is change management.
