 here with theCUBE. We're at Stanford University at the Ariaga Alumni Center for the first ever Women in Data Science Conference. We're excited to be here. It's about 500 women talking really day technical stuff in the early panels and presentations. We're excited to be joined by a business woman, Kelly Thompson, SVP Merchandising Walmart. Welcome. Thank you so much. It's really great to be here. It's amazing to see the intelligence and creativity all concentrated here and the talks so far have been awesome. I'm learning a ton. Having a good time. It is a good time. Some of that stuff was a little deep on the first one. I have to say I got a little bit lost on all the network explanations, but clearly it's heavy, heavy science to get the things like a better movie recommendation or 50,000 potential descriptive terms on the row that I look at. It's amazing the amount of effort that goes behind making a better experience. Yeah, it's great. And I think a lot of this stuff actually applies to retail too, where I'm a merchant and what merchants do is we serve customers. We're agents for the customer. So when the customer has a problem, we have a problem that we need to solve. So we're really interested in solving problems around connecting customers with the right products at the right price, making sure we buy the right amount of inventory. Stuff that seems pretty simple, but actually isn't easy. And with Walmart, in particular, price is so important to our customer. There are value seekers across all kinds of income ranges. So we've done a lot of interesting work on pricing and making sure that we live up to the brand promise of save money, live better for our customers. Good stuff. Yeah, but then you've got this other thing too, which is time. Now things in kind of an e-commerce world are moving so, so fast, sensitivity, fashion, et cetera, except Walmart buys in mass scale, right? It's containers coming across the ocean. How do you kind of juxtapose those trends? Because things are moving quickly, but buyers place orders a long time before we see the stuff on the shelf. Yeah, it's a good point, but I think there's stores and there's e-commerce. And the cool thing about Walmart is we're using both mobile stores and e-commerce to kind of come together to solve problems. So you can buy products a lot quicker and get them onto an e-commerce shelf and not gonna help inform what goes onto a store shelf and vice versa. So you kind of, the cool thing about Walmart is you've got this scale, but you can also move with speed, which is one of the things that we're really focused on, both at Walmart e-commerce, but also within Walmart labs. And one of the things you mentioned, there's so much data and so much information coming at it. It's harder to be a merchant nowadays. So merchants can't humanly digest all of the information that's coming at them. So we've partnered a lot with our technologists at Walmart labs and really helping merchants scale their ability to drive sales and profit through the data products that we've developed. It's interesting, we've talked to a number of people here and it's always this kind of conflict between the data scientists who knows the numbers and the math and then the people that have the contextual information that know they've been in the business for a long time and it's really bringing those two together to work as an effective team is where you're going to get the value. Neither by themselves is really going to crack the nut. So culturally, how has that been working at Walmart? How have you kind of brought those two worlds together and taught them to work together to get a one plus one makes three? You know, that's a great question and that's really at the crux of it. And so I would go to this word collaboration and it's kind of a buzzword that everybody talks about. But I think one of the fundamentals of successful collaboration is this humility and knowing that you need each other. And so I think what we've done at Walmart between labs and the business is really come to the table with that humility. I need you and you need me and we are really working on blending the art and science through this blend of business and technology. It was a cultural shift for me. I had to kind of spend my time in different ways, learn new terms. And then I asked my team to do the same. And then on the business, I'm sorry, on the technology side with the data scientists, they're so hungry to learn more about the business context. And that's really how you strengthen the ranks for a company is you get this blend, this mashup between business acumen and tech acumen. To me, that's where the excitement is and that's where the future is at. So we've worked hard on that collaboration. That's awesome. So for the people that aren't aware of kind of Walmart's investment in Silicon Valley, because everybody knows about Bitten Harbor and everybody makes the pilgrimage and that's where all the buyers go. But years ago with Excel partners, I believe, Walmart made an investment here in the Bay Area to be close to the technology hub. I wonder if you can share people kind of what that was investment was all about. I don't know if you were there in the early days and how that's kind of morphed to really bring a different level of technology because obviously super sophisticated on the supply chain. No doubt about it. But really to make an investment here in Silicon Valley around evolving technologies, online commerce, and now big data. Yeah, no, that's a great point as well. Walmart's investing where the talent's at and especially with the creation of Walmart Labs. So I think we've done over 13 acquisitions in the last three years. A lot of that is to get the right kind of talent and then mash them up with all of that institutional knowledge within the business. But yeah, we've got over 2,000 technologists right here in Silicon Valley. And we also have other offices around, places like Portland and Carlsbad. But we'll go to where the talent's at and it's about bringing the talent to the business. So Walmart is building a technology startup within the world's largest retailer. So it's a really, really exciting place to be, especially for someone like me who loves that blend of art and science. It is not the way most established retailers go about the business. So that's what makes Walmart unique is Walmart Labs within Walmart. So Kelly, last thing before I let you go, it's interesting how there was a lot of kind of on-prem blurring that went into the early days of e-commerce. And now it seems to be kind of shifting back. Now they're bringing with sensors and internal GPS. Now they can start to see people's reaction to things in a store as we've done priorly as people click around. So can you talk a little bit about the blending of those two kind of go-to-market strategies and how you can leverage one with the other to really provide a better customer experience? Yeah, it's another great point. Like in the early days, you know, the physical style of retail was really driving e-commerce, but now you're kind of seeing e-commerce and mobile commerce in particular drive physical commerce. And really what we see at Walmart is most of our customers actually have smartphones and they get them out and they use them when they're shopping a store. So they'll use them in the store. So they're doing things like they want to read more content about the items. They want to read reviews and ratings. What are other customers saying? They'll check and see what the prices are. But they're actually using it to help get a richer in-store experience. And that's what's so great about a company like Walmart is you've got mobile, you've got e-commerce and you've got stores. And it's connecting those things seamlessly for the customer that gets us all really excited about what's possible. Wow, that's, this is the combo, the combo. So last question before I let you go, you joke for where you came online, you're kind of a business person sneaking around at a tech conference here. What are you hoping to learn today? What are you excited about that you've already seen? What, why are you here? What are you excited about? You know, gosh, I could, I could go on and on about what I've learned. I learned a lot from, I think her name was Kailin who talked about Netflix and just how do you connect, sort of how do you use data to actually connect customers with things that they want and love and enjoy. All these things are the neural networks in the first talk, in the first talk that we heard. Just there's all this stuff is applicable. When you're, when you're making connections, that's really what this is all about. Networks are about making connections and in retail we're making connections between people and products. And so a lot of it's very applicable. But yeah, really, really great speakers and more to come, so very excited. Excellent, well I'll let you get back to it. Thanks for taking a few minutes, Kelly. All right, take care. Thanks you guys. Jeff Frick here at theCUBE. We are at Stanford at the Ariaga Center. Thanks for watching.