Walmart Centroid

As part of our FY26 Leadership Offsite, we had the privilege of visiting Stanford University, where our leadership team participated in an insightful session with Adjunct Professor Daniel ONeill and explored the Stanford Robotics Center with Executive Director Steve Cousins. A huge thank you to Ana Clara Backes Martins for organizing and coordinating this incredible experience! #leadership #AI #innovation #Stanford #Robotics

It was great spending time this past week in Sunnyvale hosting Walmart Centroid ! We had great discussions and shared learnings throughout the day.

As part of our FY26 Leadership Offsite, our leadership team had an incredible opportunity to engage with four innovative startups during sessions hosted by Plug and Play. These discussions provided valuable insights into emerging technologies and disruptive business models. A big thank you to Joshua Saffran and Prajwal D. for facilitating such an inspiring exchange of ideas! #Leadership #Innovation #Startups #PlugAndPlay

As part of our FY26 Leadership Offsite, we had the privilege of visiting Stanford University, where our leadership team participated in an insightful session with Adjunct Professor Daniel ONeill and explored the Stanford Robotics Center with Executive Director Steve Cousins. A huge thank you to Ana Clara Backes Martins for organizing and coordinating this incredible experience! #leadership #AI #innovation #Stanford #Robotics

Inventory remains the single most important factor driving business growth and cost improvement. It impacts everything—from customer satisfaction to operational efficiency—yet it is often an undervalued capability. Inventory planning can be summarized by a simple yet powerful goal: ensuring the right item is available to a customer, whether they’re shopping in-store or online. But achieving this is far from simple. At Walmart, we optimize over 500 million item-location combinations across a time horizon of nearly a year. Add to that the uncertainty of supply chains, and the complexity becomes even greater. This is where AI, ML, and Agentic AI have the potential to fundamentally transform inventory planning. By leveraging new-age compute capacity, machines can now learn from past mistakes—such as wrong allocations or insufficient inventory levels—and refine decision-making processes. These technologies enable us to go much more granular, optimizing inventory down to the smallest detail with precision and agility. Agentic AI, in particular, offers a solution to the limitations of traditional 'black-box' ML models. By providing transparency and interpretability, it helps us understand how decisions are made, ensuring they align with business goals while building trust in the system. As AI-driven inventory planning evolves, the question becomes: how do we maximize these tools to unlock the full potential of this often-underestimated capability? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the future of AI in inventory planning. Walmart Centroid

We are thrilled to announce recent promotions. We appreciate all the hard work and value that each of you created for the enterprise and our customers. Congratulations! Arvind Prabu Francisco Calero Raghava Sarma Santhosh Reddy Kosike Spencer Loper

We had our second 2024 town hall meeting last month where our associates had fun participating in team-building activities: Marshmallow Challenge in Sunnyvale and Scavenger Hunt in Bentonville. A big shout-out to Annie Dorsey, Arindam Debbarma, Federico Lai?o, Grant Barnes, Greg Guinney, Jenna Ford, Lekshmanan Natarajan, and Tory Rickey who helped organize the events!

Walmart Centroid was invited to the 2024 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Seattle last week to chair two sessions and deliver a keynote speech. Emerging Delivery Technology Session:?Yuqian Dong had the honor of chairing this dynamic session, featuring experts from diverse fields. We explored the integration of cutting-edge delivery technologies into urban systems. Special shoutout to Coline Ramée from CENTROID, who shared how we leverage decision science models to enhance strategic insights in Last Mile Drone Delivery. Strategic Supply Chain Network Optimization Session:?Chaired by Xinyue Peng, this session spotlighted the remarkable algorithmic work by CENTROID members Amin Aghalari, Lingxun Kong, Rahul Swamy, PhD, Xinghua Wang and Yaqing Wu. Their presentations addressed complex real-world challenges, highlighting our strategic initiatives that are transforming Walmart’s End-to-End Supply Chain and improving customer experiences. Keynote Speech:?Yuqian Dong was invited to give the keynote talk on "The Future of Last-Mile Delivery Technology and the Importance of a Collaborative Approach." The talk emphasized the significant benefits of collaborative innovation in creating competitive advantages in Last Mile Delivery—a key factor in customer satisfaction, loyalty, and brand perception. Thanks for having us, and we are proud of our team’s achievements and excited for what lies ahead!

It is exciting to share that Mohan Ram Akella, who leads Walmart’s Centroid, was invited as an opening keynote speaker at Supply Chain Expo of Silicon Valley Summit hosted by Plug and Play. Mohan shared how Walmart’s supply chain had evolved over the last couple of decades and introduced our transformative journey of supply chain around automation and data with focus on delivering bigger value to our customers and associates. Appreciate Plug and Play and Joshua Saffran for inviting us!

Edgar Blanco, one of Centroid's VPs, recently had a privilege to be invited to the MIT Supply Chain Management Master's Program Class of 2024 graduation ceremony.