The world’s largest retailer is using Jetblack, a money-losing personal-shopping service, to develop artificial intelligence to compete with e-commerce giant Amazon
Walmart is using Jetblack’s army of human agents to train an artificial intelligence system that could someday power an automated personal-shopping service, preparing Walmart for a time when the search bar disappears and more shopping is done through voice-activated devices, said Jetblack CEO Jenny Fleiss.
.. Walmart is competing with Amazon, which has $233 billion in annual sales, including web services.
.. Walmart is the world’s biggest retailer by revenue, with $514 billion in annual sales, but e-commerce makes up only a small percentage. That’s out of sync with where retail is growing fastest. Across the U.S., online shopping accounted for 9.7% of total retail sales last year and grew 14.2% from the previous year, according to the Commerce Department.
Walmart bought India’s biggest e-commerce site. It has been buying up small online retailers including men’s apparel company Bonobos and is testing autonomous cargo vans for home grocery delivery in places such as Surprise, Ariz.
.. it is one of the biggest gambles Walmart is making to attract wealthy shoppers and burnish its tech credentials.
Walmart primarily views the company as a research hub on AI and voice shopping.
.. Marc Lore, head of Walmart’s U.S. e-commerce business, had in mind a Jetblack-like service before Walmart bought his e-commerce startup Jet.com in 2016. That website sells products that appeal to urban shoppers, including higher-end brands that won’t sell on Walmart.com.
Mr. Lore was fascinated by the idea of a premium service that allowed shoppers to order products for speedy delivery by speaking into the air, said people familiar with his thinking. “This is a Marc Lore passion project,” said one former Walmart executive.
.. One former Walmart executive said Jetblack is “the first thing that we’ve tried that will unwind you” consistently from Amazon Prime. “The early indication is that it has legs,” even if the point isn’t earning profits, the former executive said.
Jetblack members are spending an average of $300 a week for products because the ease of the service encourages more frequent purchases ..
.. The average shopper is buying more than 10 items a week, said Ms. Fleiss. Average spending a week is higher than last September, said a company spokesman, but he declined to say how much Jetblack members spend a week or how many of those products come from Walmart.
.. Customer-service agents, often recent college graduates drawn to the startup culture of Jetblack, need to become experts on wealthy New York City moms. Agents have two weeks of training, in part to learn what products babies need as they move through different developmental phases so they can make better product recommendations.
.. Moms—the vast majority of members—sometimes text fast requests like “reorder cereal.” When a Jetblack member joins, an employee usually goes to the customer’s home to inventory the products the person uses, giving agents a database of frequent purchases. Software automatically suggests a product if it is a frequent purchase or was scanned in the customer’s home.
.. It takes agents slightly longer to place an order for “item requests,” when the shopper knows exactly what they want but hasn’t ordered it before. Even more time-consuming are “recommendations,” open-ended requests such as “I need a new yoga mat” or “I need a birthday present for a 9-year-old.”
.. Agents consult a file that combines past purchases, products agents have researched and recommendations made by Jetblack merchandising workers, then suggest around three items for the customer to choose from, current and former employees said. Sometimes agents head to Google to do research, said one of these people.
.. Through the dialogue, the system is learning which follow up questions to ask, said Ms. Fleiss. For example, if a shopper asks for a new stroller, the system might learn to next ask “For how many children?” and “Do you need your child to nap in the stroller?” Members buy one of the recommended products 80% of the time, she said.
.. Jetblack also learned it still needs traditional technology. It created a companion app because some shoppers don’t like to update credit card information or review past orders over text.
Workers stock up on frequently purchased items by taking a daily van to a Jet.com warehouse and Walmart stores in New Jersey, since New York City has no physical Walmart stores, ordering products online for pickup. Later this year Jetblack plans to use a new Walmart fulfillment center in the Bronx to collect some products faster, said a spokesman.
How Dark Money, Gerrymandering And Democratic Complacency Altered Wisconsin Politics
.. Six years before Trump’s win, the state’s voters elected conservative populist Scott Walker governor. With the help of a Republican-controlled legislature, Walker waged an unprecedented assault on public employee unions in the state and later signed a right to work bill, which undermined private-sector unions.
.. he would go along to these small towns and speak to people about this danger of corporate influence on their lives.
DAVIES: And how far into the 20th century did this sort of progressive trend hold in Wisconsin? And I note that Senator Joe McCarthy – probably the most notorious anti-communist of the century – came from that state.
.. he undertook a pretty radical approach to dealing with public employee unions. What did he propose to do?
KAUFMAN: Well, he proposed to all but strip them of collective bargaining rights, which is their ability to speak as a collective voice around wages, benefits and other workplace concerns, workplace safety, basically, reducing their ability to act as a collective voice. He exempted the police and fire department unions. Some would say that cynically because some of these unions supported him.
.. Tim Cullen, a moderate Democratic state senator – he said, the one thing that was non-negotiable was the automatic dues checkoff.
.. He stoked resentment against the public workers. It was clear in his inaugural address in 2011. He said the public employees can no longer be the haves, and the taxpayers can no longer be the have nots. Privately, he even went further.
There’s a famous recording of him speaking to a billionaire donor where she says when will we become a completely red state? When will we become a right-to-work state? She conflated the two. And he answered, you know, have you seen what we’re going to do with the public employees? And then he went on. He said, you know, because you use divide and conquer. What he meant by that was he was going to first attack the public employees. And then several years later, he instituted a right-to-work law against the private sector employees. Now you have a state that went from 14 percent union density when he was elected to 8 percent.
.. in 2016, the presidential election arrives in Wisconsin, as it does in the rest of the country. The Democratic primary – Bernie Sanders beats Hillary Clinton by 13 points. Why did Hillary Clinton have trouble connecting to Democratic voters in Wisconsin?
.. she has never been a close ally of labor. Wisconsin progressives were deeply wounded by the attacks on labor. She was a former corporate board member of Walmart, a notoriously anti-union company. And she also supported for many, many years free trade agreements, like NAFTA and the China’s membership into the World Trade Organization, that have really impacted the industrial Midwest in such a profound way. People are aware that you can drive by a factory, and they’ll say, oh, this factory moved to Mexico and then went on to Vietnam. They are very keenly aware. Other factors played a role – automation and so on – but these agreements really impacted particularly the industrial Midwest – Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio.
DAVIES: And particularly unionized workers, I think.
.. I think people forget that Donald Trump’s message during the campaign – he also twinned his message of resentment – racial resentment – with a defense of the welfare state. You can look at his speeches. He staged five huge rallies in Wisconsin. He almost always mentioned, we’ve got to protect Social Security and Medicare, and he railed against these free trade agreements. So there was a different kind of Republican message that resonated with a certain sector of the population enough to put him over the top, coupled with Hillary Clinton’s noncampaigning and non-effort in these places, and it really impacted the race.
.. There was frankly a weak Democratic opposition to his message, and there was a stoking of resentment in a time of economic insecurity. That is very powerful. And they weren’t – people weren’t being offered an alternative – a very compelling one anyway.
.. Another example is gerrymandering. In 2012 election, Wisconsin Democrats won an aggregate of almost 200,000 more votes than the Republicans, and yet they lost seats. That…
DAVIES: You’re talking about in the state legislature.
KAUFMAN: In the state legislature in the assembly, and that leads to demoralizing (laughter) of your party. I mean, it’s hard to get candidates to run when they know they’re going to be defeated if the district is just so heavily drawn to favor the Republicans where – and the Democratic seats are – you know, they’ll routinely win more than 70 percent of the vote. So they pack them in. And that case was, you know, brought to the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s the first partisan gerrymandering case to go to the Supreme Court in more than three decades because the federal court agreed with the plaintiffs – the Democrats – that their rights had been denied because it was so extreme.
White House lurches into crisis mode, again
Chief of staff John Kelly was forced to publicly insist he’s remaining in his job as he tried for a fourth day to contain the damage following allegations that a senior aide abused two ex-wives.
The relentless chaos has prompted some senior officials to leave the administration in recent weeks. The latest is Rachel Brand, the number three official at the Justice Department, who resigned on Friday to join Wal-Mart, telling friends that she was concerned that her association with the Trump administration could hurt her reputation.
“She is very smart, accomplished, and talented, and wants to protect her career,” said one Brand associate.
.. The list largely consisted of portfolio reassignments and title changes, doing little to allay concerns that Kelly has been unable to recruit fresh faces to replace senior officials who have left.
.. Even though he was previously aware of some of the allegations facing his staff secretary, Kelly’s allies say he didn’t fully understand the severity of the issue until he saw photographs of one of Porter’s ex-wives with a bruised eye. White House aides also assert that Kelly and other top officials felt misled by Porter’s own defense against the allegations.
Third-highest ranking official at the Justice Department stepping down
Brand, 44, who has only been in her Senate-confirmed position for nine months, would have been in line to take over the supervision of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation if Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, the department’s No. 2 official, was fired by Trump or recused himself from the matter.
.. Brand is leaving the Justice Department for a top legal job at Walmart
.. When Trump was asked by a reporter whether he was then more likely to fire Rosenstein and whether he had confidence in him, Trump replied, “You figure that one out.”
.. With Brand’s departure, Solicitor General Noel Francisco is next in line at the Justice Department to oversee the Russia investigation after Rosenstein.
.. The news that Brand is leaving came as a surprise to many people who know her. The Federalist Society just announced Friday that Brand is scheduled to speak next week at a Washington chapter lunch.
.. Brand has one of the department’s more politically challenging jobs, managing the lawyers who litigate civil issues, including Trump’s travel ban as well as civil rights, environmental and antitrust cases.