Walmart CPO on Scaling AI-Powered Localization Across Hundreds of Stores Worldwide | Tim Simmons | E285

I think it's the new battle for who customers will really trust. Are they gonna trust an LLM to basically be their shopper agent? Are they gonna trust, say, Walmart? 71% of customers will tell you they lose trust in the experience, whether it's a website, app, whatever. They lose trust in the experience if it's not translated correctly. We're translating intent, not just literal word for word. We are doing across 22 languages. We're translating millions of items, catalog items per month. Every single translation is done within twenty milliseconds. And so what I'm learning is is that the more we can expose AI to our complexity, the smarter and more resilient it gets. And that's actually starting to show up as a competitive advantage. Hey. This is Carlos, CEO at Product School and your host on the product podcast. Today's guest is Tim Simmons, chief product officer at Walmart International. Walmart is the largest retailer in the world with over $650,000,000,000 in annual revenue and over 255,000,000 customers every single week. Tim manages a massive international portfolio across 18 countries outside The US. What makes this episode essential for senior product leaders is how he's executing a full stack platform strategy and leveraging agentic AI to turn complexity into a competitive advantage. During our conversation, Tim shares the advanced frameworks and results driving that strategy. The orchestrator strategy, how they build AI agents that automate user stories with an 88% acceptance rate from human PMs. The ROI of AI, a look at their internal translation engine that processes billions of items in milliseconds, cutting costs by 99%. Global versus local, the playbook for building one core platform that scales to 30 brands without losing critical hyperlocal nuance. Let's dive in. Welcome to the product podcast, Tim. Thank you. Great to be here. We've been trying to catch you for some time. Yeah. I'm I'm thrilled to be a part of this, really. Glad that you are with us. One of our common friends is in one of your mentors, and she recommended that we had to get you. We tried to bring you for ProductCon New York. Mhmm. Yeah. But I'm glad that we're here again. Yeah. Me too. San Francisco. Yep. So chief product officer at Walmart International. Correct. What does international mean for Walmart? Yeah. You know, it's a really good question because it's not too commonly known that Walmart has a really broad global footprint. You know, we think about Walmart US, and I think a lot of people also know Sam's Club is a segment of the Walmart business. So they think about Walmart US and Sam's Club. But the reality is is that we have a robust portfolio of retail business globally. So we work in seven markets, and those seven markets, consist of about 18 countries. So sometimes we gather different countries into a given market. And so we have over 30 banners or brands, all retail. So, like, for example, in …