How Carrefour is following Walmart's lead as its 2030 AI-enabled transformation kicks in

As French retail giant Carrefour begins what it is being pitched as a new chapter in its 66 year history, this isn’t CEO Alexandre Bompard’s first rodeo; in fact, it’s the third strategic plan he’s had oversight of in the 8.5 years he’s been in the top job.

This latest iteration is known as Carrefour 2030 and it sets out three strategic priorities for the next five years - to win on product offering and customers; consolidate omni-channel growth; and to accelerate performance through AI, tech and data.

On the last point, Bompard says:

The emergence of AI represents a turning point. AI is one of the major strategic bets of Carrefour 2030. And I deliberately refer to this as a bit because we are not yet able to quantify precisely the gains that this revolution will deliver, but we know that those gains will be substantial by 2030, starting with productivity gains in both our store operations and our headquarters functions.

He adds:

The breakthrough opportunity offered by AI - and more broadly, by tech and data - is opening an unprecedented transformation of our entire value chain from procurement to assortment, building, from sales to customer relations and even to quality of life at work.

Carrefour is looking at spending more than €100 million a year on AI by 2030 and on an AI factory, bringing together internal teams and AI specialists to coordinate the move and get the best out of each function, says Bompard:

Regarding the central functions, our teams are already working on transforming business processes with AI agents. A few hands-on examples [include] selecting the right locations for your expansion, contract management, granular sales forecasting, customer service and optimizing logistics flows. We will pay particular attention to upgrading our employee skills and deploy specific training program for all employees, whether in stores, at our warehouses or at head office. We have already taken a first step by deploying Gemini to 250,000 employees in 2025.

As a retailer, Carrefour obviously wants skin in the emerging agentic commerce space, confirms Bompard:

A hallmark of our sector is the intensity of the agent commerce revolution. Today, 60% of consumers report using AI in their shopping journey, whether to get information, search for a product or buy it. In the near future, AI agents will be a central point of entry for our customers. With 100,000 users every month, Hopla+ [Carrefour’s ChatGPT-based offering] has laid the foundations in our app for the first agentic shopping experience in France. In France, we're already the most visible food retailer in the three largest Large Language Models

Digital leadership

In recent years, Carrefour has demonstrated an “undeniable leadership” in data and digital, he pitches:

Whether [in] data, cloud migration, CRM transformation or e-commerce, our digital retail company has embraced every major trend and has established itself as a preferred partner for the world's leading technology players. With our 10 billion transactions, we have a data lake that is unique in both scale and quality. This enables us to personalize customer relationships and develop adjacent revenue streams via our financial and merchant services as well as through our retail media business, which continues to grow.

Bompard also cites Unlimitail as a Carrefour success story. This was launched as a joint-venture in 2023 in association with Publicis Group to partner with retailers and brands and bring scale, connectivity and consistency to retail media across Continental Europe, Brazil and Argentina. This is also set for an AI shot in the arm, predicts Bompard:

Unlimitail has established itself as the leader in the European market, even though the market has not yet reached the scale initially expected. At a time when the traditional advertising market is under pressure, we will double Unlimitail's revenues, and we are placing more emphasis than ever on in-store screens.

More recently, Carrefour signed up with Vusion, a global provider of digitalisation solutions for physical commerce, to digitalise all of its hypermarkets and supermarkets in France as part of the 2030 strategy.

In doing so, Carrefour is following the example of Walmart which has a similar deal with Vusion that has, according to Bompard, delivered outstanding results:

Carrefour is becoming the first retailer in Europe to deploy a fully integrated solution, combining cameras, electronic shelf labels, connected rails and AI to address key in-store operational challenges such as out-of-stock detection, accuracy, product, geolocation, planogram management and more….This partnership with Vusion is a paradigm shift. We are scaling up. This means that our stores are becoming smarter.

That’s important in a connected omni-channel retail world, he explains:

Stores have improved. They've been optimized, but it's basically the same way of working by and large, so there are inconsistencies, anomalies [and] there's always going to be shortages [and] price errors. Planograms can be unsatisfactory, and sometimes order picking is done manually. Vusion means the end of all of that. Thanks to Vusion, a store will be exactly similar to its digital twin. We [will] use data to improve every single process.

This will deliver considerable benefits, he argues:

When you reduce shortages as much as you can, when you reduce pricing consistencies as much as you can, when planograms are perfectly executed, when store picking processes are optimized for drivers using those digital technologies, you realize that the productivity gains are huge. Now I'm not going to give you the ROI because the testing period is still underway, but the ROI is huge, and that's significant.

Walmart’s experiences are informing Carrefour’s thinking here, admits Bompard:

Because we have an excellent relationship with Walmart, I asked my counterpart at Walmart whether my teams could spend time there to see how they're working. When you talk to the head of Walmart, he'll say, ‘This is the biggest operational transformation our stores have ever undertaken’. And we see the productivity gains that this has generated and also operational gains in stores.

I'm firmly convinced that if we manage to do things right, if we maintain our level of energy, this transformation will revolutionize our stores, and this means additional sources of revenue because this generates data in real time for suppliers. So it's a major undertaking, [but] together with the rest of the leadership team, I'm firmly convinced that this will radically change our stores. And that's what our friends from Walmart are saying to us as well. [Their] stores have become a digital replica. That's what we're doing, that’s what we're testing, that’s  what we will deploy.

My take

Bold, ambitious, and promising huge returns if executed on successfully, but also hugely expensive - the Vusion deal has a €150 million price tag and the initiative is limited to France in the first instance!

And theory doesn’t always deliver on schedule. As Bompard notes:

Online sales have not grown as quickly as every expert said they would a couple of years ago. Remember, a couple of years ago, people predicted that Amazon would win that battle…My objective back in the day was to board that train, which was leaving the station. But online sales did grow, but it grew more slowly than expected…In absolute terms, e-commerce is still generating growth, but not as quickly as we expected in 2020. 

But the direction of travel is now set, as Bompard confirms:

Now we share the same road map for the next five years. Starting today, the challenge is simple. We need to execute fast, well, and we need to do it together country by country, business by business, store by store. Carrefour 2030 is starting now.

Onwards!