Hi everyone. Alexandre, welcome. We are glad to have you here. You have been a chairman and CEO of Carrefour for eight years now. You began a career in public services before taking on leadership roles in the media industry, then modernizing Fnac and merging it to Darty to create a European retail champion. At Carrefour, you're leading one of Europe's boldest retail transformations, combining digital innovation, sustainability, and operational excellence, trying to invent the future of this very competitive industry that is retail. First, let me ask a personal question. Looking back at your diverse experience as chairman and CEO across media and retail, what has been your own journey with tech and innovation so far?
So thank you. I'm very pleased to be here with so many tech leaders to talk about innovation and AI in Paris at a privileged moment. I would say first I love tech personally. I love tech. I love innovation. I love tech objects. They are part of my life and it's very important in my life. But more important, because I'm a CEO, I do consider that one of the main qualities of leadership is curiosity. You don't need to be an engineer to drive innovation, but you have the responsibility to provoke curiosity and to be curious yourself and to take ownership of that. And I think it's very important. So as you said, I have been a CEO in two B2C industries, media and retail, both provoked by disruption coming from tech. And I was coming in these two industries from the old world: linear TV and radio for media, brick and mortar retail threatened by e-commerce. And in the two cases, what I had to do was to reconnect the old world with innovation, to recreate, to relaunch innovation in this old world. I think we will talk about Carrefour soon, so if I just say a word about when I was in Fnac, there were new digital platforms: Amazon Kindle for books, Apple Music for music. So I decided, I was quite young, I decided to launch two digital platforms. One was okay, Kobo by Fnac, quite a good success. The other one was Fnac music. I'm sure you never heard about it because I think we had no subscribers at the end. So it was a total mess. But I would do the same today because when in an old world you decide to tackle innovation, you have some ups, you have a lot of downs, but you have to do it, do it, do it again because it's part of the journey.
It's how we learn, right. So now Carrefour is a big ship: 100 billion euro turnover company, with a 45-country footprint and 500,000 people working. It must not be easy to drive innovation, but you did it very successfully for several years now. Can you tell us a bit more about your personal journey and how you make it work at such a big ship company?
So when I joined Carrefour, we were, I would say, nowhere near the tech-born giants, but also nowhere compared with the brick and mortar competitors. And that was coming from a common belief of the management of the company at this moment. We did think that nobody would ever order food on a computer or on a phone. So as you've seen, this common belief didn't grow old very well. So when I joined, I decided to introduce two new convictions. First, we have absolutely no chance to survive and to remain a leader if we don't put innovation everywhere in our transformation. Second, because we are big, 500,000 employees, 100 billion euros of revenues, innovation cannot sit in an angle in a corner. It has to be everywhere. It has to be shared by the social body. It has to be a shared conviction from all the team. So we try to become, coming from an old company, we try to become a digital oriented company, a more agile organization, and to make a transformation with e-commerce, with migration on the cloud, with leadership on the app. And that's the journey we are at this stage of the journey. Where are we today? Are we competitive on tech compared to the tech-born giants? The answer is no. Are we credible, legitimate? Are we one of the leaders in our industry in Europe, and more than in Europe, in the world in brick and mortar? Yes, we are. So now we are credible. We are legitimate. We are in advance on a certain number of transformations on tech. But of course AI is coming. It's a new battle. It reshuffles everything and that's the new journey we have.
So we are today at Adopi, Alexandre. So let's talk about AI. Can you tell us a bit, you know, what role AI could play at a company like Carrefour?
Let me tell you a secret. I don't care at all about putting AI everywhere in my speech. I don't care. I don't need to be modern in my speech. What I want with AI is having new tools to transform my company. That's the only thing that matters to me. What can AI bring to the transformation of the company? And the good news is that when you invest, when you have good experts, when you have good cases, in our industry AI helps us to transform the company. First, it helps us to better serve our customers. We have dozens of millions of customers. We have a data lake of 10 billion transactions today. Thanks to AI, I'm capable to build a local assortment, a more adapted assortment, and to fix price each second in a coherent and rational way. That was not the case at all. So first, we serve the customers better. Second, it helps us to take better decisions. One example: we open in the world more than 1,000 new stores every year. Since recently, it took me six months, nine months with many studies to analyze competition, traffic, demography, and so on. And we were wrong in 80% of the cases. So I was waiting for surveys for nine months and in 80% of the cases, two or three years after the opening we were not at all in the forecast. Now with AI, I have the same information but more performance, more credible, more relevant in two minutes. So in two minutes, if I say okay I want to open a store in this street, what do you think about that? I have the proper answer on the probability that I will open a store that would deliver exactly the forecast. So that's the second thing. And the first thing is that AI, artificial intelligence, is creating a new kind of customer experience coming from the US as you know, and so every customer progressively will have its own agent, AI agent, recommending, curating, buying for them. So it's a revolution for us, and the answer to that is our capability to develop our own in-house agent to give this agent for our customers to create this intimacy with a customer on the new customer experience. So these three examples prove how it will change dramatically the way we are doing our business, the way we serve our customers, the way we transform our company.
