We are with Isabelle... Hello, hello Isabelle. You are the managing director of Google Cloud France and I would like to ask you a few questions. One question, finally, about Enrique Martinez, the CEO of the Year. What made Enrique Martinez's application stand out at Google Cloud?
Our DNA is innovation. So when we select our CEO of the year, we are very attentive to that aspect of innovation. Innovation also means vision, and I think Enrique personifies that well. That is, he was very visionary at a very early stage. He understood how using data and artificial intelligence — and I mean artificial intelligence before generative AI — could transform two emblematic companies like Fnac and Darty, and change the way we do retail today, while preserving a very important aspect for us: sustainability. His book 'If We Consumed Better' really reveals how he thought about and carried out this transformation within the Fnac Darty group. So we are very attentive to that, and obviously to sustainability, because we have a duty of responsibility to understand that technology can serve transformation and sustainability. That is particularly important for us. That's why he was named CEO of the Year. Thank you, Isabelle.
Enrique Martinez, hello. Hello Enrique. You are the CEO of the Fnac Darty group. We are going to discuss your CEO of the Year award, which was recently given. Before talking about the award, I would first like to ask you a question about innovation. What is innovation for a CEO like you? What is innovation when you lead a group like Fnac Darty?
Well, I think we are in very competitive markets, so innovation is about finding growth levers. It's also an opportunity to improve the quality of our services, our processes, and our relationship with our customers. Sometimes when we think of innovation, we all think of the latest products at our stores, but we are also interested in how we can innovate through tools, methods, and ways of working to make our operations more efficient, more impactful, and more satisfying for our consumers. So it's a very broad domain, and I would say we have invested both time and money, but also a lot of focus recently in the group.
That's interesting because when I talk to you about innovation, what's immediately interesting in your answer is that you first talk about innovation for the internal side before even talking about innovation for the external. Why is it so important for you to talk about the way you transform processes and the way people work?
Today, we manage over a million square meters, we manage stores, we manage tens of millions of products, hundreds of millions of visits, so there's a significant operational complexity. Technology, data, and mastery of operations allow us to be much more efficient and find sources of savings. But at the same time, there are significant sources of risk because if we don't do our job correctly and if we don't innovate in how we manage our tools, we can find ourselves with execution defects. And in retail, especially in the last days of the year, every day is critical, every minute. So innovation in preparation is typically hyper-important, vital for us.
This innovation, you carry it out daily with your partner Google Cloud. Since when did you choose to work with Google Cloud?
We have been Google partners for a long time, but about four or five years ago we started building the foundation of a new partnership cycle with Google. We truly became interested in how this Google Cloud strategy could accelerate our digital transformation. Our group is not like others; there's a very important but also very old IT heritage. So all the work of modernizing our tools while at the same time taking advantage of the opportunity to make our operations more flexible and to benefit from Google Cloud's experience and tools key to us, such as customer relations, data quality, the relevance of our search engines, our websites. For us, it seemed obvious that the new innovation cycle for the company would pass through a transformation of IT tools, and at that moment, the relationship with Google was a starting point and especially an acceleration of the group's transformation.
And again, based on what you've been saying, it also relies heavily on data. How has a group like Google Cloud helped you get the best out of your data? You mentioned many stores, we are at the end-of-year period, so with enormous flows of requests on your sites or in stores, how does a group like Google Cloud help you absorb all that, give it meaning, and ultimately inject it into your business?
It's interesting because the teams were very quickly made aware that you can't have a good data or innovation strategy if you don't have quality data. That's something we've heard for a long time. The difficulty of having many data systems that are sometimes inconsistent, not simultaneous, not well enriched. So I would say for the first time, we have done a whole job of urbanizing and hardening data to make data accessible to all our systems, so we can start from a clean base. That work prepared cycles, especially for evolution and so on, and that allowed many things that will enable us to create a roadmap for internal and external. For example, something close to our heart: a few years ago we decided to open our repair data to customers. Today we repair millions of products per year, so there's extremely rich and specific data for customers to have a better overview of product quality. That's the repairability index, the sustainability label, and so on. All that depends on the quality of data we now master, which we always used to improve the performance of our repairers and assistants, and we decided to transform it into quality data shared with consumers. So typically, these data silos allowed us to do projects that I think four or five years ago we would have been incapable of doing. Obviously, when we approached the transformation of digital tools for fnac.com and darty.com, mastering data to go further on enriching product sheets or on the quality of search engines was key. For us, and in the relationship with Google, these were symbolic projects: how we wanted to project better search quality on our sites. We know that the biggest entry points on the site are search engines. Being able to transform that experience through new technology was decisive for us.
If we try to talk very concretely from the point of view of the buyer or user when they go to your site, yes, what is Google going to improve? For example, when a query comes in, does it produce results faster? In natural language, because we know that's one of the specialties of Google Cloud? Can queries formulated in natural language get a faster response? Very concretely, how does this collaboration help you gain relevance?
Today, there are about twenty use cases in the company, some visible to consumers, some not. Very visible things include the quality of product sheets, especially on the marketplace, which have been improved. Today we feel that sheets are much cleaner, well-structured, with the necessary data, photos, features. That has greatly improved the quality of the experience. We are starting to test natural language; there will be things a bit later. There will be questions about customer relations; we are starting to test in a few countries, soon in France as well. So there are about twenty use cases on services, a lot of work on how to better identify customer cases to know the best method to handle them correctly: whether to handle them in-house or quickly send to a technician. That diagnostic work is much improved thanks to data mastery and AI tools that are being developed. So we are already seeing an improvement in the perception of customer quality.
One last question, Enrique, on the impact of data on the customer. We know that today, customer knowledge is particularly critical. You mentioned fnac.com and darty.com. We know that today customers are versatile, they go from one site to another. They need a quick query and a quick response to their query. How, thanks to Google Cloud, have you managed to improve your customer knowledge and, I would say, your conversion rate with them?
