Mere months after Marvin Ellison became Lowe’s CEO in 2018, he hired Seemantini Godbole as chief information officer to help revamp the home-improvement retailer’s technologies.
“It was kind of shocking how behind we were from a technology perspective,” says Godbole, who took on the additional role of chief digital officer in 2022.
For much of her career, Godbole focused on making businesses more technologically savvy amid the rise of e-commerce. She worked at Travelocity when travel spending migrated from human agents to online, then joined Target in 2010, and held several tech leadership roles as competition ramped up with Amazon.
But at Lowe’s, ranked 49th on the Fortune 500, tech’s structural issues were internal. In-store technologies and supply chain software were decades old, and Godbole worked quickly to upgrade those systems. She ditched inefficient self-checkout terminals from a third-party vendor, replacing them with a Lowe’s-designed system that ditched a weight scale, included prompts to nudge shoppers to tack on an installation fee when buying a faucet, and the flexibility to accept more forms of payment, including Apple Pay.
Godbole also upgraded the company’s website and mobile app for greater distinctions between do-it-yourself home renovators, who need more educational recommendations, and professional contractors who want speedier reordering and liked having a dedicated page that tracks past purchases to make invoicing easier for their taxes. Additionally, Lowe’s deployed Zebra Technologies’ handheld devices to associates so they wouldn’t have to go to a desktop computer to get updates on inventory replenishment, merchandising, and other in-store tasks.
All of these upgrades aligned with Godbole’s focus on prioritizing updates to customer-facing technologies. Shoppers tend to visit home improvement stores less frequently than other brick-and-mortar retailers but also spend a lot more money as they remodel a kitchen or spruce up a bedroom. She wants to make that experience as smooth as possible.
For investments in generative AI, Godbole focuses on three core pillars: “How we shop,” which are customer-facing technologies; “how we sell,” for store associates; and “how we work,” for corporate employees. “We don’t want to give a pass to generative AI,” says Godbole. “We want to hold you to the same rigorous standards we have for all other digitization initiatives.”
That includes setting up privacy guardrails, like not allowing facial recognition in a new generative AI and computer vision tool called Dwell Alerts. Currently tested in 50 stores, Dwell identifies when customers are lingering in an aisle and sends a notification for employees to offer assistance.
Other generative AI applications include a Lowe’s version of ChatGPT that’s available through the Zebra devices at 14 stores and can answer customer questions like “what fertilizer should I use for my grass?” and “what’s the difference between premium paint and the cheaper option?” The company says 400 associates are testing the tool, which answers questions at 80% accuracy. Godbole wants that figure to improve to 85% to 90%.
One way Lowe’s is making generative AI accessible to customers is with the Style Your Space app, introduced in September. More than 300 images are uploaded each day by users who take photos of their kitchen or bathrooms to generate a visualization of the room with Lowe’s products that match decor styles like contemporary or mid-century modern.
This year, Godbole also started a pilot of Apple Vision Pro’s mixed-reality headsets in a handful of stores, helping shoppers visualize what a new kitchen would look like with an updated counter, backsplash, and new cabinets. She hopes this tool will make selling easier for associates.
“I’m really optimistic about what happens in those stores and then we’ll keep rolling it out,” says Godbole.
John Kell
This is the last CIO Intelligence for 2024. Thank you so much for reading the newsletter and wishing you happy holidays and a wonderful New Year. See you again in 2025.
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NEWS PACKETS
OpenAI accelerates rivalry with Google; escalates tussles with Meta and Musk. ChatGPT’s search product has been made available for free for all users who have a registered account for the chatbot, letting OpenAI more broadly pitch the tool as an alternative to Google, which has overhauled its own search to include more conversational AI features. Meanwhile, rivals like Meta and startup xAI founder Elon Musk have found themselves on the same side of a fight to halt OpenAI’s plan to transition to a for-profit entity from its current structure of being controlled by a nonprofit.
IT hiring is expected to be “stable” in 2025. Staffing firm ManPowerGroup predicts that IT hiring will plateau next year because of “economic uncertainty,” reports Computerworld, as employers shift from volume hiring to “quality hiring,” meaning a more strategic approach to adding new talent. ManPowerGroup says companies are also taking longer to make a hire and that seasonal hiring during the holidays is less intense than previously. Meanwhile, a separate report by CompTIA earlier this month noted that hiring in November was “flat,” while also saying that employers are seeking more clarity on the incoming presidential administration and inflation.
Rhode Island is stung by a cyberattack. The Ocean State has disclosed that cybercriminals could release personal data of Rhode Islanders after the RIBridges online system for delivering health and human services was hacked. The state was first made aware of the problem after its vendor, Deloitte, warned there was a major security threat to the system. Anyone who has applied for or received benefits for several state programs since as far back as 2016 could be affected, the New York Times reports. The hackers are also threatening to release sensitive information unless they are paid an undisclosed amount.
ADOPTION CURVE
How IT mindsets are shifting after the CrowdStrike outage. It's been five months since cybersecurity company CrowdStrike's outage crashed millions of Windows-based devices, but there are still lessons to be gleaned from the crisis. A recent study of 1,000 IT and business executives found that 88% expect another CrowdStrike-sized outage in the next 12 months and that 86% say they are putting too much emphasis on developing security measures and not enough on preparing their team and customers for when a disruption does occur.
The survey, by Wakefield Research on behalf of software company PagerDuty, found that most (55%) of technology and business leaders are focusing on more continuous efforts to evaluate and improve preparedness for future outages.
PagerDuty CTO Tim Armandpour tells Fortune that IT outages are no longer just an action item on the CTO's agenda. CEOs are constantly talking about the risk with their technology leaders. “Now there’s a lean-in that is beyond tooling and data and more about what our communications protocols look like,” says Armandpour. A vendor’s customers and their end users should be more clearly aware of the status of an outage, when they can expect a resolution, and how that will cascade to them, says Armandpour, who cautions that “leaving that uncertainty too long can erode the relationship.”
JOBS RADAR
Hiring:
- Centific is seeking a field CTO, based in Redmond, Wash. Posted salary range: $200K-$250K/year.
- Cribl is seeking a field CTO, a remote-based role in either the U.S. or Canada. Posted salary range: $190K-$240K/year.
- Lazard is seeking a VP of technology, based in New York City. Posted salary range: $250K-$275K/year.
- Creative Artists Agency is seeking a director of corporate systems, based in Los Angeles. Posted salary range: $157K-$195K/year.
Hired:
- Qualcomm has appointed Baaziz Achour as CTO of the Qualcomm Technologies subsidiary, where he will oversee the R&D and engineering organizations. He succeeds James Thompson, who will retire; both executive changes will be effective on Feb. 3. Achour has served as deputy CTO since 2023 and first joined the chip maker as a systems engineer in 1993.
- MetLife named Nick Nadgauda as EVP and CIO, effective March 10. He will be accountable for the life insurance company's application development, infrastructure, enterprise platforms, and architecture teams. Nadgauda joins MetLife from Citi, where he worked for 20 years in various leadership roles, most recently as a CIO for Citi's services business, overseeing a team of 15,000.
- Dutch Bros announced the appointment of Venki Krishnababu as chief technology and information officer, assuming the role at the drive-thru coffee chain this week after seven years with Lululemon Athletica, where he was CTO. Prior to Lululemon, Krishnababu was CTO of health insurance company Premera Blue Cross and held various leadership roles at retailer Nordstrom.
- LivePerson named Christopher Mina as chief technology and product officer, where he will oversee engineering and product operations at the provider of conversational AI software. Mina rejoins LivePerson, where he previously served as a VP of product and engineering, from telecommunications company Vonage, where he served as head of product.
- Xaira Therapeutics announced the appointment of Hetu Kamisetty as CTO, effective immediately, reporting to CEO Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Kamisetty is a co-founder of the AI drug discovery startup and as SVP, played a key role in scaling the business since its inception in 2023. He previously spent a decade at Meta, where he played a lead role in several AI initiatives, including the tech giant’s early efforts in generative AI.
- OneSpan has appointed Ashish Jain as CTO, leading the cybersecurity company’s global engineering operation and to oversee the development and delivery of products and services. Jain was most recently chief product officer at Arkose Labs, a fraud management and account security company. He was also head of identity at eBay.
- RegScale announced Devon Goforth as CTO, joining the software company from Google, where he led a field engineering team responsible for integrating cybersecurity firm Madiant’s Advantage platform into Google’s security operations portfolio.
- VIP Play named Fernando Daniel Goldstein as CTO, joining the online gambling operator to launch a new app in early 2025 in Tennessee and other U.S. markets. He was previously VP of engineering at financial services company Quenta and CTO of Earnity and Cred.
- Blue Eye appointed Corey Catten as CTO, effective Dec. 9, to oversee innovation and scale the video monitoring and security provider’s platform. Catten was previously a cofounder of Commerce Logic, a transportation analytics company, and was previously CTO at several organizations including PrePass and Zed Connect.
