Everyone welcome to the restless once I'm then Strickland. As always, my focus is on it flooring, the intersection of technology and business. By in conversations with the most forward thinking leaders throughout my career, I have covered everything from me. So parallel processing to advance robotics, but what truly spires me are the story: of innovation and transformation. Today I have the pleasure Speaking with some anthony go bully the chief digital and information officer at los samantha unease ground is in mathematics and engineering and we hit it off right away. I quickly learned about both her perspective on technological innovation and on business leadership when presented with challenge, Samantha Anthony, begins, exploring solutions through collaboration and thinking outside the law, all while maintaining an enthusiasm around her work in

honey has played a pivotal role in guiding decisions and strategies at los, as the company has embraced digital. seychelles to improve the experiences of customers, partners and associates alike, but before we dive into all the work she's doing at los. I wanted to take a look time to learn more about Samantha me herself, so montoni. Thank you so much for joining us on the restless ones. I'm extremely excited to have this conversation with you today, Jonathan great to be here. I am really looking forward to this conversation before we jump into the amazing work done over at los. I always like to get to know my guest a little bit better, I'm very curious how you first got interested in engineering and technology in I pink Jonathan I been. India ended my underground in india, and then I came here to do my graduate school and from the very beginning I feel like. I was interested in

et in science, and I wish I could come up with a much smarter reason, but I figured out that map problems, if you just saw them on a consistent basis. You didn't have to study to my just before they exams. If you do a bunch of mathematical problems than you are always before the past and you don't have to do anything special. On a more serious note, I think scientific experiments hangs on learning. I just feel like it interested me much more. When I will seize the more you do it the better you get at it, and then it becomes a beautiful virtuous cycle and that's all happened to me, Jonathan and by the time that I have completed my high school, I was very clear that I wanted to pursue engineering. My dad was engineer so I am sure that had a tremendous influence at great it resonates with me, because I often saw math is sort of like a series puzzles and solving puzzles, was something I always loved to do, and certain types of ethnic.

Economic tree, just saying to me and fish sang to me and it's because in maids Hence, and once you grasped it, everything starts to kind of fall into line, and I get a little hint of what it must. like to be an engineer, not that I would ever suggest as lofty. engineer but monti. You of course had lots of experience as both technical lead and an engineer. I'm curious how those experience says in those roles, shaped your approach to leadership. Yet I think the biggest thing that happened to me was even to this day

I truly appreciate what engineers do for us and not just engineers where'd you ex designers, data scientist, infrastructure engineers. I mean we could go on and on, but maybe because I did that work myself. I have a huge appreciation for how many dedication it needs. How much you how to keep yourself up with new technology, keep learning Jonathan. You said something which sought resonated with me: riches solving a puzzle night. So if you're a softer engine your writing gods and goddesses called on an everyday basis. Your solving puzzles continuously, and then there are many evenings. You go home and you haven't quite saw something at its bothering you and you when the next morning and they suddenly, you have a breakthrough and things change or night like something that seems completely unsolvable yesterday. Suddenly, today, you had a break.

so I just feel like living that life gimme tremendous appreciation for what our teams do and to this day when we are having a lifeboat discussions, though, that, actually, by the way, my best hours I tremendously enjoy working with the team psyche anytime, you good chance to Share ideas with people who might be looking at things from a slightly different perspective and perhaps see something that you missed to me. That's one of the great joys. I don't get frustrated that I missed it. I take joy that someone else saw something that just because the angle I was looking at, I could not see Jonathan one of the big things is every day. I realize that how much my team knows and how good they are at what they do and it's humbling it's just really awesome to be surrounded by such smack. People that fantastic, what actually brought you to lows. So I was working for another retailer. I was working for target when I got a call from the team. At los it was gonna, be a bigger

got suggest. To be really frank, I felt like I could have more impact I felt like I was ready and when I came and met with everybody, I lose my future cures and, of course, I met with Marvin ellison our seal What was very impressive, is forced to file. I filed lay glows had a tremendous scale also as I was listening, Everyone about the home, improve and business. I felt like back field, was ripe for omni channel retail lots of innovation, but here is the most important thing I felt like merwin was truly interested in transformation led by technology, and I felt like this happens very very dearly where the company of scale who wants to transform a seal whose empathetic and really invested in transformation, and then domain that is so problem rich. All these things don't come together. Often enough.

And I was really excited after listening to everybody, and I didn't want to pass up the chance, I'm really lucky. I got this job and I love it every day. It sounds like the perfect convergence. It does sound like the Here's dream come true of like we're going to give you the support. You need to be The change that we need in order to move into the next era of our? innovations, history. Out of curiosity, when you first meet someone, how do you actually describe what your job is to them? absolutely and Jonathan. That's a really good question. All of us want to describe our jobs in a way that everybody understands, and here is what I do billina everyday basis. My job is to make sure that our customers are able to buy everything. They want

however, whenever wherever they want to buy so whether they want to go to those dark com, they want to call our contacts and error. They want to come into our stores, they should get it really connected and a seamless expedients on the other side of the coin. What we are doing is for our associates some other you're working in a store behind a register or your receiving a truck in address, seeming doc or euro supply chain associated moving the product to our real house or you're sitting in our work. We call it s store support centre, which is basically a headquarter where you're sitting here Some financial analysis ideally want to make sure that our associates are able to have the best experience so that they can serve. Our customers said and he is about all the experiences and technology we design for our customers and associate. This is how it is my job and we are on a journey,

Become the most customer, centric omni channel retailer, and I feel like technology, plays a really important role in that I like that, the scheme- being able to do this, to provide this experience both to the customers for lows loses partners, as was the associates who work at los. It requires a better that we love to talk about on the show, which is, of course, connectivity. It is my firm belief that connectivity is the technology that enables so much more, innovation and while we can focus on the innovation- and we will talk about It- it never escapes me that that connectivity, peace is what makes it all support, so that we don't just have silos of data that do no good, because they're all independent little islands that never have

in connection with anything else. So can you tell me a bit about what it means to build a connected workforce at los, absolutely and Jonathan. Many sad home improvement is a problem rich space, that this field is right for omni channel experiences. I tell you what we mean and bad goes back to the connectivity you just brought up. So, for example, you wander change floors in your house, or you generally would do is, and there are some decisions which are almost family decisions, because these are big decisions. You're making not just for yourself were you're making it for their entire family. This is a floor. You're gonna live in every day. This is. think you're gonna make up every morning and take a look. You want to be part of it. You want to feel her.

About aid when you invite people- or you want them to feel good about what you have done. So there is a lot of paid in this project. So what you do gently is what we have seen with our customers. You start your journey online and you may ardor samples. You may look at different floors. Now we have introduced lots of feature swear. You take a picture of your home applauded then you try out

flourish online from our catalog and you may narrow down your choices and you may see these are the three or four things I liked, but then, generally what we have seen his customers then go to the store. Are they'll? Go with your contractor. We have this huge advantage of just the yearly experienced associates, and so when you go to the stores, you get tremendous amount of additional information and then what we have seen is generally then people sort of complete their transaction. They either complete their right there in the stores. Are they come back and do that back online? So that say, it needs to be very connected because if it was disconnected like, if you zero in on three floor online, but you go to the store and then nobody knows what you're talking about it won't work. So that is just a tremendous amount of information and connected ness that needs to go back and forth between the different channels. For appliances, for example, restarted two way: communication very

Keep you completely updated, but hey, reminding you Jonathan you're deliveries tomorrow. Are you still ready for it because plans change and then, even throughout the day, we would keep you updated. So I feel like Jonathan. Our customers are demanding it, more and more that it doesn't matter how they buy something, but they wanted all connected the want, similar and consistent expedience and wanted to be really a hassle free one type of experience when they are doing something so exciting in their life. May I have personal they had very many of the experiences that you have just mentioned, and I think that the connective that we have seen over the last several years, which enable that's where you have this real time inventory management system that can be reflected on the customer. facing side, that's transformative,

It removes so many pain points and frustrations as someone who's actually tackling a d. I why project, which can? As I am sure you are aware, some onto the it can sometimes be a little stressful. So to me, those are those connective points that are absolutely critical to having a good experience and is the one that keeps bringing you back to a specific business when that sort of representation of making use of data in a constructive way has a huge impact on the customer. Absolutely, and the other thing we have also seen is our customers and even associates want our experiences to be very context aware. So, exactly like you said what is available in the store near you What is right for you if you are living in miami as opposed to? Let's see Ben were right. The climate and the requirement of these places are very different. If you are living in a very tight urban location, no point

in showing you elaborate big patio said, maybe you're looking for a bistro table with a couple of chairs and maybe that sword we should show you whether you come online or whether you are coming in sight a store, and these are the context, rich experiences. now is the time to grow your capabilities. We t mobile for business. You get a five g network built for the way. This is intact, converged, so, whether you using a I to decode customers, autonomous robots, deliver flowers for smart shelves. manage inventoried you'll have the speed capacity and covered you need to take your business to the next level learn more a team. Dot com. Slash now Well, one of the other things we love to talk about on the show specific, It would be the use of wireless,

allergies like five g and wifi, six. very curious montoni. Do you see places where the retail sector, in particular can really leverage ease connectivity solutions, ones that have the high throughput and the low latency that we're seeing develop through these new wireless technologies. Yeah, of course, be a tremendous cons, worse of cloud, and we do have our own data centers, just given the complexity and the reach of laws, but then what we have done is across our more than seventeen hundred stores we have really created me. e r, a micro data centre in each of these stores said that we are closest to the customer. Read over, the customer is safe. You are online you're connecting through ploughed if you walk into the store you're connecting to a server which is in the store itself, and then, if you are sitting at one of our strong support,

anders, which is like a headquarter and you're. Let's say a merchandising analyst you're connecting to our data center severe trying to connect you to the closest location, and then everything you mentioned comes into the picture in a big way. For example, if you're in a store and your associate or a customer you're connected to the wifi you're connected to the server which is very close, and what we are doing is with our caching strategy and a pi eyes. We are making sure that the data is staged closest to where you are and we are trying to reduce communication across sites. So, for example, if you are in the story of trying to keep your communication within the stores as much as we can now, there are times when you are leaving

the store, your bits and bytes are leaving the stores going, someplace else collecting answers and coming back and you're absolutely right in those times what we do is use technologies such as five g, if you're a customer- and there are some calls of yours which are going outside of the stores- are- you are an associate and you're using a zebra device which is basically a smartphone device that we issue. Do all our associates do better, find anyone to relocations, police and ardor get something replenished answered. We are making use of wireless technology, sometimes we're using connectivity for tethered, sir worse, but we are making sure that the data and the answers I pleased clauses to wear the customers is my imagine. That also plays a huge part and logistics and things like supply chain as well, when you're looking at it from the back end, and now we ve had a lot of,

relations on the show about supply chain because, obviously, during the pandemic, that was first and foremost everyone's minds, as we saw all the choked points, and people suddenly realised what engineers had known for ages that the supply chain is a delicate stem and that realisation paired with our new capacity to collect, Analyze information means that the duration of leaders, are far more aware of the power of data and how you can use that information to have as little interruption and business as possible.

Did you lie and Jonathan I mean some of these things came to surface during covert when suddenly the demand for everything outstripped supply. Data to your point is really powerful and one of the biggest things the customers wanted to know is what is available near me in my store. So we had by that time, actually modernize some of our technology around inventory and inventory positioning. So we were able to expose that even before covered hitter, so that was good but be unleashed a lot of different experiences and We did. Was we literally curbside experience throughout the rule that out within six weeks in vain to really started making it more prominent as to what is available next to you, but to out covered and even before, covered? We continued our transformation and we actually double down

great for our customers, because they were relying on laws to find the things they needed to keep their homes working, and I think it truly showed that our team was super resilient in really difficult times and This segues really well into our next section where we were going to talk specifically about e commerce. I mean. Obviously E commerce became the dominant form of the way that customer interacted with businesses, particularly during the times of lockdown. Why can leaders in the retail sector due to sort anticipate enormous ships as what we ve seen with e commerce. What lessons have you learned that we think are valuable to your peers? I have always looked. I e commerce, as ideally important part of tartar retail equation, Everybody at LOS does so I don't think that was a big surprise. I think what college did was it just accelerated a train

which was already in motion, which is you lots of people who had never done online grocery shopping started doing that lots of people who had never part they could get something delivered. You know gesture and orders overall, digitization just breached epic proportions.

And- and I think some of those changes are permanent and what I mean by that is just your level of comfort and what we did was we looked at it and we said what does it mean to our customers and what would be most helpful. So, for example, we observed that virtual appointments people are getting really comfortable, just this new way of conversing, with each other through cameras into this new technology. People are really good with that, and so what we did was for some of our categories like kitchen design, your countertops and cabinets. What we do is we have a centralized selling team and you could go ahead and book. An appointment were truly an start talking to them. You'll still have people from laws come to your house and take some measurements, but because of their virtual appointment, that is happening even before people at last come into your house, you have

and a lot of homework we can actually do our own homework before we come to your house and then that way we can get everything done in one appointment and we are giving you all the information and we can always answer your questions later through a follow up, work, jewel appointment said these are some of the things we are noticing. People are much more comfortable, so what we have done is actually we have taken advantage of this. So the rating trends and brok even more innovative experiences to our customers and associates, while maxed up at an interesting question, because I think of lows as a truly enormous company, and often we can have a prejudice. On a normal companies and think of them as being unable to be nimble or dexterous win

missions change? So what do you think is the secret to leaders to being ready to respond to the next big thing? Jonathan, I think, first of all, irrespective of their size, we all need to operate as a or start up and at laws in technology, and otherwise we are always thinking about ourselves as a small company deity and not as this mega corporation that we are, and I think that fosters a sense of entrepreneurship and creativity and scrapping s- that's really needed to solve. Even though

these problems and we totally believe in what we call it as envy be minimum. Why will products we believe in iterative approach, so we would cut up, publish something in the market watch how it goes, keep it rating and perfecting a billy comes to a stage where it is ready for praying time and a national launch, and all these are signs off creatively. Thinking in smart themes and taking risks and giving licence for people do not get it for Beckley right. The first time. I think that city in a key jonathan, excellent, I'm also curious. Are there any emerging technologies that you are particularly interested in exploring? I mean obviously right now, the technology, that's all a buzz across multiple sectors as artificial intelligence, though I often find that people reduce that too

specific applications of ay as opposed to artificial intelligence as a whole, but other any that europe particularly excited about. Yes, absolutely envy and looking at cutler different technologies and real absolutely talk about a year before we going there you're looking at combination off, can we use? Atif if Id for anti theft, so, for example, anderson until you pay for your tool, it's not going to work, we call it project unlock. We are exploring that with lots of our vendor partners. We feel that that technology and laws was the first one to come up with. That is really promising. We are looking at a lot of these connect The technology is what happens in the stores and online and how do we connected? Lastly, AL also talk about e jonathan. You know before that data remains extremely important,

us, and how can you unlock more and more in sight for our associates, our customers in order to make sure that their shopping experiences really enjoyable? The goal is to put all the fun in the home improvement in and take all the fridge out, and that has been the really important guiding principle for us and then lastly, a I, we are absolutely looking at you. I, for example, when it comes to predicting demand. a chain level in store level, but then also predicting demand for how many salespeople I regard need on the floor. In certain hours on certain bees. We're doing all these predictions with ie by looking at store by store sales on an hour by hour basis and kind of predicting as to when are the electricians meaning most help when our poor plumbers coming into the stores asking for help? When is the right time to deploy all these associates so that we can give the best customer service do our customers? I think all this buzz about hiv singly, which has started,

is all because of chad, jpg and generating die, and we are looking at generating ii and we want to make sure that we come up with a use case. There is really helpful either for associate and customers, and we have some ideas about how to applaud items really quickly Can we help in a way so that some of the manual work, that is very true and very tedious, can be taken out? So I think we are again applying the same principles. How do you make sure there is a benefit for associates and customers, and how do we make sure we, the fun in the home improvement in and pay caught the friction,

I let her go. I had to ask some antoni one more thing: what does being a restless one being too you gonna know is funny you ask and when we are talking about this part cast as we the curious, because I loved the name, and I tell you why we practise this I'd lose every day. It seems like because we are on this deck transformation journey. Like I said, we are on this journey to become the most customer centric omni retailer and jonathan? Sometimes you feel like this is a tall I'm paying your climbing and when you reach the summit, you're gonna feel this just tremendous happiness but and we see another mountain and we feel a glow. I wonder more dizzy and ports there in that mountain and we start walking again.

And then meet each another place, and we are like ok, but I can see something else from here and it just feels like a continuous journey, as opposed to one glorious day when we feel tremendously all done and all buttoned up and frankly, I haven't had buddy and I am quite happy that I haven't had, but they because the journey continues, and I think restlessness is a really good thing in my mind you want to feel like there is more to learn more to do. Leadership itself is a restless journey you're. Never come to work and say I know everything there is to leadership. I think I got it. In fact. Every It is a little bit of like well, I know some things, but better. So many more things I don't know, and hence I feel the name of your part, is really how businesses and how technology is, and that is how everybody had lost. so the name resonates with us totally well. Some onto the. I could not ask for a better answer to that question

Thank you so much for joining our show and sharing your perspective. It has been a delightful conversation. Thank you so much janet and an it is great to talk to you. thanks again to surmount illegal bullet for joint as on the restless ones? I greatly in our conversation and getting to know some anthony's approach to leadership. The vanquished maintains her appreciation for each team at the company really shines through and using that paired with a dedication, exceeding customer expectations. Clearly aids or leadership style, and once again we see through connectivity, that businesses can achieve real results, whether it the better anticipate and meet customer needs, keep an eye on the ever changing conditions and supply chains or streamline workplace operations for associates connectivity is the glue that holds it altogether

I can't wait to see how lows incorporates innovative technologies in the not too distant future you for listening to this episode of the restless ones be sure to it, Aren't you hear more conversations with pioneers where at the intersection of technology and business and check out our past episodes for some incredible interviews? Will leaders across the spectrum of business from start ups to fortune five under companies until next time. I'm Jonathan Strickland now is the time to flexor footprint with t mobile for business and the nation's largest five g network inspiration? straight from virtually anywhere. So, whether you are in the office on the road or on your pc, not quite of you'll, be ready for the next big thing After all, geography doesn't limit your business. Your network should neither learn more.

t mobile dot com. Slash now.