Seemantini has more than 25 years of global technology experience. Before joining Lowe’s, she served as senior vice president, digital and marketing technology at Target Corp., where she oversaw the company’s global e-commerce, enterprise marketing and loyalty technology strategy and operations. Prior to Target, Seemantini held multiple senior technology leadership roles at Sabre and Travelocity.
Seemantini earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering from the National Institute of Technology in Nagpur, India, and a master’s degree in computer science from Texas Tech University. In 2020, she was recognized by Industry Dive as the CIO of the Year and was selected to the Adweek 50 honoring the year’s standout leaders in media, marketing and tech. Additionally, in 2023 Seemantini was named CIO of the Year by Retail Info Systems and included on the Forbes CIO Next List.
Seemantini Godbole, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Lowe's. joins 'Forbes Talks' to discuss Lowe's cybersecurity concerns through gift cards and hacking, and why information science is so important to our economy.
0:00 Introduction
0:18 Cybersecurity And Anti-theft, What Are The Biggest Challenges?
4:33 ChatGPT: What Threat Does It Pose?
5:59 How Does One Prepare For A Cyberattack On A Company Scale?
10:15 What Is Lowe's Investing In: Tech wise
14:53 Lowe's Cybersecurity Environment
17:20 Seemantini's Background And Career
19:24 Tech Leadership: Who Is On The Radar?
Seemantini earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering from the National Institute of Technology in Nagpur, India, and a master’s degree in computer science from Texas Tech University. In 2020, she was recognized by Industry Dive as the CIO of the Year and was selected to the Adweek 50 honoring the year’s standout leaders in media, marketing and tech. Additionally, in 2023 Seemantini was named CIO of the Year by Retail Info Systems and included on the Forbes CIO Next List.
Seemantini Godbole, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Lowe's. joins 'Forbes Talks' to discuss Lowe's cybersecurity concerns through gift cards and hacking, and why information science is so important to our economy.
0:00 Introduction
0:18 Cybersecurity And Anti-theft, What Are The Biggest Challenges?
4:33 ChatGPT: What Threat Does It Pose?
5:59 How Does One Prepare For A Cyberattack On A Company Scale?
10:15 What Is Lowe's Investing In: Tech wise
14:53 Lowe's Cybersecurity Environment
17:20 Seemantini's Background And Career
19:24 Tech Leadership: Who Is On The Radar?
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TechTranscript
00:00 (upbeat music)
00:03 - Hi everybody, I'm Diane Brady.
00:04 I'm here with Simantini Godpoli,
00:07 who is the Chief Digital and Information Officer of Lowe's,
00:10 as well as Executive Vice President.
00:12 Simantini, good to see you.
00:14 - Great to be here, Diane.
00:17 Thank you for having me.
00:18 - I have to start first, great to see you.
00:21 But when I think about people in your role,
00:23 I think about, you know, having to be anti-theft,
00:26 cybersecurity, talent, all the issues
00:29 that must keep you up at night.
00:31 Maybe they don't, but tell me what the biggest challenges
00:35 are of your job.
00:37 - And you know, you're right.
00:39 I mean, as a Chief Digital and Information Officer,
00:41 there is a tremendous amount of product development we do
00:45 to bring great experiences to our customers and associates.
00:48 And that's just a delightful part of my job.
00:50 At the same time, you're absolutely right.
00:53 You do have to worry about cybersecurity, theft,
00:59 and both these issues, as you know,
01:01 across the retail industry,
01:03 and across overall all Fortune 500 companies.
01:08 This definitely, both of them are big issues.
01:11 And, you know, Diane, more than keeping me up at night,
01:16 you know, we have tremendously talented team,
01:19 and I think our goal is always to preparedness.
01:23 How do we make sure we are ready for the situation?
01:26 And how do we make sure that we build our technology
01:28 ground up in such a way that we can combat
01:31 some of these threats that we are talking about?
01:34 What keeps me up at night, frankly, Diane,
01:36 is not these specific problems,
01:38 but I always keep thinking about, you know,
01:42 making sure we are retaining the right talent.
01:45 Because if you retain the right talent,
01:46 engage the right talent, if they are really into lows
01:50 and engaged in lows, then I feel like there is no problem
01:53 big enough for us.
01:54 But that's really something that I keep thinking about.
01:56 - It's an excellent point.
01:58 I think talent is always the starting and end point
02:00 of all of these conversations.
02:02 But let me unpack, you know, we've had,
02:04 this is a year where we've seen incredible new tools
02:07 come into the consumer realm,
02:09 also, of course, into the business realm.
02:11 And I'm talking about generative AI,
02:13 but of course, many other tools as well.
02:16 How, what are you able to do now
02:19 that maybe was not possible a few years ago?
02:21 - Yeah, and Diane, I think that that's also,
02:27 you know, that's also a fantastic element of technology
02:30 that what was just not possible
02:32 like three or four years ago,
02:34 now suddenly is within reach, very much possible.
02:38 And that just opens up possibilities
02:40 of what we can do for our associates and customers.
02:42 That's the fun part.
02:44 And you're absolutely right.
02:45 I think even just five years ago,
02:47 I'll just walk through two or three technologies.
02:50 - Sure.
02:51 - You know, one of the things was migration to cloud
02:55 and API-based technology stacks
02:59 and having them integrated into a particular cloud provider.
03:03 That was a bit of a skill five years ago.
03:06 And it may be at different places,
03:09 but I'll tell you at Lowe's,
03:10 I think we are in a great position
03:13 when it comes to just having our workloads deployed,
03:17 whether it's cloud, our own data center,
03:19 back of every store, we have created a micro data center.
03:23 And how do we remove all this friction
03:25 from all our engineers to make sure
03:27 that they can deploy anywhere they want to.
03:30 And we have like really mastered that.
03:31 So I'm so happy to talk about that.
03:34 But the other technologies that you talked about,
03:37 we have more than 50 products
03:40 that deploy artificial intelligence
03:42 into production at scale.
03:44 So this is not experiments or proof of concept.
03:48 These are at scale solutions, you know.
03:52 And I feel like over the last five years
03:55 or even like last two to three years,
03:57 I'm seeing tremendous amount of development
04:00 where it's becoming easier.
04:03 And then leading up to that is generative AI,
04:05 which you just brought up, Diane.
04:07 And, you know, last November when ChatGPT came out,
04:11 I think it took the world by storm.
04:13 And we have been, you know, experimenting
04:16 and trying to figure out
04:17 as to what does this technology mean to us.
04:19 And I think it's fascinating.
04:21 I feel like we can open up avenues.
04:23 We are people first technology led company.
04:27 And I feel like we can really open up avenues
04:29 for both our customers and associates.
04:32 You know, Samantini, as you're talking about that
04:35 and the fact that we were wowed as consumers,
04:37 I've often wondered, were CIOs like yourself or CDIOs,
04:42 were you wowed as well by ChatGPT or did it really,
04:46 and I'm using that,
04:47 obviously that's one brand of generative AI.
04:51 Or was it just, did you see it coming?
04:55 I mean, give me some sense as to how transformative
04:58 it was in your own thinking about how you use these tools.
05:02 No, it absolutely wowed me.
05:03 I mean, you know, last November when we started all,
05:06 when it came out,
05:07 and I think I'll tell you what wowed me the most, Diane,
05:10 because we knew that all these things
05:12 were being worked upon and experimented
05:15 by really big technology companies.
05:17 I think one of the surprising thing was that,
05:20 and which happens in technology way too often,
05:23 so it should stop surprising us,
05:25 but it was an entrant like OpenAI,
05:28 who said, "Hey, we'll take a chance.
05:29 We will expose this service to our consumers
05:34 and see where it goes."
05:35 And we were all the beneficiaries of kind of working with it
05:38 and trying to get answers to various questions.
05:42 It wowed me many times about the questions I asked ChatGPT
05:45 and the answers I got.
05:46 I'll give you an example.
05:47 I asked ChatGPT, "When do I use the conventional type of AI?
05:52 And when do I use generative AI?"
05:54 And it gave a really nice balanced answer,
05:56 which was pretty cool.
05:58 So there are-
05:59 - What did it tell you?
06:01 Anything you gleaned advice-wise you can give to us?
06:04 - I think it was a really nice answer
06:08 if my board was to ask me or my boss were to ask me,
06:11 my CEO were to ask me.
06:13 I think it was a really nice answer for somebody
06:16 who probably knows AI and knows generative AI,
06:20 not at a great depth, but wants to get an answer.
06:23 I think that it was crafted very nicely.
06:26 And it said to the effect
06:28 that if you have just tremendous amount of data,
06:32 if you want to do natural language processing,
06:34 generative AI is a great solution for those problems.
06:38 But if you have limited data, lot of domain knowledge,
06:41 lot of business rules that are very, very crafted
06:44 for yourself or your own business,
06:47 then what it calls analytical AI,
06:51 or what we sometimes term it as the general conventional AI
06:55 is what you could use was the answer.
06:58 And I really liked that,
06:59 the way it had done classification
07:00 of when can you use generative AI
07:02 and when could we use analytical AI.
07:05 - It's interesting, as you're talking,
07:07 I'm thinking about the transition of the role itself,
07:10 to the extent where certainly when I talked to CIOs
07:14 several years ago, it was very much
07:15 and still is about cybersecurity.
07:18 A lot of what I started with the threats,
07:20 the threat and also the gatekeeper,
07:22 keeping, making sure that what's being used
07:26 and brought into your ecosystem is safe,
07:28 is efficient, et cetera.
07:31 Now it feels like a lot of the role very much
07:34 is also aligned with business development,
07:36 transformation being less about necessarily cutting jobs,
07:40 more about finding new opportunities.
07:43 That's my observation just from afar.
07:47 Tell me how you think the role has changed
07:49 for yourself and others.
07:50 - You know, Diane, and I am going back
07:54 a little bit in the history
07:55 and I'm dating myself by doing so,
07:58 but I'll tell you like even 15, 20 years ago,
08:00 I mean, CIOs generally used to be
08:03 somebody plucked out of another field
08:05 and appointed as a CIO.
08:07 Like, you could have had a financial background,
08:10 general management background,
08:12 you could be a MBA without any,
08:14 necessarily technology background.
08:18 And then you were put in these roles
08:20 because there were a lot of buying of the software,
08:23 making sure, technology was really more
08:27 like a enabling function
08:30 or a behind the scenes kind of background function.
08:35 And I think those roles at that time made sense.
08:39 There weren't many technologies available
08:41 in-house development was really expensive.
08:44 I mean, if you, Diane, I do remember in my early days,
08:49 like buying CDs from Microsoft,
08:51 paying for those and doing Visual C++ programming, right?
08:55 And everything was licensed.
08:56 There was no open source, there was no cloud.
08:59 And then lots of different things happened, Diane.
09:02 And one of the things that happened
09:04 is the amount of technology transformation
09:06 that happened in retail.
09:07 So Diane, I think for last 10 years or so,
09:10 what I'm observing is there has been a sea change,
09:13 not just in retail, but industries across,
09:16 where there's a realization
09:17 that you really need core skillset of technology
09:21 to manage the technology function
09:23 of a chief digital officer, chief information officer,
09:27 chief technology officer.
09:29 There are a couple of different titles.
09:31 And I feel like I don't necessarily look at my job
09:34 as a gatekeeper at all.
09:36 Though prioritization is really important
09:38 and you can't be doing everything for everybody.
09:40 And you need to be making sure that your investments
09:44 are deployed to right places.
09:46 But Diane, my job is really to grow the business of Lowe's.
09:49 I have the P&L responsibility for Lowes.com.
09:53 So I absolutely play that role for Lowes.com.
09:57 But for rest of Lowe's also, I look at my job
10:00 more about growing the business,
10:03 having just delightful, wonderful experiences
10:06 for our associates and customers,
10:08 removing all the friction and less about gatekeeping
10:11 or less about controlling.
10:14 - You talk about priorities.
10:16 Let's talk about some of those priorities right now
10:18 because life is about hard choices.
10:20 There's only so much money.
10:22 What are you prioritizing?
10:24 What are you doubling down on?
10:27 And what are you perhaps spending less on?
10:32 - Yeah, so Diane, we spend a really, really healthy amount
10:37 in Lowe's on technology because we just understand,
10:39 I mean, more than me, Marvin Ellison, our CEO, my boss,
10:43 is a true believer in technology,
10:45 has always said that, hey, all great retailers
10:48 have a few things in common.
10:50 And one of them, very important one, is technology.
10:53 So he, you know, I haven't had to convince Marvin
10:57 that, hey, you know, we should invest in technology.
10:59 He's the one who always says that we should invest
11:02 in technology and does so.
11:04 So we have been very fortunate at Lowe's
11:07 that we didn't have to convince anybody.
11:09 Having said that, any amount of money given to you
11:12 is always limited and you always have to make choices.
11:15 And with that, Diane, I think, you know,
11:19 we have structured ourselves in product teams
11:23 and we have structured ourselves around OKRs.
11:26 So every product team has something called
11:28 as objectives and key results.
11:31 And all the objectives and key results
11:34 are around associate or customer satisfaction.
11:37 So we measure it by, you know, there are various measures.
11:42 And we, you know, likelihood to recommend
11:45 is one of our big measures to measure
11:48 as to if you're doing the right things
11:49 for associates and customers.
11:51 And then, of course, there are goals around,
11:55 you know, number of unique users,
11:57 how often they come to Lowe's or Lowes.com,
12:02 you know, app downloads,
12:05 how are sales and margin objectives being met.
12:09 So these are all the objectives.
12:11 - So you're focused on basically enhancing
12:15 the customer experience right now
12:17 through these technologies.
12:19 Let's talk about some of the challenges.
12:21 Earlier this year, you talked about
12:24 how you're addressing the challenge of theft,
12:26 which perhaps is less,
12:28 I don't even know if it's less of a problem for Lowe's
12:30 and some of the, you know, drugstores, et cetera,
12:33 we've seen in the nation.
12:34 But what are the new tools there
12:37 and how are you trying to get out ahead
12:39 of especially organized retail theft?
12:41 - Yeah, so organized retail theft is really a problem, Diane.
12:46 I think at Lowe's, what we have done
12:48 is through our investment and we have just a tremendous team
12:51 which does a really nice job of making sure
12:54 that they are called asset protection.
12:57 And they do a really nice job of monitoring,
13:00 operating and making sure that they are, you know,
13:04 monitoring across our 1700 stores, also digital fraud.
13:09 And they make sure that it is a non-event
13:11 from a customer experience
13:13 or associate experience perspective.
13:15 But it is hard work, frankly, in today's environment.
13:18 And Diane, what we have done is,
13:20 it's kind of like combination
13:23 of people, process and technology.
13:26 Technology does play an important role
13:28 along with the asset protection team,
13:30 which is all about people and process.
13:32 And what we have done, Diane,
13:33 is a combination of technologies which are in store.
13:38 They are also looking at the order flow
13:40 and inspecting the order flow
13:42 from a digital fraud perspective.
13:45 But in store physical environment,
13:47 just making sure that we have, you know,
13:50 through visual means in our parking lots,
13:53 just enough intelligence to tell us if we have a situation,
13:57 which needs to be observed and controlled.
14:00 Controlling our associate and customer experience
14:03 is most important to us.
14:05 And that's what we are doing.
14:06 We also came up with something called as Project Unlock.
14:10 I'm not sure if you've heard about it, but-
14:11 - Yeah, I have.
14:12 - We are experimenting
14:15 and we are working with various of our partners
14:18 to see if we can, you know, implement a technology
14:22 which is RFID based.
14:26 And we are trying to figure out
14:28 if we can implement that technology
14:30 without taking away anything from customers or associates
14:34 and at the same time, deterring theft.
14:36 So this will be as simple as you have to pay for a tool
14:40 before you leave the store anyways.
14:42 You're used to it, you take it for granted.
14:45 So that process of scanning for payment
14:50 would make sure that your tool is unlocked
14:52 and you're able to use it.
14:53 - Almost like a phone or a gift card, right?
14:56 You can't use it unless it's been activated.
14:58 So now that I think that makes a lot of sense.
15:01 Let me ask a bit more about the cybersecurity environment
15:06 and less about maybe the specifics of Lowe's,
15:11 but also you've worked across
15:13 a number of different industries, companies.
15:16 What have you learned in terms of the advice
15:19 that you have right now?
15:20 Are there new threats that are emerging
15:22 or is it just really new tools for the same old threats?
15:26 - You know, Diane, I think first of all,
15:30 I'll just give you some background.
15:32 I mean, I think, you know, the technologies
15:34 which are so good for making sure
15:38 that we are giving a great associate
15:39 and customer experiences.
15:41 Those same technologies are available to bad actors
15:44 and they are using them to launch attacks.
15:47 So whether launching an attack
15:50 by using the power of any cloud, you know,
15:55 or for example, you know, anonymizing services.
15:59 So it's very difficult to tell
16:00 where the attack is coming from.
16:02 Or the fact is that with all this cryptocurrency,
16:06 nothing can be traced back to anybody
16:08 and that all this environment has, you know,
16:11 had, you know, all these technologies can be used
16:15 for the good, it can be used by the bad actors.
16:17 And that's what we are seeing.
16:19 On the other hand, though, I think, Diane, to your point,
16:24 you know, we have to continue to evolve
16:26 because bad actors in a very organized fashion
16:29 are continuing to evolve in technology,
16:32 in their maturity, in how to carry out these attacks.
16:36 So it is absolutely imperative for all Fortune 500
16:41 and all the corporations for that matter
16:44 to just be always in a state of readiness,
16:46 always continue to assess threat
16:48 and always be making sure that we have the right defenses
16:52 in order to make sure that we are, you know,
16:55 we are not taking away anything
16:56 from the customer and associate experiences.
16:59 You know, lately what we have seen is that
17:01 these actors have been deploying
17:05 a combination of tactics such as social engineering
17:09 plus the cyber attack and stuff.
17:10 So I think they are continuing to be creative
17:13 and I feel like the corporations
17:17 just continue to stay one step ahead of them.
17:20 - I wanna switch a bit to the personal to end off
17:23 in terms of your own career.
17:25 I don't know if what you wanted to be when you grew up,
17:29 when you went into college,
17:31 but here you are in a C-suite leadership position
17:34 at a global company.
17:36 Talk a little bit about what motivated you
17:40 in terms of what you studied
17:43 and what was formative along the way.
17:46 Let's start with what you wanted to be when you grew up.
17:49 - So Diane, I think I always loved math and science
17:54 and I think it's just,
17:56 I wish I could give you a really very nice answer,
18:00 but the fact is I just felt like
18:04 there was so much logic in math and science
18:06 that you didn't have to remember too much.
18:08 If you knew how to, it was like solving puzzles for me
18:12 and if you knew how to do it,
18:14 then you didn't have to stay up late into the night
18:17 trying to read up stuff right before your exam.
18:20 You could be out and about playing.
18:23 As a kid, I always did that
18:25 and still go ahead and do pretty well in all these subjects.
18:27 They just, I think they naturally came to me
18:30 and then I chose engineering as my profession.
18:34 I also feel like though these topics came naturally to me,
18:39 Diane, I mean, all of us know in all our professions
18:41 that you have to put in your 10,000 hours
18:44 and you have to.
18:45 So I've spent countless hours
18:48 trying to keep up with technology,
18:49 just making sure that I really understand
18:51 as technology advances.
18:54 And so it's been hard work as well.
18:56 I had never, if you had asked me 20, 25 years ago
19:00 that hey, do you want to become a CIO?
19:03 I don't think I had these fixed ideas,
19:05 but leadership is something that has always attracted me.
19:08 I felt like this is something
19:11 that you could never wake up in the morning and say,
19:13 I think I got it.
19:15 It's an evolving journey.
19:17 There is a new problem every day
19:19 and I think that fascinates me
19:21 and that brings me where I am today.
19:24 - Excellent.
19:25 Well, and obviously the impact you can have too.
19:27 Any advice to other leaders or even consumers
19:31 as we look into 2024,
19:34 what's on your radar you'd like to put on ours?
19:36 - Yeah, I think what my advice would be Diane
19:42 that the technologies that we are working with right now,
19:46 for example, even take generative AI as an example,
19:50 I think these technologies can be very powerful.
19:54 I also want to make sure that as leaders,
19:57 we don't die a death of thousand pilots.
20:01 What I mean to say is some of these technologies
20:04 are relatively easy to pilot
20:06 and then they get fairly complex
20:08 as you try to put something off scale in production.
20:11 And I feel like being aware of it from the very beginning
20:15 and just making sure that finally we are in the business
20:18 of bringing value to our customers and associates
20:21 and just focusing on that
20:22 and asking yourself that question every morning you wake up
20:26 is are you bringing value to your customers and associates
20:30 with new technology,
20:31 with these new experiments and explorations?
20:34 And as long as we keep that as a North star
20:36 that we are here to improve the experience for our teams,
20:40 for our customers, for our associates,
20:42 I feel like we could be on the right path
20:45 and making progress.
20:47 - Great advice, not just the tool,
20:48 but what the tool is being used for.
20:51 Thank you so much for joining us.
20:52 I look forward to continuing the conversation
20:55 and wish you a happy new year.
20:58 - You too, Diane, happy holidays.
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