Walmart's Mark Hardy - Scintilla, the Commerce Intelligence Platform

Mark (00:00)
I'm Mark Hardy, SVP and head of data ventures at Walmart. You're watching CPG guys.

PVSB (00:07)
Hello and welcome to the CPG Guys Podcast. I am your inconspicuous co-host, PVSB. I also serve as an adjunct professor at the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University. We're coming to you today from Northwest Arkansas at the 2026 Inspire event being produced by Walmart Data Ventures. My co-host, he is the father of pop stars, Rhea Raj and Katseye's Lara Raj. The fans, of course, refer to him as

Papa Raj, he is also the co-founder at Think Blue Consulting and a fellow academic at Cornell. Please join me in welcoming my BFF, the man known as Sri. Sri, day two of Inspire. How you doing?

Sri (00:47)
I'm doing Awesome. obviously it's been a great couple of days 'cause we're actually at Mark Hardy's event, the Walmart Data Ventures Inspire 2026 event. It's going great.

PVSB (00:57)
You know, Sri, you and I met thirty years ago working for an insight provider. So this is like our roots. This is our jam. So to be amongst all of these analytic types, it feels like we're coming home Homecoming indeed. It is homecoming, isn't it?

Sri (01:12)
Met a bunch of friends from a past life, met a bunch of friends from current life, and some new ones that'll be future life as well.

PVSB (01:19)
All right, before we get to our guest, I'll just make a mention to our audience. If you get value from these conversations we have a couple of times a week, just three things we want you to do. Number one, subscribe to the CPG guys on whatever platform you're listening to right now, Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon Music. Just hit that subscribe or follow button. That way you'll never miss it. Did you say

Sri (01:39)
Spotify as well.

PVSB (01:40)
Spotify too?

Sri (01:41)
Our benchmark is 37.4 million monthly subscribers, so we can catch up with Katseye.

PVSB (01:46)
that's that's a tall, tall ask, Sri. We'll work on it. We'll work on it. second, leave us a rating. it takes a few seconds and it makes an enormous difference in helping other CPG and retail media professionals find us. we built this community one listener at a time, and a five star rating is the single best way you can help us keep it growing. So Sri, when you want those really good fries, where do you go? Five Guys. You go to five guys. Pretty straightforward. And you want some really good rock music, who do you like to listen to?

Sri (02:13)
No, that's your band.

PVSB (02:14)
Five for fighting. Four for fighting. Five. So smash the five. We like the number five when you're giving us a rating. And third, follow us on LinkedIn between episodes. We're producing enormous amount of thought leadership, industry analysis, and content you're not going to find anywhere else. All built for CPG and retail, that you're already a part of this community. Search CPG Guys on LinkedIn or just click the hyperlink that are in the digital show notes of this episode. Subscribe, rate, follow.

Three things make the CPG guys happy. We try to make you happy too.

Now on to our guest. The year after Scintilla subscribers were shown to be outpacing non-subscribers on gross merchandise volume growth. Our dear friend Mark Hardy returns to talk through what's changed, the launch of Scintilla In-store for supplier field reps, the rollout of the AI-powered data companion, and where the Scintilla Insights model goes from here. It's a status check on the platform that keeps delivering on its promise to move faster from insight to action.

And look at what's next as Inspire itself keeps outgrowing its own stage. For the third year running, we're closing out Walmart Data Ventures Inspire event with the man who leads the team that built the whole thing from scratch. Mark Hardy is the senior vice president and head of Walmart Data Ventures, where he leads the team responsible for turning Walmart's first-party data, shopper behavior, digital landscapes, customer perception, and more into decisions that benefit suppliers, merchants, and ultimately the customer. Under Mark,

That ecosystem went from an aspiration a couple of years ago to the artist formerly known as Walmart Luminate to its current identity as Scintilla, now live across not only the US, but Mexico and Canada, and as of this year, extending into stores themselves through Scintilla In-Store. If you want the real story behind the AI, the data, the roadmap driving Walmart's Insight Strategy straight from the person running it, you want to hear from this guy.

Mark, welcome back to the CPG guide.

Mark (04:14)
Thanks for having me, Peter. Sri.

Sri (04:16)
Looking

forward to it.

PVSB (04:19)
I'm gonna suggest to our audience please toggle over to the digital liner notes of this episode. You're gonna find a link to Mark's LinkedIn profile and to Walmart Data Ventures website where you will be able to learn a little bit more as you listen to this conversation ensue. So I'm gonna get us started. Mark, I mentioned we're back at Inspire for another year. For those who may not be familiar, why don't you set the stage

What is Inspire? what do you hope it accomplishes? And ultimately what's different about this year than some of the prior years? Yeah.

Mark (04:54)
So Inspire is our annual conference where we bring together the Scintilla community. That community is suppliers, merchants, and other partners who have access to the Scintilla platform. The event really serves two purposes. First, we give our community a peek into where we're going, what's next, and what to expect. The other part of it is really bringing the community together so that they can share what they've been doing.

So that they can learn from each other on how to apply the insights to drive actions, to drive outcomes. Being able to share these case studies is what is helping the adoption of different data sets as we continue to add it. As you know, the Scintilla platform is very comprehensive. And therefore, being able to hear best practices always will inspire somebody.

to come up with a new way of approaching the same problem.

Sri (05:51)
Let me welcome you to the CPG guys. Always a pleasure to have you and have a conversation about data and insights. Peter and my kind of original training. We were here last year, and one of the things that stuck with us was your introduction of the actual Scintilla insights Model, which you kinda doubled down on this year as well. For our audience, could you remind everybody what that is and how you're thinking about that as you develop it out fully?

Mark (06:16)
Yeah. Launching data and tools to apply to the data is only part of the equation. If people don't know how to use that data, don't know how to interpret the data, it was just a tool. It's lost. There's no value that's gained from there. Because of the comprehensive nature of Scintilla, because it has data about the customer, meaning transactions, it allows you to do quantitative and qualitative studies.

With our Spark community. It includes the digital path of travel. It includes our supply chain and store information.

Historically, you would have subject matter experts, and you still do today. For example, a replenishment manager would jump into our channel performance module and be able to dig deep in terms of what is happening in our supply chain. But more and more the problems need a solution that looks broader than just one channel of data, one source of data. So we developed Scintilla Insights model to help educate, to help.

guide our users on how to connect the dots between all these sources of data. It starts and ends with the customer. So being able to understand what customer behavior or what customer mindset is driving the performance is critical. So the SIM model, simple. It starts with the mindsets that leads to behaviors that then leads to your sales performance. Driving for an outcome. An outcome might be optimizing shelf space.

or on shelf availability, launching a new product from a white space. So the range of these outcomes is pretty broad. And so we help our community understand how do you apply it, how do you connect the dots?

PVSB (08:12)
Mark, you mentioned in your keynote yesterday opening the show up that you had an open call to suppliers to actually submit for presenting case studies of how they'd use Scintilla to advance Walmart's business and how to help those brands grow their business. You had, I believe, 80 submissions and you chose twenty eight to present. We had the distinct pleasure of speaking with two of those suppliers before you came here.

One of them was Jurgens. We were really impressed with their entire story of how they attracted new consumers that were outside of the traditional brand franchise of a hundred and twenty-five year old brand. And it had such growth opportunity and outcome for the category and in turn for their brand. Can you

build upon how this Scintilla Insights model helps a brand like Jurgens find those opportunities and actually build a case for growing. and not only that, but finding that there are shoppers that they would like to reach and and helping them introduce a product that resonates with those shoppers.

Mark (09:28)
Yeah, that was an interesting case study because it's taking a century-old brand and making it relevant to Gen Z. That is a hard thing to do. Right. Basically become relevant to this new generation who never used your brand. Right. So what I thought was interesting about that and how they connected the dots is they started by looking at behaviors of customers in the category, being able to see who was lapsing

and what opportunities existed in terms of customers who were not buying them. They then used customer perception, which is our ability to engage our Spark community, which are verified Walmart shoppers, into a survey where they could listen to them and understand what were they looking for? What was the opportunity? And it helped them paint a picture of what that white space was and where they had to go.

They then were able to continue engaging that community in terms of being able to, as they were developing and refining their concepts, understand is this right, is this wrong, is this resonating? And it was great to see them at the end of the day come out with products and put it into distribution, both online and stores, that actually drove the category business, brought new shoppers into our category at Walmart, making

the category relevant to that Gen Z shopper at Walmart. So being able to use every single one of the Scintilla modules to weave that story, identify the opportunity, weave the story, and then launch it, that is why we've built Scintilla. And that was a great example of how to use it.

PVSB (11:08)
And to add upon that, Susan from Kao described for us the fact how incredibly impressive it was to be able to just simply identify shoppers based upon their behavior rather than run a successive series of surveys about stated behavior, not not necessarily actual behavior. You have in your DNA the same kind of roots that Sri and I do.

How big a deal is that for brands and for Walmart to be able to really get at the shoppers and know that that's how they behave, not how they say they'll behave.

Mark (11:47)
part of what we wanted to do is pursue quality. And as we all know, we in our industry, especially in the quantitative business, we have issues around fraud. Right? Whether it's bots, whether it's unverified people answering surveys. So when we built the Spark community, we built it in a way where these are verified customers who

Double opt in to participating and providing their voice. But at the same time, they give us permission to be able to look at their transaction history. That transaction history allows us now to be able to get away from using screeners and asking someone, did you ever buy this product? Do you use that product? They actually now can look at transaction history to see people who've lapsed, people who are increasing their purchases within the category.

switching patterns that have happened. So now we're actually talking to customers who we really care about and who we want. That's the big difference that she was referring to. Do you

Sri (12:49)
Do you think last last morning when you were presenting this, it sunk into the industry? What a big deal this is for the industry, 'cause traditionally, for decades they've relied on panel data that comes from syndicated data providers. You're talking about a Walmart survey capability with verified purchases that the screening homework is done.

Mark (13:16)
We've been talking about it for now years. It's not new for us. and I think it's starting to sink in that there's a huge difference. The quality of the data comes back, the reliability of the data is significantly different. So we've done side by side studies with other providers of survey responses panels, and you can see the difference in response and the quality of the data that comes back that allows you to make the right decision.

So yeah, we've been touting it. I think our suppliers were on the platform. The more they use it, the more ingrained they get to understanding this is quality data that we're putting on the table.

Sri (13:48)
This is huge, guys. speaking of huge, speaking of all the modules of Scintilla, you laid out a pretty big but clear vision for Scintilla yesterday morning, evolving from the Insights platform you built into what you actually called a commerce intelligence platform. Can you decompose and unpack that for audience?

Mark (14:09)
So in our case studies, what you're seeing today is very different than what we saw four years ago at the first Inspire. At the first Inspire, you would see our customers come in, our suppliers come in and talk about one data source, one application of data to solve one problem. As we transition to this year, and the case studies you've seen, they're intertwining all the different data to solve a problem. And so when we think about where we're going.

We had to say, okay, we have to get them to action. Cause insights without action is just interesting, right? Insights with action delivers results. So what we've done is for the last five years, we built Scintilla, focused on making sure that we had quality data, relevant data, and timely data. That foundation has been built. And we will continue adding data.

Right? As we move forward, and we will continue to make it more timely.

But now it means the next step. And the next step takes us to a commerce intelligence platform. So what does that mean? That means that it's going to be integrated, intelligent, and actionable. Integrated, all the data comes together regardless of source. Intelligence, we're applying AI to get insights faster. And then lastly, actionable, making sure that it's not just interesting.

We can help you understand how do you take an action that's going to provide a return.

PVSB (15:49)
I want to remind our audience that Sri and I are speaking with our friend Mark Hardy, the head of data ventures at Walmart. Mark, I want to double-click down on the integrated aspect that you just mentioned. Suppliers already have access to an enormous amount of data. In your estimation, what still needs to be connected and integrated to really drive the success and the opportunity to make really good decisions?

Mark (16:19)
Well, technically, I would just tell you that everything's integrated because all the data is in Scintilla. Okay. The problem is integrated behind one UI, but they're still separate modules. So we have to dig deep. A user has to dig deep to understand what is happening in their business. So I'll have to go into channel performance to understand what's happening at the store, what's happening in my supply chain. I have to dig deep into shopper behavior to understand.

What's happening with my customers? How are they changing their behavior over time? So each one of our modules provides in-depth perspective of what's happening in your business. The problem is it involves a lot of clicks to get to there. So if what we want to do is truly make this integrated, it's about making source of data irrelevant. Those modules will always exist because you're always going to have subject matter experts who want to dig deep.

But being able to bring all this data together into what we're calling boards, which we just launched, allows you now to integrate your customer data, your supply chain data, your digital data all in one place. So you go to a business overview board, for example, and you can see what is happening to your business with a complete view, making it easier for a user of our platform to go to one place and say, okay, now I know where to go dig down deeper to get more information.

Sri (17:46)
You know, sometimes I wish Peter I was still in the corporate America space just so I could use Scintilla after seeing the demo yesterday.

PVSB (17:53)
I I feel that. I feel like

Sri (17:55)
So

now I'm gonna go into the word of the air space. Can you guess what it is, Mark? AI. Correct. He nailed it. Insight Sky, of course he nailed it. You shared some exciting new AI capabilities yesterday. Sounds like Scintilla is getting a lot smarter and how it helps suppliers make sense of all this information. We saw a demo with AI output in it. What does the experience start to look like and what does the future hold with AI for Scintilla?

Mark (18:20)
Yeah, so Scintilla already has AI in it in certain areas. So under custom perception, we we can do surveys, qual quant work. We already utilize AI to surface the insights, to do summaries of the analytics so that makes it easier for our users to be able to get to the so what or what is happening, right? We also have Marty as our agent within Scintilla. And the initial use cases that we launched Marty with were really as a data companion

to our users. if they want to know where to find a metric, understand what that metric means, they can have a conversational experience with Marty to be able to dig into that. But where we're going is expanding the use cases Marty can help with, expanding how Marty can continue to go beyond a data companion into a true partner on the platform. So imagine being able to get on the platform.

look at your board and you see something happening with your sales. It's declining. And on the board, you start seeing that customers are defecting from your brand. And you see that they're either shopping it less or buying less on each purchase, for example. You could actually have a conversational experience with Marty and say, can you tell me why my sales are going down? When the it comes back

And we'll give you a full analysis. You can ask Marty to dig deeper into any one of the metrics or causes of that. You can then ask Marty to actually create an analysis and surface it to you in a board. You can then decide, hey, this is something I should keep track of, and ask Marty to now build a board for you that you can now have your KPIs associated to that and have it constantly being pushed to you.

Right. It changes the experience because what we're doing is taking the cognitive load off the user and using AI to be able to surface the problem, so the what, and then the why. So that now the user can actually make decisions faster.

Sri (20:31)
The only thing he's disappointed about is you didn't call it ask Peter.

PVSB (20:36)
I had to think about that for a while. I'm like, who's Marty? Marty. it's Wal Mart. Very interesting. By the way, Sri, I've are you glittering? I am glittering. Did you have a lotion burst from Jurgens before we started the show? Look at that. That's pretty nice, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, we're gonna take some of those home. Anyhow, all right, let's go to the third part because you just talked about the integration, you talked about the insights, and what I want to get at is

third piece, which is the actionable aspect, right? So Scintilla can do what you say, which is tell me what's happening, help me understand why it's happening. Close the loop for me. How does it get me closer to actually doing something about it, Mark? Yeah.

Mark (21:15)
So you have the integrated, which I talked about, source becomes irrelevant. You have the intelligent now powered by AI. So now that third step goes back to my comment. Insights, but no action, it's just interesting. So how do we at the end of the day help

The suppliers, the merchants, and our partners who are on our platform move insights to action fast.

The retail industry is moving at an incredible pace of change. And we're moving at that pace of change because customers are changing so quickly. So being able to get an insight and then go through the process of activating that insight, and if it takes days, weeks to actually come to that conclusion and then put it in in motion, your opportunity's over.

Whether it's the opportunity to fix something or an opportunity to deliver something new. Ultimately, what we're doing is we're not serving our customers properly. So, with a goal of serving our customers properly, when you are able to surface an insight, make a decision, we need to be able to action it. And the way that we are going to action it is by having interoperability between Scintilla and other Walmart systems, like Supplier One.

Like Scintilla in store, Walmart Connect Ad Center. How do we take those insights and then be able to have a decision port it over to the right system so that we can act upon it? That puts us having actions at the speed of the decision, And not having to wait for the insights to then delay a decision for action.

Sri (23:01)
Mark, I knew at some point you'd have Scintilla in store. That moment was clearly explained yesterday when you were up on stage, including demos, things of that nature. We had merchants talk about it and their love for it, which is fabulous. What changes for your supplier community and everyone using Scintilla when you bring this intelligence all the way to the sales floor where the action happens?

Mark (23:23)
So when when we started this journey, we looked at being able to get visibility both from the journey of a product from source to store and the journey of a customer from home to shelf, digital or physical. We were able to capture all this visibility and data together, and it was easier on the digital side because we can actually look at pre purchased behaviors. How did they get to us? What did they search for? What was our path of travel? What did they look at?

then we can actually understand where did they drop off, Where do they abandon the cart? Where did they convert? We don't have that visibility in the physical store. So we see Scintilla in store as becoming the systems of record for our field reps who go into the store. When I say field reps, it's third parties and our supplier reps who come into the stores. We have over four million field rep visits to our stores a year.

Sri (24:20)
Significant number of visits, four million, no joke. think of the amount of data that creates.

Mark (24:24)
Yeah. And that's how we're looking at it. It creates data that we can then utilize for visibility. But it also allows us now to integrate that data. And I go back to the first point about integration, integrate that data with all the other data that we have. So what we can then give back to that field rep when they're walking in our store is the opportunity to understand what they can execute in that store and dry the needle. So think about when a field rep goes into our store.

They spend a good part of their time trying to figure out what's out of stock, where is the inventory, and when they need approvals to take some actions, they now have to go look for a manager to be able to get approvals. So the way we look at Scintilla in store is being able to provide and surface that data to that rep when they walk in the store and customize, tailored down to that store and what has to happen. So when they walk in, it will know what priorities.

that they may have been given, but it will also surface what is the next best action that that rep could take in that specific store and have it quantified. Then they can check it off that it got done. It'll help them locate features quickly, right? With the feature locate. It'll help them be able to walk in to our back room and understand where is their inventory that they can pull out. It will give them visibility into inventory and where the products are and where the out of stocks occur as they walk in.

So what we do is we shrink that time that they're spending walking around trying to figure out the problem and we give them more time to fix the problem.

PVSB (26:03)
Mark, when we talked to you two years ago, the story was for a lot of suppliers, how did I do? Last year the story was what should I do?

Looking into 2027, what's the story?

Mark (26:18)
What's my next opportunity?

PVSB (26:21)
Where to go next?

Mark (26:22)
Where do I go next? we're providing all the data. Yeah. Data translates into insights. Yeah. Those insights now with AI help surface. What are the opportunities? What are the risks? So I think the focus as we continue to go forward is going to be where do I go next? And that now helps us at the end of the day get faster. Get faster.

being able to serve our customers better and that's the difference that Walmart will have.

PVSB (26:51)
Sri, another great conversation. What's your big takeaway from what Mark shared with us today?

Sri (26:57)
I can share several, but I'm gonna reflect back to Mark's opening on main stage yesterday at this event. He spoke for approximately 24 minutes. I actually timed it. And there was an image behind him for a majority of that conversation, one single image. And the image was the flywheel of what Cintilla enables from movement of the product once it arrives at a Walmart warehouse, the warehouse to the actual distribution network.

the distribution network to in store, we talked about Walmart in store, then into the cart, which Scintilla has had in its previous life as well, as Walmart Luminate. And then a very important new part through the survey, which is consumption and the consumer. I call that a full flywheel of the consumer, as well as from ship all the way to consumption. What a big deal. And the image stayed for the most part.

off his presentation which means this conviction behind enabling the full full flywheel. What was yours?

PVSB (27:59)
You for me, it was not something that Mark said, but my CPG background allowed me to connect the dots, particularly from putting that together with the conversation we had with Jurgens. Scintilla is such a powerful asset that it will not only help brands grow their business at Walmart and grow Walmart's business, it will help them invent new business.

New areas for their brand to grow in general story. Well

Sri (28:29)
What's next?

PVSB (28:30)
settings, that is what's next. It's not just what's next at Walmart. It's what's next for even a hundred and twenty-five year old brand. That is game changing. That's my big takeaway. Mark, we want to thank you for returning to the CPG Guys podcast for the third year. We're we're making a bit of a habit of this. That's OK with us.

we can't wait to see what you have in store for Inspire 2027. Thank you.

Mark (28:55)
Thank you for hosting me and thank you for coming back to inspire.

PVSB (28:59)
well that's it for today's show. If today's conversation sparks something for you, a new idea, maybe a fresh spark it we just got that. maybe a new idea, a fresh perspective, or just a reminder of why this industry is actually so worth showing up for every day. Share it, tag us, tell a colleague. the more voices we bring into this community, the sharper all of us get.

The over 47,000 followers on LinkedIn that trust us to inform, educate, and entertain you about our industry. Thank you for your trust and encouragement. Until next time, keep pushing the conversation forward. I am PVSB on behalf of my co-host, Papa Raj. This has been the CPG Guys Podcast. Goodbye.