Walmart taps Google exec for elevated CTO/CDO role
Walmart has tapped current Google executive Suresh Kumar to lead its technology and business operations strategies in a newly elevated chief technology and chief development officer role, starting in July. The retailer's previous CTO Jeremy King left the company in March to join the leadership team at Pinterest.
In a memo, Walmart chief executive Doug McMillon said Kumar's experience in supply chain, advertising, cloud and machine learning will further the company's vision for merging tech and retail.
"As the Global CTO, Suresh will set our technical strategy, combining advances in computing with Walmart's strengths to deliver the best customer experiences," McMillon said. "As the Global CDO, he will lead the team in building tools and systems to digitally transform our business operations, using the scale and power of our data to deliver a competitive advantage while improving the productivity of our associates and their experience of being part of Walmart."
During his time at Google, Kumar has served as VP and GM of display, video, app ads and analytics. Prior to Google, he was the corporate vice president of Microsoft's cloud infrastructure and operations. Kumar also spent 15 years at Amazon in various leadership roles across technology, retail systems, supply chain and operations.
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