Home Depot’s Chief Information Officer on the Role of Tech Postpandemic

Fahim Siddiqui, the chief information officer of Home Depot, was in the trenches during the home-improvement retailer’s pandemic boom times. Amid lockdowns and social distancing, customers flocked to its stores—which were deemed essential services in many locations—and spent big to spruce up their homes.

Siddiqui was named Home Depot’s CIO in April 2022 after joining as senior vice president of information technology in 2018. Technology has kept the retailer’s operations afloat, he said, underscoring the criticality of early bets on cloud-computing, artificial intelligence, and mobile applications.

Now, as Americans curb their spending on home improvement, executives at the Atlanta-based retailer have warned that annual sales will fall for the first time since 2009. In May, the chain reported a 4.2% decline in revenue to $37.26 billion.

Siddiqui spoke with CIO Journal about how technology is vital to the retailer’s future as it aims to expand its base of professional customers, such as contractors and electricians, and take advantage of generative artificial intelligence.

A podcast of the full interview is available here. Edited excerpts are below:

WSJ: Walk us through a little bit of what happened during the pandemic, and how technology helped you get customers what they needed.

Siddiqui: Since we were open and our stores were open, we had to also invariably connect what traffic we saw in dot-com, to what we saw in supply chains, to what we saw in our stores. We did not have curbside delivery until then, and we went and built curbside delivery capabilities in a matter of days and deployed it to our stores.

Now, in theory, curbside delivery sounds pretty simple. I put an order in and somebody delivers that order to me. But in the back end, it’s complicated because you have to take the order, process the order, home it into the correct store, then create the work order within the store to pick up the appropriate order, stage it, and when the person does arrive, connect them again to have the associate deliver the order to that vehicle. 

You can see how many things have to possibly come together across a varied platform and multiple applications.

WSJ: How does the Home Depot mobile app drive what you learn about customers, and how you guide them to the right products?

Siddiqui: We look at the app as a competitive differentiator for us, and we provide specific journeys within that for our customers. If you look at the highest level, our DIY customers constitute half of our business, and our [professional] customers constitute half of our business. 

We have customized the actual user experience based on the needs of the DIY customer who might be more interested in browsing and searching.

I was showing the app to somebody and we were at a dinner table, which had a sunflower in the middle. So I took an image of the sunflower and the app went and found everything that looked like a sunflower from our inventory. Unfortunately, in this case, they were all plastic, but that’s what we sell in stores.

WSJ: How do you view technology’s role in supporting the health or continued growth of the business?

Siddiqui: Our growth story, first of all, really focuses on building the capabilities for complex order management, for trade credit, for delivery that will meet the needs of our [professionals] that are looking for a planned purchase event. 

Next, customer experience. We do the best job that we can on customer experience, but we also know there are so many more opportunities in the customer journey to take friction out and be the preferred provider. As of last year, we transitioned a hundred percent of appliance deliveries to our network [rather than outsourcing to external distribution centers]. Are we perfectly good and great at it? No. We believe we have opportunities just in that one instance.

We are continuing and we will continue to make appropriate technology investments. As we have shared, our target is to invest 2% of our capital into new capabilities, be it new stores, be it technology. 

WSJ: What are you personally excited about in retail technology?

Siddiqui: I’m very excited about the power of generative AI, and AI becoming a core part of our technology stacks, both in terms of browse, search, call centers, what associates have in their handhelds. So that they can anticipate, have the productivity, and really be supportive and helpful—be it the chatbot we write, be it the application, or the device that our associates have in their hands.

Write to Belle Lin at [email protected]