Interview: David Walmsley, chief digital and technology officer, Pandora
David Walmsley, chief digital and technology officer at jewellery retailer Pandora, is reflecting on four years of sparkling progress. His team has built a platform for digital transformation. Now he’s eager to help push the business into new data-enabled areas.
“I was brought into Pandora to sort out e-commerce and digital, which is what I’d been doing in John Lewis and Marks & Spencer,” he says.
“I inherited a traditional IT function that relied on outsourcing and that didn’t have a great track record in delivering big programmes and change. That’s what I’ve been addressing during the past four years, and we’ve been having a lot of fun ever since.”
Walmsley describes a long list of projects that have been completed. However, the biggest shift is cultural. He’s insourced engineering and architecture capabilities and built a strong product management function. The overarching strategy is to ensure that people in technology focus on business outcomes.
“Yes, we’ve built some big stuff, but the bigger change is that we now concentrate on how we use technology to drive conversion, customer satisfaction, shelf-edge availability, manufacturing, and more,” he says.
“The approach is all about asking, ‘How do you drive the outcome and line the technology up behind that?’”
While the solution to the business challenge could involve implementing a big IT platform, the answer at other times might involve clever combinations of existing data and technology.
“So, we don’t exist to build big stuff, we exist to drive outcomes,” he says.
“And that’s the big achievement. While we have a strong internal technology team, we also have great partners. Our successes are not just about doing clever stuff ourselves and hoping we know best. Our partnerships with Salesforce, SAP and Microsoft have been part of the fuel that’s powered us forward.”
Developing a digital stack
When Walmsley last spoke with Computer Weekly, he discussed the importance of using agile-focused development techniques to create new experiences. That approach is still important to his team’s work at Pandora four years later, but with a twist.
Each business domain becomes a product line where stakeholders are integrated with digital and technology professionals in a team. This team runs quarterly planning meetings and establishes sprints and granular delivery points. However, Walmsley was keen to avoid stricter approaches, such as the scaled agile framework, that place tighter constraints on workflows.
“We don’t exist to build big stuff, we exist to drive outcomes. And that’s the big achievement. While we have a strong internal technology team, we also have great partners”
David Walmsley, Pandora
“We created this phrase, ‘Pandora, the agile way’. We wanted to create our flavour of agile. We do continuous improvement and development from the engineers’ desktops, and automation at scale. Our systems are, in the main, autonomous and loosely coupled. But then there are variations in between,” he says.
“Take the ERP programme with SAP. That’s a massive transformation. Yes, you can be iterative in certain areas during the work. But building an ERP system is at the other end of the spectrum. Yet across this spectrum, our digital stack is the most leading-edge I’ve had in my career. It would hold up against any major enterprise e-commerce stack.”
Pandora’s Digital Hub in Copenhagen plays a key part in this development process. Walmsley explained in 2021 how the hub was established during the coronavirus pandemic as a route to e-commerce innovation. The hub, which employed 120 people four years ago, is now home to over 300 IT, digital and data analytics professionals. Walmsley sets these developments within the context of the firm’s IT hiring decisions.
“We took an extra floor of the building, so that hub has been expanding over the last couple of years,” he says.
“We’ve also been building IT talent and knowledge. We use the phrase sustainable technology, which is about keeping a check on total headcounts and costs. That approach is important for how we frame technology’s contribution to the business.”
Building data foundations
Walmsley says his technology team’s work involves a mixture of legacy streamlining at the back end and pushing change at the front end.
“My opportunity as a digital leader is to drive the top line,” he says. “All the complexity is at the back end. I bias my days towards doing clever stuff at the front end. However, the back-end digital transformation, across areas like ERP and manufacturing technology, is critical.”
Walmsley is proud of the work his team has completed on the firm’s data foundations. These foundations will help Pandora embrace emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence (AI). As a member of the company’s executive team, Walmsley works with the senior leadership team to develop a platform for change.
“Our investment in data foundations is a fundamental multiplier to where we’re going next,” he says. “We’ve got three big bets in AI.”
Our investment in data foundations is a fundamental multiplier to where we’re going next. We’ve got three big bets in AI David Walmsley, Pandora
Those bets include working with Salesforce and its Agentforce product to develop agentic AI solutions for selling and service. Pandora is eight months into that relationship, and the technology already manages a significant chunk of online customer service requests.
The second big bet is product development. Here, the team explores how AI can help bring new products to market. Finally, the third bet is back-end automation across the organisation, using productivity-boosting technologies from providers such as Microsoft and SAP.
Walmsley says Pandora’s explorations leave him to conclude that successful exploitation of AI requires a targeted approach. CIOs can suffer from a fear of missing out when it comes to AI, especially when chief executives and other C-suite members pile on the pressure for innovation. Walmsley advises his peers to hold firm and focus on business outcomes.
“If you want to use AI, fine,” he says. “But in terms of the strategic bets, concentrate on your points of competitive advantage. Don’t get distracted. Keep your peers and your business leaders focused on how to apply AI to your points of strategic advantage.”
Honing the platform
As a key support for its digital transformation programme, Pandora is using Rise with SAP, with SAP S/4Hana Cloud as the core of Pandora’s new ERP system. Walmsley says the push behind the move to SAP was a desire for consolidation.
“We had five legacy ERPs we had to replace – if you need a new roof on the house, you pay a lot of money and you get a new roof,” he says.
“But we took the opportunity from the start of our digital transformation to think, ‘Okay, what makes a difference?’ And for me, the back end of the business drives the customer proposition.”
Walmsley says solid back-end infrastructure ensures Pandora gets the right product to the right place at the right time. This capability is a crucial differentiator in the digital marketplace, providing customers a clear sense of stock options and availability. The company also uses the SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud to plan orders and analyse scenarios.
“We have over 15,000 people who make our jewellery in Thailand, all on the payroll, all amazing people, and they were working on pen and paper,” he says.
“The digitisation of the back end gets light on the shop floor. ERP gives us a digital backbone. Then we’ve got discrete platforms, such as the merchandising and warehouse management systems.”
The SAP technology deployment began at the start of this year, and the pace continues to accelerate. Pandora ran a series of pilots with SAP and is creating three core ERP systems: one for selling and finance, one for distribution, and another for manufacturing.
Walmsley says the back-end infrastructure changes are transforming the working lives of thousands of people at the front end of the business. The manufacturing team can track and trace potential issues in real time, and the finance team is automating parts of the reporting process. The next stage will be to use this platform to exploit SAP’s AI features.
“Then you can layer AI, and particularly predictive AI, so that you can play different tunes,” he says. “You can ask questions like, ‘Do we want to make more margin here? Do we want to sell more volume there?’ You can drive the sales planning process in a very different way. This next stage is the exciting part for us.”
Refining the experience
Walmsley reflects on the progress made in automation and boosting the digital customer experience. Now he’s eager to embrace more emerging technology, including agentic AI.
“Over the next 24 months, I think the agentic piece on selling and service will come to the front and centre,” he says. “It’s early days, but my ambition is about more than having a chat box in the corner of the screen. Agentic will be the whole digital experience.”
The AI-enabled changes Walmsley envisages won’t be confined to customers. He says agents and other data-powered services will have a huge impact on employee experiences. What’s already clear, he suggests, is that the relationship between IT professionals and business users will transform as employees become more tech-savvy.
“The people who are going to thrive in this space in the future are people who can bring different tools to bear and build stuff in low code,” he says. “These power users will exploit the technology and data that we synthesise together and build their own things.”
Walmsley says the agile development journey undertaken by many organisations, including his own, is the groundwork for helping business users make IT decisions and build technology solutions. The rise of agentic AI will place more power into the hands of users, and he’s keen for Pandora to lead this charge.
“We’re there to give users the tools to make this change happen,” he says. “The fundamental contract between stakeholders and technology functions is going to shift very rapidly, and that’s the kind of colleague experience I want to support.”
Jonathan is a tech enthusiast and the mind behind Tech AI Verse. With a passion for artificial intelligence, consumer tech, and emerging innovations, he deliver clear, insightful content to keep readers informed. From cutting-edge gadgets to AI advancements and cryptocurrency trends, Jonathan breaks down complex topics to make technology accessible to all.
