Hasta luego! Caroline Welsh departs Customer, Digital & Trading Board Director role at Brico Depôt Iberia

Caroline Welsh is stepping away from the role of Customer, Digital & Trading Board Director at Brico Depôt Iberia (part of Kingfisher Group).

In a LinkedIn post, she said: “A great leader tells us, "Done is better than perfect!" After seven incredible years at Kingfisher, it's time for me to step back, incredibly proud of what we've done and learning it’s OK to not be perfect.”

Welsh, who did not reveal her next job, added: “Working at Brico Depôt Iberia (Grupo Kingfisher) has been a privilege, and I cherish every moment spent with both my Iberia and Screwfix team.”

“Sandra Zárate, you embody the future of female leadership, and Juan Zapata San Martín, your guidance for the team is invaluable. Thank you to everyone who has made me a better person both personally and professionally. Farewell for now, hasta luego!”

Google Cloud

Google Cloud recently announced an AI focused partnership with Kingfisher, which also owns UK DIY brand, B&Q.

Athena, Kingfisher’s orchestration framework, now uses Google Cloud’s Vertex AI to make instant product recommendations, accurate predictions and demand forecasts. 

By leveraging Google Cloud technology, Athena is now able to:

• Combine the capabilities of Vertex AI Search with Kingfisher’s recommendation engine to help customers find the right tool for the job, in seconds. 

• Integrate LLM technology with Vertex AI Search to help streamline internal processes, such as answering employee queries. 

• Kingfisher developers can now experience the the flexibility of either building solutions from scratch or using an off-the-shelf solution, reducing development time from months to weeks.

In a blog post, Mohsen Ghasempour, Group AI Director, Kingfisher, said: “Under our banner brands, B&Q, Screwfix, Castorama, Brico Dépôt, and Koçtaş, we provide a wide range of products, services, and customer support to help professionals and consumers complete any home improvement project.”

“To do this, we use leading technology to provide a balance between speed and choice.”

“Professionals know what products they want, so our goal for those customers is to deliver those items as quickly as possible. For DIY consumers working on their own homes, it’s more about helping them make informed decisions.”

He added: “For years, we had been building various AI microservices to solve individual problems, such as product recommendations, churn prediction, demand forecasting, and more.”

“But the development times for each of these microservices slowed our time to market and made it difficult to scale up the number and complexity of these services.”

Kingfisher wanted a way to bring these AI solutions together easily, in a secure way, to build more sophisticated solutions, without having to build every service from scratch.

Enter Athena. Built on Google Cloud, this enables it to quickly build sophisticated generative AI solutions by automatically selecting the right microservice to answer a specific user query.

And because security is built into Athena’s processes, the platform improves the safety of the AI services it build.

Ghasempour commented: “With Athena, we have significantly reduced our development time. Services that would have taken months to build from scratch now take just a few weeks, reducing our time to market and allowing us to develop secure AI solutions at scale.”

Read the blog post in full here.