From Journalism to Jeans: Levi Strauss & Co.’s Katia Walsh

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:01)
Many retailers are personalizing their product offerings, but few do it using AI projects inspired by employees with limited technical background. Join us when we talk with Katia Walsh, Chief Global Strategy and AI Officer at Levi Strauss & Co, about how the company's AI bootcamps upskill its workforce and inspire innovation.
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence in business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI. I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Information Systems at Boston College. I'm also the guest editor for the AI and Business Strategy Big Idea Program at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:42)
And I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, Senior Partner with BCG, and I co-lead BCG's AI practice in North America. And together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching AI for five years, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities across the organization and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:10)
Today, Shervin and I are excited to be talking with Katia Walsh, Chief Global Strategy and AI Officer at Levi Strauss & Co.
Katia, thanks for taking the time to talk with us. Welcome.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (1:19)
Yeah, thank you for joining, Katia.

**Katia Walsh** (1:21)
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:23)
Can you tell us about your current role? What are you doing for Levi Strauss now?

**Katia Walsh** (1:27)
I'm responsible for a fusion of strategy and artificial intelligence. And to tell you a little bit more about that, it's really building an integrated capability that connects emerging technologies, data and AI in one holistic capability in service of our strategic goals.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:47)
How long have you been doing that?

**Katia Walsh** (1:49)
I've been the Chief Strategy and AI Officer for Levi Strauss & Co. for the last two and a half years. I joined very, very soon before the pandemic began.
So it has been an induction by fire and it has been also a great opportunity to show the power of technology in times like this.

**Sam Ransbotham** (2:07)
Yeah, it's a great time and a challenging time, I'm sure.
So you didn't start off, though, in this role. Tell us what was happening before two and a half years ago. I believe you actually started as a journalist in Bulgaria, connected the dots between that and Levi Strauss.

**Katia Walsh** (2:25)
I did grow up in Communist Bulgaria at a time when Levi's signified so much more than fashion or clothing. It was really the flag of freedom. It was about independence and democracy and the unattainable.
And I did start as a journalist for one of the very few independent publications in the country.
And very early in my life, I learned the value and the power of information. And information is really data. Newspaper stories are data. There is a field now called data journalism. I didn't know that at the time. But I learned about the power of information and I developed a real passion for it.
And then I had the opportunity to come to the United States on a full scholarship and continue my education. And that was in the heyday of the internet. So that's when I developed my second passion for the power of technology to amplify the power of information or data. Then I continued my education. I got into academia and developed my third passion for machine learning and statistics. I'm not an engineer, I'm a statistician. But through my education in statistics and machine learning, I developed this third passion about the power of machine learning to help us drive desired outcomes.

**Sam Ransbotham** (3:42)
What are some of those outcomes you're trying to drive right now with Levi Strauss?

**Katia Walsh** (3:46)
This is an industry, whether it's apparel, or fashion, or retail in general, outside of the likes of Amazon. This industry has been quite analog, manual, imprecise, and traditionally not the best citizen of the planet.
So my mission at Levi's together with the teams which I partner and create and grow is to help the company become what used to be analog is now digital, what used to be manual is now automated, and what used to be intuitive is now precise. We're driving the full digital transformation of the enterprise, but also a disruption of the entire industry. This is the biggest thing to happen to this whole industry since the first industrial revolution.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (4:36)
That's really quite fascinating, Katia. Share a little bit more about some examples of that revolution that's happening in the industry, either at Levi's or whatever you're free to share or anything outside so that audience can have a better sense.