News

A Case Study: How Walmart Labs Uses Beautiful.ai to Communicate Better

Diana Christine Bitting
 | 
July 23, 2019
 | 
8
 min read
A Case Study: How Walmart Labs Uses Beautiful.ai to Communicate BetterA Case Study: How Walmart Labs Uses Beautiful.ai to Communicate Better
Table of Contents
“The simplicity of Beautiful.ai was the biggest appeal to our organization. The tool makes it easy to design, so you save tons of time versus creating a presentation from scratch.” —Callie F., Senior Product Marketing Manager at Walmart Labs

Walmart Labs chooses a.i.-powered presentation software for better cross-functional communications

At Walmart Labs, every day is spent innovating. The over 600 employees at their Sunnyvale, CA headquarters are tasked with developing “industry-changing innovations to make in-store and online shopping a more seamless experience for millions of daily shoppers.” No small feat, seeing as how Walmart Ecommerce hosts over 350M monthly visits. 

Being a progressive, fast-paced, technology-driven company, Walmart Labs relies on constant communication and alignment between teams and departments in order to get more work done in less time. Thus, presentations are an everyday event. “Working at such a large organization, we need everyone to constantly understand what we’re doing, so everyone understands where we’re headed," says Callie F., a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Walmart Labs. "There’s a big need for regular internal presentations.”

To facilitate these communications, Walmart Labs started searching for software tools to add to their toolkit that would support their rapid growth. They discovered Beautiful.ai in the best way possible: a personal referral from an executive team member during a company retreat. “Every exec had to put together a ‘Department Update’ presentation,” Callie explains. “We don’t have internal design resources for internal communications, so everyone was on their own. One of the execs got up and presented, and his presentation looked way better than everyone else. We all thought he must have used a designer. Then we found out he was using Beautiful.ai.”

A mutual appreciation for good design and great technology that saves time

WalmartLabs were impressed with Beautiful.ai’s value propositions of “smart, simple and beautiful”—a mantra that hits close to home for a company that has always valued good design and great technology. Because Beautiful.ai’s “design a.i.” cuts presentation creation by 75%, managers and team leads can whip up a presentation in minutes, then devote their time to more important projects (like launching Strati, a revolutionary computing program that “automates workloads in mega cloud environments.”)

In addition to the automation features, the employees at Walmart Labs love Beautiful.ai’s easy cloud access, which avoids the clunky file-sharing process altogether. Being in the cloud also allows teams across the globe to collaborate on presentations in real-time. Which greatly benefits people like Callie, who is responsible for compiling all the content for executive-level meetings. “I don’t have time to sit there and layout each slide and collect information from 10 different sources for each presentation. So Beautiful.ai’s sharing capabilities were super helpful. Everyone could collaborate at once.”

Adaptive “smart slides” make meeting prep simple and fast

For fast-paced technology companies, internal meetings are the most important forum for aligning on objectives and getting things done quickly and efficiently. Weekly Team Syncs, monthly All Hands, Department Updates and daily Stand Ups are a part of every employees’ work day—and everyone relies on presentations to communicate their ideas. But managers and execs don’t want to waste a ton of time preparing for each meeting; they’re much more concerned with communicating their key points and inspiring their team to be more productive and make meaningful progress.

That’s why an “a.i.-powered presentation software” product like Beautiful.ai caught on quickly at Walmart Labs. The platform is super intuitive, so no onboarding or training was necessary. The entire company was able to up-level their presentations in minutes, not hours. “The simplicity of Beautiful.ai was the biggest appeal to our organization,” Callie says. “The tool makes it easy to design, so you save tons of time versus creating a presentation from scratch.”

Pre-set templates make it easy to guard the brand

Like many large organizations with multiple entities and departments, preserving the “brand” — or visual identity and quality of content — was challenging for WalmartLabs when it came to presentations.  But with Beautiful.ai’s built-in design “best practices” and customizable templates, Walmart Labs can now keep their brand guidelines protected at scale.

Many members of the marketing staff and human resources departments at Walmart Labs are relieved to know that they no longer have to worry about off-brand presentations leaking out into the world. “I like the brand guardrails,” says Callie. “It’s easy to create branded templates for senior management, and they can just drag-and-drop their content without messing with the layout or design.”

Before finding Beautiful.ai, the process of presentation creation was all over the place. “People were using Keynote, Powerpoint, you name it,” Callie says. “And everyone complained about the time it took to create a presentation from scratch. And it often ended up not looking good.” But in the past year, our presentation software has helped Walmart Labs remain agile, and communicate better, across the entire organization. We hope to grow with the Walmart Labs team, and aspire to “work beautiful” together in the future.

Read more customer success stories and case studies here.

Diana Christine Bitting

Diana Christine Bitting

Diana Christine Bitting is a content director, tech journalist and marketing strategist at Beautiful.ai.