Drone delivery will “be in most areas that we operate in,” Walmart senior vice president of transformation and innovation Greg Cathey said Tuesday. While Cathey did not provide a specific timeline, he made it clear that the retail giant is moving beyond small-scale tests.
“The regulatory environment is making it where this can be a viable business for us,” Cathey said onstage at the UP.Summit, in the city where Walmart is headquartered, Bentonville, Ark.
Walmart signaled its increasing commitment to drones in June, when it announced it would expand its partnership with Alphabet’s Wing to offer delivery across 100 of its stores in Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando, and Tampa. Onstage Tuesday, Cathey said, “100 stores is just the start,” and announced that Walmart would add another region to the mix: Northwest Arkansas, where it is headquartered, with a delivery operation at a Walmart across the street from the retailer’s old headquarters in Bentonville, as well as a location nearby in Rogers, Ark. While Cathey declined to provide a specific number of stores, he said that Walmart planned to add “a lot” and emphasized that drone delivery was a “key part” of the retailer’s last-mile delivery strategy.
Nevertheless, Walmart’s public plans offer a major early indication that—after a decade of drone development—some of America’s largest companies do finally see a clear business case and path to scale because of the evolving regulatory environment. Business viability has been one of the greatest barriers to scale and adoption over the past several years.
But it’s Alphabet’s Wing, which has emerged as an industry front-runner in the U.S., that Walmart has begun to work with to actually scale. Wing is one of a select few companies the FAA has allowed to conduct package delivery beyond visual line of sight in Dallas—meaning without human observers—as part of its efforts to develop new regulations and parameters specific to drones. Cathey spoke onstage with Wing CEO Adam Woodworth at the UP.Summit, discussing the plans to scale and the partnership. Zipline was not mentioned in the conversation.
Cathey pointed out onstage that Walmart had now surpassed 300,000 drone deliveries—double that of the 150,000 deliveries it had announced this past June. “We’re committed to this,” Cathey said.
