What a 16-Year Walmart Senior Vice President Wants CPG Teams to Know Right Now

We had the chance to sit down with Creighton Kiper, former Senior VP and General Merchandise Manager at Walmart, over breakfast in Bentonville. The conversation covered retail execution, distribution strategy, and where supplier teams need to focus as commerce continues to evolve.

A few things stood out.

Retail execution is still pass/fail, and the grading curve is gone.

Creighton was direct about something many teams have gotten comfortable ignoring: "When you think about it from a customer trying to order something on an app or walk into a store, it's either an A or it's an F." The tolerance for B-minus execution exists inside supplier organizations and agency decks, but not inside Walmart's buying offices. If your product isn't on the shelf or isn't findable online, the customer doesn't give partial credit.

For teams relying on lagging reports to catch execution gaps, this is the cost of ignorance in real time.

Stop counting stores. Start measuring catchment.

One of the most useful reframes Creighton offered was about how suppliers think about distribution. The question isn't, "Am I in 3,000 stores?" The question is, "Is my assortment placed in the network in such a way that I have 98% access to customers?"

And then: of that 98%, how much of it is positioned for one-hour or 30-minute delivery? As Creighton put it, conversion rates on products that can ship fast are "through the roof." Distribution strategy now centers on speed infrastructure as much as coverage.

Fill rate is the number that matters most right now.

The new CEO of Walmart U.S., John Furner, came from supply chain. He spent $15-16 billion a year making sure products flowed efficiently to stores. Creighton's read: "The backbone of getting a product to a customer in any type of format is did you fill the order or not?" If your fill rate isn't dialed in, everything downstream, including online availability, conversion, and traffic, falls apart before it starts.

Two forces are about to reshape how you go to market.

Creighton named continual merchandising and agentic commerce as the two things supplier teams need to be actively preparing for, not planning to study someday.

Continual merchandising means the Walmart mod cycle, the annual planning calendar most brands have built their innovation pipelines around, is giving way to a system that responds to real-time data signals. The question for supplier teams is whether their supply chains, trade strategies, and product pipelines can move at the speed the data demands.

Agentic commerce is the bigger disruption. When a customer asks an AI agent to recommend a pillow, it surfaces three products. Everything else is invisible. The priority is building the metadata, item setup, and brand memory that agents pull from when making recommendations. As Creighton put it, Amazon built affiliate link memory into Google over 15-20 years. "Now agentic is the next highway. Who's training the muscle memory inside of that?"

He gave a timeline: we're in a seven-year window, three years in. The muscle memory being built inside agentic systems right now will be much harder to change later.

What the best line review teams do differently.

For sales teams heading into line reviews, Creighton's advice was about showing up as a student, not a presenter. That means checking the app, visiting stores, and understanding the merchant's category strategy before you walk in. The goal is real dialogue, not a rehearsed talk track. "Selling is like only convincing someone to do something they already want to do." Come in as a steward of the business, not just an advocate for your SKUs. And if you're not leading with a digital mindset, including content quality scores, traffic plans, and conversion data, you're leaving your best material at home.

The bottom line.

The shift Creighton described is underway. The brands and teams that will win are the ones with real-time visibility into what's happening in stores and online, the ones testing their way into the new systems being built right now, and the ones showing up to every conversation armed with the data their retail partners actually care about.

Storesight exists to give CPG teams exactly that visibility. If you want to know what's happening in your stores right now, not next week: