A Brand Strategy for Productizing Innovation and Stepping Into Web 3 - Luca Dell'Orletta @Nestle'
I always say there are three ways which we can innovate. One is to win, one is to learn and one is to get noticed. I also, let me tell you this today, I wouldn't place web three on the to win for the Nestle group' but it's more to learn or to get noticed. My guest today is Luca Dell'Orletta, the global head of Tech Innovation for the Nestle Group. In this episode, we sit down with Luca and we discuss his personal framework to evaluate and experimenting with new technologies.
So basically it's focus, invest, connect, explore, learn, scale, and iterate luca offers a ton of valuable insights for everyone interested in the crossroad between technology and branding. So please enjoy this conversation with Luca Dell'Orletta. luca, welcome to the show, Thank you so much, Sara. Thank you so much. I'm super happy of being here today. and I'm super happy to have you. You've been in the Nestle group for quite some time now. Could you tell us about your journey, before arriving to the group and also like inside Nestle? Indeed. Thank you, Sarah, for the, for the opportunity. I think my career overall can
be divided in two big portions. The first one is about project management, business analysis, program announcement. A lot of that. I've been two or three companies before, uh, lending to Nestle. And then seven years ago, almost seven years ago,
I had the opportunity to, build, a mobile factory for the group for Nestle Group. So, leading the mobile space at that moment, there was an incredibly booming ecosystem of mobile applications and mobile experiences So from there I've been, then growing to the internet of space and more into the marketing business space. And then eventually, since today I'm heading IT innovation for the group. So technology innovation for the group. That's beautiful. So you mentioned, you're heading the innovation at Nestle, right?
What does innovation mean and how do you innovate a company that was born traditionally offline and serves clients uh, around the globe. in general. Nestle's been innovating for over 150 years. it's a company that has been uh, able to be very, very relevant for our customer consumers for so long. I love to describe innovation as solving problems that matters in a new way, which could be a new mindset, new perspective, new frameworks and new technologies. And usually we have the best um, experiences or best use cases where we are able to combine maybe a new mindset, a new framework with new technologies together.
And those are perfect ingredients to do something that really matter to our consumer, employees, customer businesses, and uh, and solving in a drastic different way, some of those opportunity challenges or problems that we see every day. And most recently, Nestle is stepping into the web3 s pace. How is Nestle leveraging web3 specifically? That's, that's a big question, Sarah. In general, let me allow me to tell you this,
a small disclaimer. Of course. We, we went through web one and then web two. We are been in the web for 10, 15 years. If we describe Web two as as an internet that is more centralized with. Big tech companies, social platforms that that own the space, and then consumer consuming experiences within those, those tech platforms.
Now, after one and two, usually three comesuh, but what three is exactly uh, it's yet to be discovered and yet a little bit under construction, I will say. And I truly believe that we'll see different paths, even different directions. We'll see the industry, the internet industry overall pivoting and finding its own way. I'm, I'm never a black and white person. It, it reminds me a little
bit when we were going from Waterfall to Agile. No. Where Waterfall was described as the evil and agile as the new Paradise. For me, Web3 is a little bit like that. Web two is not evil. Web3 is not paradise. But it's a lot about the gray aspects.
It's a lot about the different degrees. So I think we will love to find ways where the central model that is that has been in use for those 10, 15 years and the decentralized model of webrick can, can actually converge into something that is meaningful for our consumer, employees, customer businesses, et cetera. And I think in general for Nestle, if we believe that that paradigm is going to be right, interoperability, portability, and ownership of uh, of consumer data, et cetera, then we'll love to explore how this could impact an organization site like ours in uh, in the way we provide experiences to our customer, consumers, and employees, which are a fantastic. Community to be leveraged. That is always willing to contribute to the, to the greater good. And it's a fantastic also playground uh, for us to experience experiment web three activities.
Lots of things to, to unpack here, I agree with you. I'm very much of the same mindset that you need to strike a balance, between the internet that has been, you know in the past 15 years. And this is what also Poly Web is all about, right? Finding this kind of balance and the best of both Worlds, and you're quite a thinker also cuz you put out many thoughtful posts on, on LinkedIn, so like more in general. where is it that web two and web 3 can coexist? Meaning what is the best that you can take out of both? And specifically then, what is it that you can take of both into Nestle. I think in general, if we think about Web three within, with this new part, portability, interoperability ownership and rewarding on creativity, et cetera, there are two main use use cases where web three in the way we are thinking today could make more sense that Web two as it is, one, is when we think on those end-to-end process.
Where there are many players involved and you need to exchange data across the different players, and you need one source of the truth, eh, that's one aspect. So when you, when you have several players and you need to exchange data, and we can experience that in our everyday life with government institutions, third party certifiers, et cetera. And the, the second one is in those areas where there is a strong feeling of belonging.
So I will be tapping now into the term of community. We have seen this more and more, but when there are these two aspects, so exchange data with many players and community and strong sense of belonging, I think web three experiences are the right space uh, because it's, those kind of technologies can solve, well, these two aspects. So every use case that goes into that direction could be maybe best served with a web three approach. Outside that there could be still many opportunities, but I think the model that we have today is still working very well. And, and an evolution of web two in that sense uh, is possibly the most likely to happen. So I think we, what we are seeing today is we have use cases where web better and cases where an evolution web two, as it's today will serve better.
Eh, also when, when it comes to web three, there are some challenges that we're still facing. Like I mentioned, interoperability, portability, but that's not the case yet today. So if we build use cases or opportunities on top of those, of those opportunities uh, we might not fulfill the need of interoperability, portability, because basically the tech and ecosystems is not ready yet. So still I will see web two winning in that space and possibly we'll see an evolution of. 2.5 in in many aspects, and maybe
web three strongly entering in those two aspects that I just mentioned before. Yeah, that's certainly an interesting point of view. I think it also depends on the mission of. Company. There are certainly other aspects uh, you know, that other uh, entities companies can, can use of the web 3 space. But for Nestle in particular, how are you leveraging or you plan to leverage if it's not yet in place, right? That's also maybe something that we can dip, dive the aspects that you find most relevant I think in uh, in a company as big as Nestle, definitely tons of use cases we are exploring.
Uh, And just to be clear, I made Web three one of my focus areas when it comes to new transformational technologies along with next artificial intelligence. The advancement of ar XR vr. So augment reality, virtual reality, quantum computing uh, blockchain in general. Those are areas that I think for me are very transformational when it comes to technology. Uh, Specific to web three as I said, there are possibly two angles of looking at that.
One is the two supply chain manufacturing logistics, and that's possibly is the, is linking back to the first point I said where you, when you have many players, eh, contributing to an end-to-end process, imagine our farms, our logistic suppliers, our agriculture environment, et cetera governments and and third party bodies, certifiers, et cetera, they need to exchange data. That's a perfect use case for blockchain like capabilities. The second is when we have, as I said before, just to give some example brands that are very, very, Iconic and, and have a strong sense of community. Like Nespresso could be one. sparkling water could be another one, could be one in India, for instance, where you have consumer that are very attached to a specific brands and want to contribute to how that brand is, is also moving forward. Uh, That's another way of leveraging non fungible
tokens or digital assets uh, to deepen our relations with our customers and consumers. And that's areas we are exploring today in those specific iconic brands to, as I said, strengthed relation. Maybe provide experiences that that go, that are little bit extra if you own a specific digital asset or collectible, et cetera. And the third case is, is mostly in the imagine in the employees pay.
As I said before, employees are fantastic way. Of leveraging our community, Nestle, we have around 270,000 employees. And even for my own positions, we do a lot of open innovation or crowdsourcing innovation. So we, we go back to our employees to see how
they will go and innovate in certain problems or areas that we are trying to tackle today. And think on the power of 270,000 people that could leverage this decentralized ecosystem within a more central ecosystem, which is the brand itself, the company itself. And unlock the power of those individuals in a community like the do like approach with some logics that go through smart contracts, et cetera. When it comes to open innovation or crowdsourcing innovation, that's another area we're exploring today. It's very, very close to my heart cause it's also something that I do every day. And uh, I see an opportunity for leveraging web three in that space as well. So the enterprise space I think is something that we are.
Overlooking a little bit today, but we'll be very, very big in uh, three to four years from now. I, I agree with you and I certainly find it very, very fascinated as a space and definitely undervalued, or at least with a lot of um, still discovery to do and experimentation to do, because it's a lot about governance you know. yes.
Yeah. And experimenting with different models. I don't know. What's your take on that? I'm curious. Well, that's that's a difficult one. I will say today we need to, we can't think when it comes to web three, We should not be thinking with our mind uh, with our web to mind on, on how things were done before. That's that's my first advice to everyone. When also when it comes to cus customer intimacy uh, or leveraging the employees, as I said before, we need to change the, and go our new business models, which are regulat regulated in a different way, which will be giving different kind of benefits.
I always say there are three ways which we can, innovate. One is to win, one is to learn and one is to get noticed, eh, and for someone that is in my position heading technology innovation for the group, you need to be very clear if you're doing something for winning, for learning or for getting noticed, and there is nothing wrong on the three I also, let me tell you this today, I wouldn't place web three on the to win. For the Nestle group in the sense that it's a very shaky environment. It's unstable. We have seen tons of of announcements and episodes that have been happening in the crypto space, et cetera. But also, as
I said before, the interoperability, some of the challenges, the user experience is not there yet. So for us, web three is not yet to win, but it's more to learn or to get noticed. Could, could even be, and there are many things you are doing in the, to win sometime that you cannot even say to, to the outside. So you cannot get noticed on that. So there are some things we do to learn and some things we do to get noticed.
And it's very important that depending on why you're doing innovation, you act in a different way and you measure it in a different way. So also in terms of regulations, in terms of KPIs, in terms of measure of success, et cetera and I guess. Everyone needs to be very clear on where we are playing and why you're doing that. I love the direction of this conversation where it's going. Yeah. So lots to unpackwith this answer that you just gave so let's talk strategy,
when you leverage innovation is either to win, to learn or to get noticed, right? But what is the strategy that Nesta adopted when entering the web 3 space and how do you set this strategy, right? You mentioned that you're doing this to win, but what does it mean exactly, and how do you get the buy-in, because at your level, one of the most important thing is crafting the strategy and then getting the buy-in of the group to execute it, right? all, When it comes to the strategies or my actually very personal approach, I have a rule which I call FICELSI uh, reminds me of the Fibonacci mathematician and and that's a way for me can you repeat that? it FICELSI and I will now tell you what is this about. So basically it's focus, invest, connect, explore, learn, scale, and iterate. And this is a rule I apply for everything I do in innovation. Eh, first of all, I do select areas where I want to focus and that I believe are going to have an impact for the organization in the long run. As you say, you need to convince people. You need to let them see what we possibly don't see today. And we need to be very careful. And because when I'm going back to my organization to say,
we should focus on this, this, and this, I'm living out. Maybe 95% of the other things. So I need to be very, very good when it comes to understanding what could have a huge impact for Nestle and what could have an impact, but not necess necessarily that big for us as a group in the space where we, where we playing today. So first is focusing on understanding what are those areas I mentioned before next, artificial intelligence or, or quantum is very long run, but if, if quantum arrives and when it'll arrive, we'll change a lot of what we do in terms of, of crypto space, in terms of the algorithms that use processes, et cetera.
But in general, the first one is to identify three or four areas. What we do believe that the group should be focusing on when it comes to new technologies and information technology and web three is one of those. The second is invest. If you believe that is going to be big for your organization. You got to be bold. And that's uh, possibly one of the most difficult aspects. You got to be bold in all aspects. One, in, in the resources you're having, in the money you're putting on, in in the, in the exposure you're going to have, for instance, for the Web three or metaverse, I'm, I belong to maybe for is Metaverse standards Forum where I'm there to contribute more than to receive uh, because I also have a responsibility being in a brand such as Nestle to contribute to what's going next. What's, what's design when it comes to the future of our, of our internet, and then is going to be consumed by, by our consumers as well. After the investors, the connect is the
ability to connect the, the PE with the people you mentioned the builder were, which is, for me, super important. It's really with the people that is building, shaping the space right now. I remember I connected few months ago with the, with the developer that was building so smart con contracts in Laos and we had a three hours conversation on, on how he was experiencing the build of this uh, smart contracts in Ethereum, et cetera. Because I know that if I'm going to build a use case on top of those infrastructures, I need to understand exactly what's going on on those infrastructure, be beside doing that myself. And then when it comes to through strategy, say explore, do as many thing as you can and learn from it. In general, in, in areas such as web three, which are still unshaped,
I'm doing many things around 10 to 15 uh, different activities with different brands in different areas, categories, a bit in supply chain, a bit with employees, et cetera. And outta those, I would expect that maybe two will succeed. Two or three maybe. And that's my expectation. I will not assume that the 10 or the 15 will succeed. But it's a lot about setting the expectation, right? We are learning from
that. We're not doing that for winning. Uh, Otherwise we will take a different approach. We're learning from that. And maybe we are learning which use case we could then win as Nestle and as a group. And then as soon as we see something that is working,
we scaled. And then iterate of course, Thank you, Luca, for sharing your framework. I'm taking notes as well for myself, . It's, it's really fantastic. You mentioned that, at, at any given time, you're like, you have like 10 to 15 initiatives, that you're experimenting with going on at the same time. so my next question as a product manager myself, it's
how do you set up those experiments, in a way that it's rapid and cost efficient for the group. And the second question related to that, how do you know when and if you are successful? And therefore you pick those two big bets, that you say, okay, this is what I'm gonna streamline for the entire group. Indeed. Um, As I said, there are different measure of success uh, depending on why you're doing something. So if you're doing something to win, I'll give you an example. We have, we have just moved all our infrastructure to the
cloud. It's been. A big journey to cloud for the Nestle group. And we do that for, for winning, for any competitive advantage of leveraging cloud capabilities that will allow us to be more agile, more uh, more flexible and go at, at at faster speed that we manage it as a big program. And then you can imagine there is a business case behind, there is a return of investment. There are
weekly updates to the stakeholders, et cetera. That's one kinda activity that we have in big digital transformation that we need to make them happen to succeed and to stay relevant, eh, as Nestle, the explorations, we treat them in a very different way. First of all, Sarah, I'm not interested of receiving weekly updates on, on how an experiment is going. This is something I, I, I say to the team, eh, I don't need too much bureaucracy or admin or process. When it comes to experimentation uh, experimentation needs
to be very quick. Uh, The investment are relatively small, but are very distributed. So that uh, that we know that if it doesn't go well, it's okay. We knew that that was the amount of resources investment that we had done, and it simply didn't work out. Mentioning AI in ai, for instance, 70, 80% of the things you do don't succeed. Maybe the, the results is that the algorithm is not good enough or that maybe cannot be solved with ai, and that's fine. People in AI is used to those kind of uh, of KPIs and success rate in uh, in web three, I would say it's pretty much the same. Now, what we do at the end of every experimentation is our point
of view. That we provide them back to the to the organization, our technical point of view. So we, we might say this, we are tried onboarding with a small subset of employees in uh, metaverse slash NFTs experience, where they get rewarded if they take more learnings, et cetera. Eh, if that is working, we write down that for us, web three and Metaverse could be impactful in the employee engagement and onboarding space. And we will send that back to our HR organization as a suggestion, as a recommendation, maybe to have that within their programs for the next year. Actually, this is the case in our overall strategy.
We have, of course, and more, and. Willingness to experiment new ways of engaging with our employees, et cetera. So the feeling that's a win-win situation where we see a technology being at good of a, of a strategy, which called people 2025 strategy, eh, but in general, I would say those tech technical point of view are uh, a scale from one to 10 on how much we believe that could be impactful for the organization based on the outcome of that specific experiment. And then possibly that is going to be the basis for the next mass film uh, activity that will might set for, for the years to come.
This is quite ambitious, and frankly, quite complex. So they have having so many things going on at any given time, right? And, and I think it's many things going on, and you got to be surrounded by the right people. Uh, So people that are, that have an entrepreneurship uh, mindset. And you mentioned before you, you are a product person. You need to have product person as well in innovation. Uh, People that can combine the two sources.
One is the data they are getting. One is that they're feeling their. Feeling, oh, how this is going, where this could be. And there uh, this two component. One is the analytical, the scientist part of what every product will give you of every experimentation could give you the other one is your, having been in that field, in the innovation field for long, what would you say about it? What would you think? Sometime we are wrong, but in general, we tend to improve our own algorithms on understanding when something could have a huge impact for the organization when something is possibly going to have a huge impact for the world, but not ne necessarily for us. And then we let it go. Cause if something, I learned innovation that you go to be incredibly focused, incredibly focused. Otherwise you, you spread your efforts all over the places you go in
a fear of missing out mode. Which is happening every day based on what you see others doing. And and, and you don't get to make an impact anywhere cause you are trying to be everywhere. So being very, very focused and defining what your battles are going to be and what you want really to innovate And how do you define that? I totally agree with you, but since this space, there are so many things going on at the same time. So especially if you do innovation in general, of course. You have many technologies to choose from, first and many use cases to choose from first, right? That, that's the first thing. But let's say you isolate web 3, you know and everything that goes with web 3, you know that it's already huge, right? It can be, I don't know, tokenization. It can be the metaverse. It can be the blockchains in the blockchain for supply chain. You know, like many, many things, right?
So how do you focus and how do you choose what's your, even your personal framework, right? To choose which battle are you gonna pick and which one you are not for now usually when you do this for for living yesterday, I do, I do innovation for living since uh, since this year. And it's slightly different. Everyone does innovation as a role. Everyone has a, has ISS component of innovation that brings on tab when you do it for living. As you said, you got to be very, you got to have industrial ways of doing it, so you got to. Ways of that are very scientific on, on doing that, which is, which is a little bit difficult.
The way I do it is uh, is this one Sarah one From one side, I have all the research firms, the Gartner, the McKinsey, the Forester, and every single day I go through and I, we have Abbo rather on what's, what they say will be the next thing in general. And that's one input. The second input is what did we do in innovation over the past five, 10 years? Eh, allow me to give you an example today. If you are not good at doing customer intimacy with your CRM systems and the loyalty platforms, there is no reason to do that with Webstream. Technology is gonna, is not going. Help you in any way of doing that better If your processes of customer experience are not good enough today. If you are if the, the quality of your data is not good enough, leveraging ai,
AI today doesn't make too much sense. So one is research films. Two is what did we do the past 10 years and what's our level of maturity? If everyone says we should be doing connet factory next year. Are we sure that we have the, the proper networking in place, the proper cloud capacity in place, the proper device, the proper, proper internet of things in place.
So if we didn't do these four things, it's simply useless to go directly to connected factoring. So it's a lot depending on the maturity or where you stand. So based on what we have today and the things we do well today, is that the right thing to do? Eh, and the third thing is Sarah, our business priorities. Business priorities, of course, our, our, our North Star are uh, independent from the technology. And so we
also need to make sure that whatever we propose back to the stakeholders and to, to the board. It's to support those business priorities. We could find something that is very, very valuable and maybe could be even big for us, but is not necessarily attuned to the business priority.
And as I said before, focus is key. Uh, So we also need to make sure that whatever we propose, it's going to accelerate those business priorities that are a must win for the group. So if we take the research firms, what do we do? So our maturity uh, today and our business priorities, that will give us the train radiance for us to choose where we want to focus based on, on, on what the industry believes, what we did do, and what our boards and our priorities were. How do you know if your, your strategy was successful? Like, what is, what are the signal signals that you are looking, in the market or internally, if you're doing an internal initiative that signals to you, yes, we can continue, we can go this way, you know, and we can build on. I think it's many things. I think there is one component that is the technology. Which we explore
and try to understand how real one that could be for a group. For me, the, the signal that is the most impactful when it comes to this kind of technologies, when I start seeing business managers, brand peoples head of factories uh, which come with very powerful use cases that we had kind of anticipated, but that definitely those kind of technologies cooled in power or power. The more I see that, the more I realize that at scale we are doing that well, at least the path we should be going. Sometimes we could tech technology flavored people could be very excited about something and new technology even maybe blockchain, something. I'm really passionate about it. But then you discover that maybe from a business perspective there are
other, and maybe even better ways of solving that specific problems that leveraging a blockchain. Sometime I ask myself, Can this be done with a normal database and any other way of doing it? And, and today, reading no Rules, rules from uh, the Netflix story, which is a 300 pages book, which talks a lot about innovation and has no references to technologies. No. So in most of the cases um, what my question to myself, to my team, et cetera is, is technology today answering a concrete business problem in the best way possible? Or maybe it's a change of process. Maybe it's a change of framework. Maybe it's simply change of, of perspective and doing it differently. But in general, when we today, Sarah and I haven't experienced that in the past 10, 20 years as today, we're an incredibly convergence.
Artificial intelligence, evolution of networking, evolution of augment reality, virtual reality, reality, the blockchain convergence, all going toward the same direction. Something called maybe web three, maybe metaverse uh, or maybe the, the two of them, which is going to revolutionize the world. And on that, I'm pretty sure uh, the more I learn about it, the more I do things on it, the more I'm sure that we are in living incredible time because those were all fields that were going their direction. And going back to your question, the more I see people adopting and understanding the uh, the benefits of using maybe a more decentralized model that could be without even taking care of what's the technology behind? The more I understand we're doing the things right and and focusing a little bit less on technology and more on the experience that we provide to our employee, consumer, customer, and businesses.
That's true and like, continuing on this kind of direction, How can brands, born before the internet, how do you think they should rethink their business model? Because I think it's, it's about that actually, to, to take advantage of this increasingly digitalized World that probably is moving towards the metaverse. That's that's uh, in general a big question. Most of the brands today uh, need to ask themselves what is our role? If the word, if the digital world is going towards a more decentralized model, what are we going to do? Uh, Imagine a, a central bank uh, which is usually providing central services to its uh, customers and consumers. What's their role in that more decentralized model? Eh, I think it's more going back to, to our initial conversation is understanding in your process where you have those end to ends were required many players to contributing to. And where you have a strong community behind what you are doing. If you are fulfilling one of the two, then I think you should
be eligible for entering to the web three, even if your digital presence today is not that big. Going back to the example of the digital banks, if you ask for a mortgage today the, the process quite long, it took me months. And definitely yes, there is a central bank, but there are also tons of different players that contributing to that. And then even a central organizations, a bank, will think on how they could leverage web and blockchain capabilities to strengthen that relation and make it almost immediate to verify what is my account balance, my balance, my, my financial statement positions the, the capitals I have, et cetera. So shorten time to market for the services they provide. So still
within a central, if you wish body, but yet leveraging distributed capabilities I brands need to get used, have less control. Um, I'll give you an example. We are implementing, we are exploring meta mask and wallet in general for our experiences for our brands. But the first thing every brand manager wants to have when you have the, a user connecting through the wallet is their email address or phone number. We need the, the contacts, we need, the records in our databases, et cetera. We must move away from that thinking. It might be that in the future we don't have those kind of data or that those
kind of data is not our exclusive. Ownership, but it's may be distributed on a chain and the users, they will understand or they will opt in or opt out or make us see some of their data or not. And therefore we need to change our mind on that. And we need to be start getting ready
that that could happen and could actually be good for our consumer. But also for us, we need to think differently. And I don't have honestly the winning recipe, eh, today, but two things are for sure. One is there are people that is willing to contribute to the future. People is more and more looking after a sense of belonging and a sense of contribution on sustainability, on a better future in general. So we, brands must leverage that and and get the, that willingness on board and and and be enablers. More than a central body organizing or orchestrating being facilitators and, and enablers and I think it's, we, it'll require different thinking and everyone is in, in his own business needs to think who is my community and what's making my community complex user experience when it comes to consuming my products? Would that be simplified or could that be shortened? If I use some decentralized capability and the data is distributed, would that be a better experience for everyone, for me and for my consumer or customers? Those are the two questions that Web3, could nicely.
Yeah. And we need also, as you mentioned, to shift a little bit like our mindset, and maybe really the business model because Today, you mentioned the data. maybe one day we didn't ask anymore about emails and phone numbers, but until the internet, the main source of monetization of the internet is advertising, that maybe it's a bit difficult, but if you move to web 3 that is natively, you know, monetize, like the monetization is in the browser, right? Then you all of a sudden maybe you don't need these anymore. And then, these enable you, to build maybe, I don't know, more ethical products if you want. Right. And use other type of data, in a way that also, protect users et cetera. So I'm totally on board with that. You mentioned something that you're doing at Nestle, which I love. Which is communities,
What do you think is the role of communities and how are you planning to leverage that inside the Nestle group. In general community, as I said, are a group of people with, with strong sense of belonging and a willingness to contribute for the greater good in. we as Nestle, we have the uh, responsibility to put together a lot of communities. I said before maybe the the coffee makers with the, the plantations with the farmers, With the local logistic operators, et cetera. Each of them is a community. And therefore, going back to the question, how do the brand relate into that? Well, we could be the enabler of putting those communities together uh, looking at the greater good with data that is shared in in a way that is very transparent, available to everyone, and everyone can contribute uh, for something that is even a greater cost to the brands, but, but really for humanity. And that could be sustainability would be healthy et cetera, et cetera. So I think that's that's
something. That's the role of someone as big as Nestle with with these responsibilities. And then I will say we need to be good enough at Scott where we have those communities that those strong sense of, of of belonging where we already have huge memberships, for instance. With programs already in place that could get to the next level if we start leveraging uh, the new capabilities that Web three could, would actually give us. And the third one, and we
mentioned that this already, but it's the power of the enterprise uh, communities uh, we could even think on, on communities are cross industries which, which are consortium. Our community today memberships in general are communities today. Meet ups are communities. How do, how can we enable. That with usage of web three at a larger, greater scale those could be all very, very interesting for me to explore use cases. Absolutely. In your exploring , what are your main challenges and what do you think is
missing? Like for example, when you go to, your discovery and then you're trying to implement, some of these experiments like on a larger scale, what is the most difficult part and what do you think can simplify or could help you, I think the first overall is that web three today is still a promise. As we mentioned before, the interoperability, portability. Are not there. There are tons of different blockchains today. There are tons of different smart contracts, et cetera. But in general, even in the metaverse space, there are tons of different metaverse that don't talk very, very, very limited way. So today the big promise of interoperability, portability is yet not there. So if you try to do that at scale for Nestle and you try to apply it for all our categories as brands, market, et cetera, it simply won't work something we know. The second is that is very stable. Just
to give you a few example, it took me, when I started looking to blockchain, took me weeks to transfer my, my crypto from Coinbase wallet to to a meta mask wallet, which is a simple. Thing to do. Uh, But for the most, it's, it's very difficult. You go, you need to go through tutorials and YouTube videos, et cetera. You'll not expect that uh, something that has the ambition to go mainstream. So the user experience in general, when it comes to to this ecosystem needs to go hundred times better with respect to what today is.
Today is webre is mostly populated by very technical people and some consumers that are consuming web three activities, but it's still very, very limited when it comes to, if you look at the numbers when you say uh, how do you convince your organization if you really look into the number are very low. Uh, So if I just will focus on the numbers of adoption usage today, any CEO of this world will tell you is yet not relevant at all. Unless you are specifically in a niche. In that space. But for company like Nestle, many, many, many others the numbers are not that relevant. They will be possibly in the future. The third is that it's a very unstable, unregulated environment yet. So we have
a responsibility towards our consumer customer to serve them with the best possible experiences and to protect them. If we will build an experience out of a, of a blockchain that is unstable or using certain cryptos that will go bankrupt in uh, in a month from now, we have the responsibility. And today, these space is very green in the sense that uh, there is a lot of instability. Eh, I'll give you a few example. If you go into the land and you try to buy,
you will have to convert your uh, crypto from Possibly from material tomatic and then go back to Ethereum Beside the user experience, you don't even understand why you are losing money while you do that, because maybe you are paying for uh, gas fees, et cetera, but simply in four different transactions, there is something going on that is very technical and and you might not understand. We cannot expect our consumer to understand perfectly what's going, going on behind the scene. And I also seen that experience myself, small mistakes which made you lose your digital collectible, nft or even your wallet, the access to your wallet because maybe you have lost your, your recovery password, et cetera. These are silly things about, are extremely important when it comes to making field consumers in a proper way of, of using those experiences. And so it's super unha. So I would say user experience, stability, regulation. What happens if something happens?
I remember what, and, and you will remember for Sheara when there were these privacy concerns with Facebook mark Zuckerberg sitting in front of the court and, and answering the questions, there was one visible person in front of that court. This is web two. It's a central environment, but at the end of the story, you have a CEO response for that. Who will respond in the future if something goes wrong in the chain of a decentralized model, who will take the overall responsibility? How is this going to be regulated? Eh, so this is all questions that need to be sorted out, and we, as Nestle, as I said, participated to the standards forum and we want to contribute into that and play an active role and not just as a consumer role.
On what's going to be next. But we also know that when you change business model, when you change the paradigms of how the internet works, et cetera, there needs to be regulation. I've been in iot in internal of things in the early days and uh, I remember that connectivity with objects and privacy, et cetera, was not there yet. And it took us possibly five or six years to the ecosystem to get into a maturity model. And you feel protected when you connect to a connected device today.
And I think this is the same channel web three we have to go through during this four, five years. Absolutely. And those are great questions that still needs some thinking, needs some thinking before we can answer them properly. So keeping in mind that none of us has a crystal ball, like what do you think will the next 10, 15 years look like? And specifically, you know, how should the brands position themself from today to capture this, the upside of this possible future? First of all, I think. Something that worked for me is brands need to invest on understanding
what's going on. That's the first thing. When I, when I start with my journey in this, in this position, I immersed myself into the blockchain AI quantum world. I was already into those, but, but I really immersed myself to understand firsthand what was happening. I hired the people, eh, with the right skills to understand what was happening. The builders of this work to making sure that we know what's going on. If you don't know, it's incredibly tough to to be the owner of your uh, journey. Otherwise, you'll be
executing what the partners will be doing and the, and the technology ecosystem that surrounds you'll be doing, and you'll be just a receiver of that. But if you want to be in the front, And in the driving seat you need to understand very, very well, very well. When you understand you have a very good understanding of if investing is that when investing really massively is is the right moment, I would say. So first of all, understanding. Firsthand what's going on. The second is that I think now, as I said before, is that moment where those five six are coming together, ai, ar, vr, blockchain, web three metaverse are really coming, networking. We have huge advances in the networking space, which will allow more and more experiences coming together. In general, I think what we'll be seeing
in next year is a digital work where we will blend digital and and real activities together. My kid, he doesn't ask himself if he's online or offline. This is something, is our mind uh, because we have been in the real world for long and then we enter the, the digital world. But for, for the new generation, there is really no difference. The one is the extensions of the other, and they complement each others.
We need to realize that. So we need to provide experiences that are really seamless from the real versus the digital. Eh, the portability not just in the metaverse world, but portability in the real end. Digital words in and that's something we need to start thinking on is the same Luca talking with you is the same avatar that enters into a decent land or in a metaverse experience and buy something or uh, or as a certain experience, which we might not want to lose when we go back into the real uh, there will be more and more the connection between the two words more and more.
I'm a fair believer that AI is already changing a lot of what we'll be doing. So there will be more and more automation. And the next big thing I think is going to be augment reality. Apple is, is investing a lot on it, but I think. Out of the extent reality, virtual reality, possibly augment reality because it's an extension of, of the real world we are living, could be something really big.
And and I would agree with Tim Cook when he says that could be the next big thing. Especially in the, in, in our everyday experience, but also in the brick and mortar where you're able to to, to maybe go and shopping but have different experiences in a mented way. So I think we need to start thinking on how and when those five will mature and come together, what kind of other experiences we will provide to our consumers. Thank you Luca. We, we are approaching the end of the interview, so I wanted to thank you for, for being a guest here at Poly Web. I feel like I
learned a lot and I took so many notes, where you were talking also personally. So and I'm sure also earlier our audience uh, will learn a lot from your experience. But thank you so much, Sarah. It's been truly, truly great to be with you today and to talk about some of these topics that are really close to my heart. Beside I do them for a job that I, as a, as you can see, I'm very passionate about those and I, I try to help and contribute as much as I can. Cause I think it's about our future in, in general.
And thank you so much for giving. Sit in the space, in, in your event. Thank you so much. All right, Ben. see you everyone on the next episode. Bye. Touch out. That's all from today's episode. Thank you so much for watching or listening.
If you find this episode valuable, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel or to the Poly Web Podcast on Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app It will be fantastic if you could leave us a rating, a review, or a comment as this really helps other listeners find the show. All the resources mentioned in this episode will be linked in the description and in the show notes. See you on the next episode.
2023-02-07 02:56
