WASHINGTON — The economy is marked by two things, according to Best Buy CEO Corie Barry: a bifurcated consumer base and a resilient, value-focused customer.
Speaking Tuesday at Fortune’s “Most Powerful Women” conference in Washington, D.C., Barry described a resilient consumer “who continues to spend when they have a need or when there's really interesting innovation.”
For Best Buy, understanding this consumer behavior is critical — as customers serve as the basis for the electronics retailers’ decision-making, Barry said.
“How do we use all the tools at our disposal to help the customer?” Barry said. “And if you keep the customer at the center of every decision that you're trying to make, and then you trust people to go make good decisions across touch points, to use AI to measure whether or not those decisions are actually working … that's what creates a really resilient company that moves as fast as the customer and as technology.”
In this current moment, Best Buy’s job is to help consumers find the product that fulfills their need in a way that matches their budget, Barry said. That mission extends across the company’s bifurcated customer base, the holiday season and its use of AI.
Tariffs, rising prices and economic uncertainty have depressed consumer confidence and caused shoppers to shift their habits. But consumers aren’t a monolith — and spending is dependent on income.
“In our business, what we're trying to keep an eye on and then make sure we assort for is whatever your budget is, how can we make sure we have something that will cater to you so that the answer isn't, ‘No, I can't afford anything,’” Barry said.
Best Buy needs to provide products at an entry point price — something a child can use in high school, for example — as well as state of the art electronics for high-income earners, according to Barry.
“This bifurcation of how the customer is reacting and acting is one of the new challenges of retail,” Barry said. “The hardest part about being in retail right now is you need to meet every single individual's need across an amazing assortment, and you need to do it seamlessly across every channel.”
When it comes to automating certain tasks, Best Buy again looks to serve the customer first and foremost. Barry asks where the human element matters and decides where to double down on keeping an experience human-centered and where to automate those interactions with human-like generative AI responses.
This strategy is already at work. Best Buy has invested in specialized sales floor displays with dedicated employees and rolled out department-based training for associates. At the same time, the retailer updated its interactive voice response phone system with AI to better route customers to the right agent and is rolling out AI-powered search for customers and employees to produce fewer but higher-quality results.
