00:00 Speaker A
Longtime Best Buy CEO Corie Barry will step down as investors look to jump start a stock that has badly underperformed the S&P 500 during her tenure.
00:09 Speaker A
Despite a lot of good initiatives by her, I will say that.
00:12 Speaker A
In her place will be insider Jason Bonfig.
00:15 Speaker A
you’ve been covering this one for us and you’ve talked to Corie before. Uh, what’s your take on this one?
00:23 Speaker B
Caught up with both Corey and Jason this morning and I asked Corey, I said, why now? She’s been at the helm of the company since 2019.
00:30 Speaker B
Not really something that investors had been speculating, not really something that uh was on top of their minds, but certainly this announcement now, a six-month transition. Jason will officially take over at the end of the third quarter, so end of October.
00:41 Speaker B
But I asked her why now and this is what she said. She said the organization is at a moment in time where they have been resilient. They have gone through the pandemic, they have gone through facing President Trump’s tariffs. Now they’re in a moment of hopefully what will be growth in the next year.
00:54 Speaker B
One of those big reasons is AI is really starting to blend into the system. And on top of all that, Jason was behind some of the biggest growth drivers for the business right now. That’s their third-party online marketplace and also Best Buy ads.
01:06 Speaker B
And both of those are sort of critical, even though we’ve seen consumers pull back, those have contributed growth to the company. And so this is a critical moment in time for Jason to take the helm. He really needs to lead the company through how exactly they’re going to tackle AI moving forward.
01:17 Speaker B
You can get started in a simple way, but they’re betting big on AI right now, on how exactly it’s going to contribute to growth in the business, hoping that consumers over time, not like the pull forward that we saw during COVID, but slowly but surely leading to momentum within the business in the upcoming years.
01:33 Speaker B
He said specifically that this is creating a growth cycle for customers. He said when innovation is at its strongest, that bodes well for Best Buy, that bodes bodes well for Best Buy’s vendors, which Jason is known to have significant relationships with.
01:44 Speaker B
Also, Corey and him both bringing up the fact that this is going to develop new product categories. So think beyond just AI chips within computers, but also new categories like those meta glasses.
01:56 Speaker B
And on top of that, he also said that this will fundamentally change the way that consumers interact with the brand. They have partnerships with uh Chat GBT, Open, uh open AI, also, uh Google Gemini.
02:05 Speaker B
So this will fundamentally change the way that they interact with with partners, but I think that George does bring up a great point. This is a company that really does need to be price price point competitive with others like Walmart, like Amazon. They’re going to lose customers if they don’t present the best value. So how can AI also be used to definitely do some more price point comparison as well.
