Anshu Bhardwaj hadn’t slept, both her phone and laptop needed a charge, and she had 10 minutes before her flight from Toronto to San Francisco. Then she received the call she’d been waiting for: The Salesforce-Walmart partnership could proceed.

Bhardwaj and her team had been working on a big-ticket deal with Salesforce to help commercialize Walmart’s tech and offer it as a paid business service (think: an early-stage version of something like Amazon fulfillment and delivery services). The talks had begun months earlier, but it was now June, and to Bhardwaj, progress had seemed to stall.

• The pre-flight phone call kicked off months of turning a “mental handshake” deal with Salesforce into a formal one: A contract that rolled Walmart’s tech tools for retailers into Salesforce’s suite of products, starting with Store Assist—which helps businesses turn store locations into fulfillment centers—and GoLocal, a tool for coordinating customer pickup and delivery.

Walmart’s purported goal: Become a services provider for other retailers. The companies announced the retail tech partnership last month, highlighting Walmart’s evolving business strategy.

“This one announcement is just one piece that’s enabling this much larger flywheel and much grander ambition,” Andrew Lipsman, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, told Tech Brew. “Ultimately, Walmart exists in a very thin-margin business: They’re a low-price leader in retail. The more that they become a services company, and the more of their revenue that comes from digital advertising, the more their bottom line pops.” Read the full story on Bhardwaj and Walmart’s plan to commercialize its tech.—HF

When you navigate to Serve Robotics’ website, it poses an interesting question: “Why deliver two-pound burritos in two-ton cars?”

After briefly wondering if burritos are actually that heavy, you may realize the answer to the actual question lies simply in the fact that there aren’t too many other delivery alternatives (and we all know the economics for rapid delivery aren’t great).

But a crop of companies believe they’ve cracked the code, offering what they say are cheaper, less labor-intensive, and more sustainable ways to complete local deliveries: robots. While Serve and Nuro’s deployments have been on a smaller, regional scale thus far, the companies are continuing to scale with new partners like 7-Eleven and Uber Eats, and hoping to break through this year.

Roll with it: Serve was started by Postmates in 2017, using data from the food-delivery company that found over half of deliveries covered less than a few miles and 90% were delivered in cars, “which is both not very sustainable, but also very expensive,” Serve Robotics CEO and co-founder Ali Kashani told us. Read the full delivery dive from Retail Brew here.—EC

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Emerging Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

We operate Newlab’s applied innovation ecosystem, pairing the resources and expertise of the private and public sectors with entrepreneurs and engineers developing transformative solutions to critical challenges across mobility, energy, and materials. Our underlying aim is to support the application and development of advanced technologies to solve our planet’s biggest challenges.

What emerging tech are you most optimistic about? And why?

Within 5G, I’m optimistic about the impact this technology can play in the world’s energy transition. Energy will soon be decentralized, making it necessary for utility and electrification infrastructure to be smarter and react quicker. While 5G will certainly usher in a fourth industrial revolution, it will also drive our ability to efficiently move electrons across a system, changing the way we operate grids, utilize renewable energy, and connect to vehicles that move people and goods.

What’s the best piece of tech-related media you’ve read/watched/listened to?

Azeem Azhar’s Exponential View is required consumption at Newlab. The podcasts, newsletters, and his book are all full of rich content with interesting points of view on how technology will impact the world.

Stat: Apple’s Services revenue—$79.4 billion in 2022, per Finbold—now exceeds the total revenue of legendary companies like Intel, Nike, and Boeing. Again, that’s *just* the revenue from its Services segment.

Quote: “I don’t care if you learn anything about wearable technology today…We are evaluating ChatGPT. Your goal is to identify whether the lesson is effective or ineffective.”—Marisa Shuman, an NYC high school teacher who encouraged her students to engage critically with a ChatGPT-generated lesson plan

Read: Seven big problems facing AI-powered search.

Digital transformation success: IT professionals know achieving this isn’t easy, but IT Brew has 5 tips to help you strategize.

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Catch up on the top Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Grammarly’s plans for the generative AI boom
• Why even John Deere is getting into the space race
• Amid wave of layoffs, some tech giants are elevating AI