Part 2/12:
The speaker, who started his career in the mid-'90s, recalls working at Walmart on assortment planning, a problem that would later prove to be one of the most lucrative applications of data science. Back then, commercial tools like SAS and SPSS dominated the market, with enterprise licenses costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, creating a significant barrier to entry. Large companies like Walmart could afford to experiment with these tools, but widespread adoption was limited.