Published on the 06/05/2026 | Written by Heather Wright
How Bunnings forced its digital pivot…
Bunnings’ online journey wasn’t born from disruption hype. It started with a deliberately uncomfortable deadline – 20,000 SKUs online by 2018 – and a leadership decision to move before the organisation felt ready.
At the time, Bunnings was still a bricks and mortar retail defined by the big green sheds, weekend sausages, paper catalogues and deeply ingrained operational rhythms. It had no website, recalls Mike Schneider, Bunnings Group managing director, in Boston Consulting Group’s Business & Beyond podcast. Internally, the organisation had wrestled with whether digital even belonged in the model. Its website, while popular with about 20 million hits, was effectively just a digital catalogue and the company wouldn’t enter eCommerce in Australia until 2018 with the launch of ‘Special Orders Online’. It would be 2020 before it launched eCommerce in New Zealand.
“We are incredibly underestimated in how good our technology is.”
Deadline over comfort
The turning point came not from the technology team, but through leadership pressure.
Schneider recalls telling the market Bunnings was going online before the organisation felt ready, effectively forcing teams to work backwards from a public commitment. “As a leader, you sort of try different things, and in the end, I just told the market we were going online and didn’t tell my team,” he told the podcast, acknowledging the company was late to the online party.
It was a move he’d seen his predecessor do in order to enter a category. It was also, he admits, a move that wasn’t particularly popular with his team.
In 2017, Bunnings – or more specifically, Schneider – announced that its extended ‘special orders’ range – around 20,000 SKUs – would be available online by February 2018. “It was a bit of an ‘oh hell’ moment for the team because they had to work out how they were going to do it,” Schneider admits. The experience was clunky, imperfect and uncomfortable, but it proved two things: Bunnings could move faster than it thought, and online wasn’t the enemy.
By November 2019, a full online platform was live in Australia – just in time for Covid. Had it not been, Schneider says the business would have been exposed. (And, in a mark of how far the company had come digitally, when lockdowns hit and customers were craving their Bunnings sausage sizzles, it set up mobile payments so customers could snag their snag, contactless.)
The underestimated tech engine
Schneider says Bunnings’ technology capability is far more advanced than it is commonly perceived to be. “We are incredibly underestimated in how good our technology is.”
“We’ve gone from that kid that can’t run fast to the kid that’s actually in the elite sports team, and I think that’s actually deeply underestimated by many, many people.”
While externally the retailer may still be seen through a physical-retail lens, internally in now runs a fast-growing digital marketplace, a ‘hugely successful’ retail media arm enabling suppliers to reach customer customers across its digital and physical channels, advanced property development and sourcing systems and increasingly sophisticated digital operations.
He credits the company’s first CIO, Leah Balter, who was recruited to the role in 2018, and current CIO Genevieve Elliott, for the tech success.
“[They are] both world-class executives who have, and continue to, transform the organisation to the point where partners like Google, with the agentic Gemini commerce platform, have looked to us to partner as one of the early adopters.”
The company showed off its Buddy AI-powered shopping assistant, built using Gemini Enterprise for CX, at Google Cloud Next 2026 last month. Customers can tell Buddy what they’re looking to do – build a deck for example – and Buddy recommends the necessary equipment from decking to tools, and links to Bunnings’ how-to videos. Photos, including of a broken part or a handwritten shopping list, can be uploaded with Buddy visually identifying and locating items required.
The assistant has been rolled out in Australia across both the website and app, and will be available in New Zealand ‘later this year’, Bunnings says.
It is, Bunnings says, part of the company’s ‘accelerated use of data and AI to improve customer experiences, streamline work for teams and support long-term growth’.
Schneider frames digital as a capability layer, rather than a shiny channel – something to augment stores, suppliers, sourcing and customer experience, rather than replace them.
The shift reflects how far the retailer believes it has moved from its early digital hesitation into enterprise-grade technology execution.
That technology depth isn’t limited to eCommerce or customer-facing platforms. Schneider points to systems, processes and measures across the business designed to ensure disciplined execution and governance as Bunnings has scaled its digital operations.
Alongside its broader digital build-out, Bunnings has also deployed facial recognition technology as part of its in-store security operations.
The new industrial revolution
Schneider compares the current moment to the industrial revolution, saying he believes ‘AI will do to our generation what the industrial revolution did’.
He says Bunnings and parent company Wesfarmers are thinking deeply about how to use AI ‘properly’ for better customer and team experience, with ‘wise’ allocation of capital – and with the systems, processes and measures to do so behind the scenes.
“But there are going to be people who are worse off in the short term if it is not used properly. Just simply, ‘thank you so much for your service, we’ve not got an agent doing the work’ – that is going to happen.
“We are going to need to reimagine jobs and careers.”
He urged leaders to be clear on purpose and direction to ensure they make good choices.
“I’m an eternal optimist that things just get better and this become an enormous enabler of growth, productivity and job and life satisfaction.”
Schneider says there’s plenty of ‘really deep strategic thinking, planning and high-quality execution’ going into the Bunnings business – often through a lens of being ‘pretty casual’.
“A lot of successful Bunnings’ leaders don’t take themselves too seriously – but they are deadly serious about the work they do,” he says.
That casual exterior can mask how deliberate the machine underneath really is. Marketplace expansion, category adjacencies, retail media growth and digital platforms are all driven by disciplined capital allocation, systems and measures designed to scale without breaking trust.
And as for Bunnings’ technology being underestimated? That suits Schneider just fine – he says being underestimated has always been his natural preference.
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