Walmart improves services with the use of artificial intelligence
Walmart has been experimenting with artificial intelligence since 2019. For example, its Bentonville, Arkansas branch uses AI across its supply chain management and virtual shopping. Walmart AI plans to enhance GPT-4 with unique new features.
During an interview with VentureBeat, Walmart Global Tech’s vice president of emerging technology, Desirée Gosby, confirmed that plan.
As she said, generative AI, such as GPT-4, would “be as big as a shift as mobile, in terms of how our customers are going to expect to interact with us.”
“We’ve had a platform that has allowed teams across Walmart to build conversational experiences for about five years. We focus on building a natural language understanding capability that is retail-specific,” the VP added.
Having 240 million customers across 20 countries, Walmart has stayed ahead of the competition by adopting the latest technologies.
As a result of the rise of ChatGPT, Walmart has already begun to adapt to AI. Nearly two dozen Walmart AI experiences are being developed at the time of writing.
Desirée Gosby said, “We’ve had a platform that has allowed teams across Walmart to build conversational experiences for about five years.” Essentially, Walmart builds models on the foundation of large language models like GPT-4.
In turn, the retail firm uses its knowledge about products and customers. For example, the supermarket uses GPT-4 to improve services like Text to Shop.
By texting or speaking the name of the items, customers can add them to their online cart. The Sam’s Club membership program also helps Walmart AI improve.
Anshu Bhardwaj, Walmart’s senior vice president of tech strategy and commercialization, explained how the former collects massive amounts of data about members.
She told CNBC, “[Customers] are generating all these breadcrumbs about what they like and want, and that’s allowing us to make the shopping experience better.”
Sam’s Club achieves this goal by ensuring all desired items are always on shelves. It uses floor scrubbers to monitor every item in the store continuously.
They alert the stock room when a product runs out. “This is how we close the loop,” Bhardwaj said. As a result, Walmart’s employee productivity increased by 15%.
As a result of the use of artificial intelligence, Walmart has made its supply chain more efficient than ever. It directs the distribution of workflows to meet high demand, especially during the peak season.
Walmart AI allows the supermarket chain to anticipate emergencies. It uses data sets to anticipate stress points in order to adapt to sudden changes.
Walmart Global Tech’s Srini Venkatesan said the company used the technology to meet demand when Hurricane Ian devastated a distribution center, taking a node offline for seven days.
“Not only was a node offline, we also had a lot more demand because people shop a lot more after a weather event,” he said. Fortunately, AI helped Walmart reroute shipments to meet demand.
Walmart has been trying other LLMs besides GPT-4, according to Desirée Gosby. “The space is changing so rapidly. We don’t want to unnecessarily lock ourselves in,” she said.
She said the company is excited to use ChatGPT’s ability to “speak” to users for its services. “Having that foundation to be able to build on is very exciting,” Gosby said.
“It’s about putting those tools in the hands of the teams that are building these experiences. I don’t think it’s going to be a hard leap for our customers once they start to see what is possible,” the VP said.
The long-term goal of Walmart AI is to anticipate what customers want to buy using ChatGPT. She explained,
“If we know your son’s going off to camp this summer and that he has allergies, we can add these allergy medicines to your cart. Or here are the things we would recommend to prepare him for camp.”
