AI has changed what Walmart can do with search.
About a month after debuting the technology, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said the company was already seeing results. McMillon said during a February earnings call that “help me buy a Valentine’s Day gift” was one of the most popular searches that month. “And rather than searching separately for things like chocolates, a car, jewelry, flowers, the search returns a list of results that are relevant and curated,” McMillon said.
The retailer began deploying generative artificial intelligence late last year to answer customers’ mission-based searches and empower frontline employees with information that enables them to serve customers better and in real time.
Generative AI can make connections and serve results to customers with context and personalization, Jon Alferness, chief product officer for Walmart U.S., told Retail Dive in an interview. The technology can also help customers identify what they want to buy and discover new products. Alferness said the company’s data backs up why advancing the implementation of generative AI-powered search is important.
Customers regularly ask mission-based shopping questions, Alferness said. Before integrating AI into search, “the answers that we were giving our customers were OK but not great,” he said.
That is changing.
Empowering associates with AI
Alferness said Walmart has also deployed generative AI to empower its associates with more information that can help them better serve customers. The technology serves as a cheat sheet for customer interactions by bringing all the tools an employee might use under a single umbrella to offer contextualized answers to customers’ product questions.
For example, Alferness said, a customer might come to a store and ask an associate for help searching the aisles for a specific toy tied to a TV show or a movie but they can’t remember anything – the show, the movie or the character’s name. But AI can help find what a customer wants.
“We don’t want our customers to have to think about the complexity behind the scenes,” said Alferness, whose past experiences include multiple roles at Google. “I think the magic of all of this is done really well when it is natural, fluid, frictionless.”
Associates can also use AI to get an answer if a product isn’t on the shelf. Within moments, they can find out if the supplier is out of inventory, if the product is on its way to a store on a truck, or even the approximate time it’ll get moved from the truck to the backroom and then a shelf on the sales floor. Connecting all those dots requires the power of AI.
Walmart said its generative AI technology analyzes customer intent based on query, session and engagement. It then uses that information to create a holistic product offering in categories to serve results that cover a customer’s needs without overlaps or gaps.
“The technology goes beyond the typical word matching and can detect much more complex relationships and connections,” Tom Taulli, the author of “Generative AI: How ChatGPT and Other AI Tools Will Revolutionize Business,” told Retail Dive in an email. “This is mapped to natural language prompts. In other words, this is a much better search experience.”
Walmart’s deployment of the technology could be a template for the future of retail, Taulli said.
“Generative AI is a transformative technology,” Taulli said. “Millions of people have seen the power of ChatGPT – and this has raised the bar for AI applications,” Taulli said. “For companies to remain relevant, they will need to adopt these powerful technologies.”
Generative AI in retail still early stage
Just 4% of retail leaders said AI isn’t an important consideration, according to a recent survey of 1,100 retail industry decision makers by Algolia and Coleman Parkes Research. Another recent survey by Adobe found that 58% of respondents said generative AI improved their online shopping experience. Half of those surveyed said they’d use the technology to help them buy clothes.
“In many respects, Gen AI is already an essential part of advanced retail strategies,” Bernard Marr, a generative AI expert and author, told Retail Dive in an email. “It integrates various data points — from browsing habits to purchase history and even real-time behavior — to deliver a cohesive and customized shopping journey. As retail continues to evolve, the adoption of such technologies will become not just advantageous but necessary for staying competitive and meeting the increasingly sophisticated expectations of consumers.”
Taulli said retailers and customers alike benefit from generative AI’s rising implementation.
“One natural language prompt can instruct the generative AI to create a plan that is personalized and based on certain constraints, like costs,” Taulli said.
However, Taulli said generative AI’s use in retail is still in the early stages and it will likely be a few years before it’s a core part of the industry’s overall omnichannel strategy. One reason: deploying generative AI models based on a company’s proprietary dataset is still a complicated task.
Generative AI is part of ‘what customers expect’ for the future of retail
During the February earnings call, McMillon said Walmart is “very excited about generative AI,” and sees “big opportunities” to improve experiences for customers and associates, boost productivity and reduce costs for the business.
Walmart is far from alone in pursuing AI initiatives. Best Buy announced last month that it’s partnering with Google Cloud to introduce a virtual assistant and AI-enhanced customer support. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in April that the company plans to deepen its investments in generative AI and views the technology as a foundational element of better customer experiences.
Additionally, generative AI’s power to bridge the gap between online and in-store experiences is a key reason the technology “is becoming an essential component of omnichannel retail strategies,” Marr said. “It bridges the gap between online and in-store experiences, ensuring that customer interactions are seamless, personalized, and responsive across all channels.”
Marr said Walmart’s adoption of generative AI reflects its transformative role in retail.
“Generative AI is crucial for Walmart’s future as it enables the company to enhance the shopping experience through personalized recommendations, optimized inventory management, and improved customer service interactions,” Marr said.
Automating and tailoring those aspects, Marr said, enables Walmart to increase efficiency and deepen customer engagement, and those issues are “vital in today’s highly competitive retail landscape.”
