EXCLUSIVE Q&A: Lowe’s provides AI aid to shoppers and associates
Lowe’s Companies Inc. is equipping customers as well as employees with artificial intelligence solutions designed to provide in-depth guidance and information.
Chandhu Nair, Lowe’s senior VP of technology, recently sat down with Chain Store Age to explain how and why the home and improvement giant recently introduced two generative AI-based mobile apps, Mylow and Mylow Companion, to assist customers and associates its stores.
Nair also discussed the value of large language models (LLMs) in supporting its AI-based assistance efforts and how customers have responded.
Why did Lowe’s decide to launch an AI-based customer shopping assistant?
Number one, consumer expectations are changing. Previously, consumers were used to discovering the products that they were looking for in a list of links. But that's not usually how you try to solve problems. You're looking for answers and guidance.
In home improvement, this is even more relevant. Because most people are not coming into a Lowe’s store like they would a grocery store saying can you help me find the milk.
Our customers come and ask for help with something like fixing a leaky faucet. They may just need to change the washer in it or need to change the faucet. It’s more of a guided experience. MyLow can guide customers through the process and then get to the right products that can help them solve their problem and also link to all of Lowe’s relevant instructional YouTube videos.
Lowe's has 1 million subscribers on our YouTube channel, so we tried to curate how our customers were trying to solve their problem and create an AI companion, if you will, that can help them. That is really how MyLow came into existence.
You recently rolled out an AI assistant for store associates. What led to this decision?
We sell 35,000 to 40,000 SKUs in a store. And the SKUs are very different. Our associate workforce is largely not tradespeople. Now with the new Mylow Companion tool they have access to expert information to provide customers.
This creates a superpower for associates who are looking for validation when a customer is asking, a question about a specific home improvement issue like electrical or plumbing.
Are you using large language models (LLMs) to support your cusstomer and associate AI tools?
Both of these solutions leverage large language models. We started an early partnership with OpenAI. In late 2021 before ChatGPT came in and changed the world. That gave us an early view into the potential of LLMs.
With Mylow and Mylow Companion, LLMs tie the users to our mission statement, which is around solving problems and fulfilling the home dreams of our customers. Solving problems requires expertise, which usually is in training manuals or different types of unstructured data which is very hard to sort through.
Leveraging generative AI, you can look at all this content or any type of unstructured data, and you can really encode it into a simple advice or an action agent that can help solve a customer problem or an associate problem.
When you think about fulfilling the dreams of a customer's home, it's about visualizing your home before you can change something. That's why we started rolling out digital solutions like Style Your Space where you can take a picture of an area in your home and see how different design options can make your idea come to life.
[READ MORE Lowe’s to launch beta version of mobile room-scanning tool]
That validation is critical for somebody; to see how a concept actually looks in their space before they can make a project, project purchase. If you think about the construct being really helping solve a project for their home versus simple product search, the LLMs really help address that problem. And they continue to improve on a constant basis.
The associate app is brand new, but what kind of response have you gotten from customers so far to Mylow?
We are seeing significantly high engagement from customers in several areas. One is high overall usage. Another is are we able to address and answer the questions that the customers are asking at a high rate. And what we are also seeing is a much higher conversion rate of those customers using Mylow into a project basket.
This initiative is so much about building confidence for customers to take on projects bigger than they have ever thought of befor. Like what if a customer wanted to change their roof, a project that they previously would leave up to professionals.
