Home Depot rolls out suite of generative AI tools for customers
The newest toolset available at The Home Depot provides shoppers with product and project information.
Home Depot is introducing "Magic Apron," a proprietary suite of generative AI tools designed to help customers answer how-to and product questions and assist them with home improvement projects.
Launched to coincide with the spring selling season, Magic Apron is available 24/7 to assist with detailed product and project questions. The platform is based on large language models (LLMs) and trained on Home Depot’s proprietary project knowledge and product catalog, as well as information from across the Internet
"Home Depot customers have always relied on the expertise of our orange-aproned associates in the aisles of our stores to answer questions and help them solve problems," said Jordan Broggi, executive VP of customer experience and president – online, Home Depot. "Magic Apron is designed to bring that same expertise to the digital world, leveraging our proprietary knowledge base to support our customers and give them the confidence to tackle their home improvement projects, anytime, anywhere."
Magic Apron can currently be found on millions of product pages on homedepot.com and in the retailer’s mobile app. Home Depot plans to soon expand the technology to its Pro B2B site to offer tailored services for professional contractors and business account users.
In the coming months, Home Depot plans to continue rolling out new Magic Apron features. The technology will continue to learn from customer and associate feedback and also be available to assist store and contact center associates in serving customers.
Home Depot is formally introducing Magic Apron one day after chief rival Lowe’s Companies Inc. released a similar generative AI-based chatbot called Mylow, which is designed to deliver quick, conversational answers to customer home improvement questions.
However, the retailer is hardly a newcomer to utilizing AI for customer service and in other areas of its enterprise. Home Depot has been leveraging cloud-based Google AI technologies since 2015 to support a wide variety of initiatives.
These include the retailer’s Sidekick proprietary employee app, and its customer shopping app, use of the BigQuery database to analyze data for better decisions, rollout of an enhanced search capability called Intent Search.
In April 2024, Home Depot began enhancing its inventory management operations and improving its overall supply chain efficiency with Google Cloud AI solutions.
[READ MORE: Home Depot optimizes customer experience, operations with Google Cloud]
Based in Atlanta, The Home Depot is the world's largest home improvement retailer. At the end of the fourth quarter of fiscal 2024, the company operated a total of 2,347 retail stores and over 780 branches across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, 10 Canadian provinces and Mexico.
