Walmart enhances holiday shopping with AI across the enterprise
Walmart Inc. is using artificial intelligence solutions to streamline the holiday shopping experience across its vast enterprise online, in-store and during delivery.
The discount giant is leveraging a variety of AI and generative AI tools in an effort to making holiday shopping this season faster and more convenient from discovery to purchase, delivery and returns. The new solutions include personalized gift recommendations, a shopping assistant and expanded delivery.
Here are the details.
Personalized gift recommendations
When customers visit the Walmart e-commerce site, AI technologies understand their preferences and generative AI predicts the type of content they’d like to see. A new generative AI-based personalization feature being launched this holiday season in Mexico offers a broader range of personalized product recommendations.
In the coming year, Walmart will use this technology to create more relevant and customized homepages for each individual shopper. Walmart is also using AI to identify and vet influencers, then share their content on the Walmart.com homepage for holiday recommendations.
Shopping assistant
Walmart also continues expanding the beta test of its generative AI-equipped shopping assistant which engages customers in natural, free-flowing conversations. For example, the shopping assistant can respond to customer inquiries such as, "What's the ideal present for a five-year-old?"
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Additional tools such as generative AI-based product reviews, product summarizations and product comparisons are also available to enhance the shopping experience. For example, with Walmart’s AI-driven comparison feature, customers can compare different models when searching for a smart TV.
Sam’s Club AI-equipped exit technology
Walmart’s Sam’s Club warehouse club subsidiary has rolled out its exit technology to all locations, which combines AI and computer vision to scan items as members leave the store, automatically verifying their purchases.
According to Walmart, this represents the largest-scale implementation of consumer-facing AI-powered technology in the retail industry and significantly reduces wait times. In clubs where the technology has been deployed, Walmart reports more than 64% of members are enjoying the friction-free exit experience, resulting in members leaving the store 21% faster.
Expanded holiday delivery
Roughly 12 million additional U.S. households will receive expanded delivery coverage from Walmart this year due to an AI-driven geospatial platform. This technology unifies Walmart’s transactions, network catchment, customer insights and external data into a geo-grid composed of data layers.
These algorithms create unique delivery areas for each store based on factors like slot availability, drive time and store capacity, rather than traditional mileage-based delivery areas.
In Mexico, customers shopping at select Bodega Aurrera stores will have a greater number of online grocery delivery windows for all items useful for holiday party and cooking needs. The slot optimization data science model considers factors such as the number of available pickers and physical constraints within each store to determine the maximum number of orders that can be efficiently fulfilled daily.
Customer support assistant
Walmart has upgraded its generative AI-based customer support assistant to recognize customers from the start and go beyond understanding their intent by taking actions such as finding orders and managing returns.
"Walmart's integration of AI and generative across various platforms is transforming the holiday shopping experience, making it easier, quicker and more personalized," Walmart said. "This holiday season, spend less time searching and more time with loved ones, thanks to the innovative AI-driven tools at Walmart."
