Walmart predicts agricultural prices with AI climate risk tool
Walmart Inc. is using artificial intelligence to forecast how shifts in the climate will affect the price of agricultural commodities.
The discount giant is deploying Helios Artificial Intelligence climate risk and price forecasting software. Helios was a winner of the annual Walmart Open Call event that lets entrepreneurs pitch products and technology solutions to Walmart.
Managing thousands of produce SKUs across more than 4,600 stores in the United States on a daily basis, Walmart needs to ensure it can maintaining a sustainable, uninterrupted supply chain of agricultural products.
Leveraging the Helios platform, Walmart can evaluate the medium- and long- term climate risks facing its global agricultural supply chain to help secure sustainable sourcing.
“Walmart is leading the way when it comes to leveraging artificial intelligence to strengthen its supply chain,” said Francisco Martin-Rayo, co-founder and CEO of Helios. “Helios’ winning the ‘golden ticket’ is not only a great testament to our technology, but also proof that there are urgent needs from procurement teams to climate-proof their supply chains – especially those at the most globalized levels.”
In tandem with this new partnership, Helios AI is also announcing a new suite of features to help agri-food procurement teams and supply chain managers make decisions. Some of the key enhanced features include:
- The ability to provide climate risk and weather projections for an entire year into the future.
- For fruits and vegetables, enterprise customers will soon be able to research global, country and regional averages and ranges, interact with prices by origin region or shipping point, and even prices by variety, grade and organic status, all standardized to one unit of measure for easier comparison.
- The ability to quickly change the timeframe of all charts and KPIs, instead of pre-defined timeframes, enabling users to choose any period they are interested in analyzing, starting at one month and expanding up to view two full years.
- New metrics for individual growing locations such as days above 90°F, days below freezing, and days with excessive rainfall.
Walmart has been formally pursuing a larger goal of becoming a "regenerative" company — helping to renew people and the planet through its business.
First announced in September 2020, other recent examples of the strategy include partnering with crop supply intelligence company Agritask to test the effectiveness of AI in aiding fruit sourcing.
[READ MORE: Walmart pilots AI-assisted fruit sourcing]
Based in Bentonville, Ark., Walmart Inc. operates more than 10,500 stores and numerous e-commerce websites in 19 countries.
