Walmart will personalize customer experience with generative AI
Walmart Inc. is continuing to establish itself as a developer of artificial intelligence technology.
The discount giant has unveiled a strategy to accelerate what it calls "adaptive retail," defined as "profoundly personal experiences that brings shopping to customers in exactly the ways they want and need" via AI.
Building on its proprietary AI development efforts, Walmart is building generative AI, augmented reality and immersive commerce platforms to create hyper-personalized omnichannel shopping experiences across Walmart and Sam’s Club stores, as well as apps and other virtual environments.
Following are highlights of Walmart’s efforts:
Retail-specific large language models (LLMs)
Walmart has developed a system of proprietary generative AI platforms, the latest being Wallaby, which is a series of retail-specific LLMs (models that can process natural language to generate text and translate content) that it will primarily use to create customer-facing experiences.
Wallaby is trained with decades of Walmart data, enabling Walmart to combine it with other LLMs to create responses in a natural tone that are designed to be highly contextual and tailored to its retail environment.
Customer support assistant
Walmart is upgrading its customer support assistant with generative AI to recognizes who the customer is right from the start and go beyond understanding shopper intent to taking actions, like finding orders and managing returns.
The company says it is actively building dozens of additional generative AI tools for customers, associates and partners including enhanced customer support assistants for Sam’s Club and Walmart International shoppers.
[READ MORE: Walmart enhances search, shopping with generative AI]
Content decision platform
Walmart has developed a content decision platform to serve as a foundational tool to create shopping experiences tailored to the individual customer. The platform leverages AI-based technology to understand the customer and a generative AI-powered tool that can predict the type of content they would like to see on the site. It’s already being used within select areas of the Walmart e-commerce site.
With this technology, Walmart intends to create a unique homepage for each shopper. The U.S. tailored homepage experience is expected to launch by the end of 2025 and the company plans to also use the platform’s underlying technology in its Canada and Mexico markets for personalized item recommendations.
Using AR for immersive commerce
Walmart announced in September 2023 that it would deepen its commercial activity in "virtual worlds," such as Roblox and its proprietary Walmart Realm metaverse environment, has developed an AR platform called Retina.
Retina leverages AI, generative AI and automation technology to create tens of thousands of 3D assets, along with immersive commerce APIs. These technologies are designed to enable the company to bring its shopping experience into new virtual social environments.
Walmart also leverages Retina to support 10 AR experiences across Walmart U.S. and Sam’s Club stores that the company says have seen a 10x increase in customer/member adoption, reduced rates of return and improved conversion rates.
Looking ahead, Walmart plans to bring View in Your Home, an AR-enabled capability enabling shoppers to view furniture and home décor items in their personal spaces with a few swipes on their phones, to Canada, Mexico and Chile via Retina and create more interactive experiences, like "hotspots," an extension that enables customers/members to obtain production information while they are viewing an item in 3D.
The company is also working on headset-based experiences to enable customers/members to visualize furniture in an inspirational setting.
"A standard search bar is no longer the fastest path to purchase, rather we must use technology to adapt to customers’ individual preferences and needs," said Suresh Kumar, global CTO and chief development officer, Walmart Inc. "At the heart of our platform strategy is developing common global core capabilities that are built once and deployed across Walmart U.S., Sam’s Club and Walmart International. As a global company with multiple business segments, this enables us to move with speed as we bring consistent experiences to all our customers and members."
Based in Bentonville, Ark., Walmart Inc. operates more than 10,500 stores and numerous e-commerce websites in 19 countries.
