Lowe’s aims to make mulch buying easier with AI
More often than not, Lowe’s customers underestimate or overestimate how much mulch they need, sometimes making their yard projects go incomplete. But now, Lowe’s believes it can help customers make better estimates with the help of AI.
That’s according to Neelima Sharma, svp of omnichannel and e-commerce technology at Lowe’s, who leads the company’s technology behind its digital business, marketing, retail media, customer data and personalization strategy. That includes the company’s Mylow AI assistant on its website and mobile app, and a new feature developed specifically to help solve that mulch estimation problem.
Through a new feature launched this spring, called “Mulch Me Now,” customers can tell Mylow, “Mulch me now,” and it will respond with questions about their yard and how deep they want the mulch to be, and calculate how much mulch they need. It will then recommend the best products and colors based on that customer’s specific needs. The assistant can then add the mulch to the cart and direct customers to the checkout page.
The company decided to launch the feature during the retailer’s busy spring season, which Sharma calls its “Super Bowl.” The feature is part of a marketing campaign that also includes the Lowe’s Mulch Mobile, delivering mulch for free in some markets, as well as social media ads encouraging customers to use the feature within Mylow.
Mylow, which launched in March 2025, has helped answer questions about home improvement products and home projects. But within the last six months, Sharma said, the company has been focusing on getting Mylow to solve problems rather than tell customers what they should be doing. That includes a purchase agent within the assistant that can now help customers make purchases, such as adding products to the cart in the mulch example.
“The whole idea for us is to make our shopping journeys very frictionless,” Sharma said.
Behind the scenes, Lowe’s has also used AI for years to anticipate and plan inventory and demand, but it has more recently started using AI to plan inventory needs based on factors such as weather patterns, demographic information or traffic projections. For mulch, that is how the company makes sure it has enough red or black mulch, for example.
“It just allows us to be able to, based on the type of customer segment in that area, … better plan for what our customers are going to be looking for,” Sharma said. “We are so focused on understanding what our customers’ needs are, and from there, we start to really envision and design the customer experience we want to show up with. And then, we start to put the pieces of the puzzle together to make sure we’ve got all the operational processes and practices in place that allow us to enable that experience.”
Joe Derochowski, a vp and home improvement industry analyst at Circana, said home industry executives are still trying to figure out the role AI will play in the path to purchase.
“If it can help make that path be more efficient, or make that step be more effective, or if it solves a pain point, … conceptually, that’s a very good thing,” he said. “AI for the sake of AI is not much, but if it helps make a step along the process a little bit more convenient, a little more accurate, save steps, not waste money, all that is great.”
Derochowski said the mulch feature is an example of making a pain point in the process easier. However, he expects one of the biggest changes AI will bring will be in how customers use AI platforms to do searches and even buy directly from them. That is still in the early stages, with retailers and AI platforms experimenting with features such as OpenAI’s Instant Checkout and its quick replacement with ChatGPT apps.
“Everybody’s looking at [AI] across all the steps and processes along the path to purchase, both in-store and online,” Derochowski said. “It clearly is an area where people are investigating and still trying to figure out what their plans and solutions are.”