Walmart executives say generative AI is 100 times more productive at updating product pages than people
Walmart executives appear happy with the results of using generative AI to rewrite product listings, saying it is much faster than human workers on this task. They also plan to roll out a new shopping assistant using the technology.
Walmart president and CEO Doug McMillon told investors during its fiscal second-quarter earnings call on Aug. 15 that the company has used multiple large language models to create or improve more than 850 million pieces of data in its product catalog.
“We’re finding tangible ways to leverage generative AI to improve the customer, member and associate experience. We’re leveraging data and large language models from others and building our own,” McMillon said. “Without the use of generative AI, this work would have required nearly 100 times the current headcount to complete in the same amount of time.”
John Furner, president and CEO of Walmart U.S., said generative AI has helped the company populate the attributes and characteristics of hundreds of millions of items, and that it would have taken 100 times longer to do this manually.
Furner said having better product pages through this initiative has helped the company understand customers’ intent on the site and in the store. “We’re able to match the catalog to their intent in a much more effective way, because the detail of each item and the product display pages has gotten so much better.”
Retailers have been quickly adopting generative AI, popularized by ChatGPT in November 2022, to provide more personalized search tools and virtual assistants online and to generate marketing content. Target, Walmart and Best Buy as well as smaller retailers such as Boot Barn and Tractor Supply Co. have also announced plans to launch AI-powered tools to enhance the store experience, especially for employees. Amazon is using AI to rewrite product listings that don’t meet its requirements.
“The use cases for this technology are wide-ranging and affect nearly all parts of our business, and we’ll continue to experiment and deploy AI and generative AI applications globally,” McMillon said. “We’re anchored in the responsible use of AI, while also moving with speed and in an [everyday low-cost] way to meet our future needs and scale these experiences.”
Walmart already has AI-powered search on its app and website, and says a new shopping assistant will be able to help with questions such as, “which TV is best for watching sports?” and ask follow-up questions like, “how’s the lighting in the room where you’ll place the TV?”
McMillon said it is also testing a new experience for sellers on its marketplace to let them ask the company questions through a new assistant that will provide succinct answers they would otherwise have to find in long articles or other materials. “We want our sellers focused on selling, so the more we can make it a seamless experience, the better,” McMillon said.
Walmart’s e-commerce business grew 22% globally from second quarter 2023 to 2024. Furner said that using generative AI for its product catalog has been a “great enabler” for the e-commerce business over the last few months.
The heightened productivity reportedly gained using generative AI is “really important in the context of the marketplace, where we’ve had so much expansion in terms of the number of sellers and the number of items in the assortment,” Furner said. “For customers, more and more, we are really feeling like Walmart can sell you anything that you want to search for.”
Bryan Gildenberg, founder of commerce consultancy Confluence Commerce, said Walmart is discovering, like other companies, that the most interesting applications of generative AI are more commercial or B2B rather than consumer-facing. He said applications like helping people figure out what TV to buy or Amazon’s Rufus conversational AI assistant are difficult for AI to get good at quickly.
Gildenberg said that like people, AI is most effective when given a well-defined job, taught what to do, with clear expectations and patience to learn. “What AI learns really well is a specific task, and if you focus AI on a very specific task, it learns really quickly,” he said, adding that Walmart automating the catalog workflow — a more simple task — is “the kind of application for which AI can be game-changing.”
Gina Logan, principal retail analyst for Kantar, said she found it interesting to see Walmart leaning so heavily into AI while McDonald’s recently decided to pull back from AI ordering technology it had worked on with IBM. McDonald’s did not share a reason for doing so but this was after some ordering mistakes with the AI system went viral online. In one popular TikTok, for example, the AI kept confusing an order for”Mountain Dew” with “medium Coke”.
“It sounds like Walmart is confident in [implementation] and is really looking to use it in a way that’s going to refine their business strategy, especially their marketplace,” Logan said. “I think that that is an investment they’re making in order to improve the experience for the workforce, and I think that that will hopefully translate for them into a better customer service experience.”
Aside from AI, the retail giant also shared during its second-quarter earnings that its revenue increased by almost 5% year-over-year and projected an optimistic but cautious view of consumer demand.
“We see, among our members and customers, that they remain choiceful, discerning, value-seeking, focusing on things like essentials rather than discretionary items, but importantly, we don’t see any additional fraying of consumer health,” Walmart CFO John David Rainey told CNBC.