This new AI tool helps Walmart’s merchandising team plan what’s in stores

Within Walmart, employees known as merchants make decisions about which products the company carries online and in stores, as well as pricing for those items.

Naturally, the job involves plenty of data analysis, with merchants breaking down sales numbers by product category, sales channel, region, brand, item characteristics, and other factors. But manually running all of those reports and examining results using tools like Excel can be time-consuming, especially when merchants need to run multiple reports.

“You can see how these reports can become time-consuming when analyzing customer behavior across so much data,” says Brian Knapp, senior vice president for merchandising transformation at Walmart U.S. “In fact, running and analyzing these reports can take hours, and we know that customer expectations are changing fast, and we need to be able to move with speed to respond to customer demand.”

[Photo: Courtesy of Walmart]

To help merchants quickly access and analyze relevant information, Walmart has introduced Wally, an internal generative AI tool that can dive into internal data to create responses in just seconds. Wally uses a familiar chat-style interface to retrieve relevant data from Walmart’s databases while accurately interpreting product industry jargon and category names (meaning users don’t have to worry about whether the database lists an item as, say, “TV” or “television”). Wally can then generate quick answers, tables, or full reports as needed.

“We’re able to take some of the best practices we as a company have [learned] over the decades in analyzing this kind of data and generate a very high quality report for our merchants to then go use,” says Aditya Kumarakrishnan, a distinguished data architect at Walmart Global Tech.

In a demo, Kumarakrishnan showed how a merchant could use Wally to analyze data about consumer electronics sales, probing details about televisions brands and prices for both in-store and delivery purchases. Wally can also help merchants manage both out-of-stock or overstocked items, and determine when to adjust prices or update sale info.

The AI tool, first announced to the public on Thursday, was introduced to merchants about a month ago. So far, Knapp says, they’ve reported it has saved time they can then use on other tasks, and has made data more accessible to merchants. Wally has also been given access to training material that Walmart provides to its merchandising team, allowing it to make recommendations and interpret data in line with that internal guidance.

Wally isn’t the only AI tool in use at Walmart. The company has previously unveiled an AI shopping assistant for customers and highlighted generative AI features to guide web customers to relevant deals. In an earnings conference call Thursday, CEO Doug McMillon said AI coding assistance and code completion tools helped save about four million developer hours last year. 

To make sure Wally gives accurate answers, Walmart has developed automated tests where the tool’s numeric responses are checked against known answers; the company even trained an AI judge to evaluate the software’s conversations based on human-annotated samples. Kumarakrishnan says his team also regularly reviews feedback from users on how the tool is working and other features it could offer.

“There’s a whole group of us that love sifting through the feedback that merchants are giving,” he says. “There are questions that they’ll ask and they’ll want to know a slightly different angle, and that gives us a roadmap to go execute on for Wally.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/91281920/this-new-ai-tool-helps-walmarts-merchandising-team-plan-whats-in-stores?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss

Vytvorené 5mo | 21. 2. 2025, 11:10:07


Ak chcete pridať komentár, prihláste sa

Ostatné príspevky v tejto skupine

Why 1995 was the year the internet grew up

The internet wasn’t born whole—it came together from parts. Most know of ARPANET, the internet’s most famous precursor, but it was always limited strictly to government use. It was NSFNET that bro

15. 7. 2025, 11:50:03 | Fast company - tech
What is quantum computing? Here’s everything you need to know right now

Computing revolutions are surprisingly rare. Despite the extraordinary technological progress that separates the first general-purpose digital computer—1945’s

15. 7. 2025, 9:30:04 | Fast company - tech
This IBM ThinkPad was astounding in 1995—and still is

Closed, it looks pretty much like any other laptop manufactured in 1995.

To be sure, it’s more compact than most—making it, in the parlance of the day, a subnotebook. But it’s still comi

15. 7. 2025, 7:20:02 | Fast company - tech
This IBM ThinkPad was astounding in 1995—and still is

Closed, it looks pretty much like any other laptop manufactured in 1995.

To be sure, it’s more compact than most—making it, in the parlance of the day, a subnotebook. But it’s still comi

15. 7. 2025, 4:50:04 | Fast company - tech
$100,000, 100 streamers: IShowSpeed and Jynxzi’s Fortnite tournament is already drawing excitement

IShowSpeed and Jynxzi are teaming up to host a $100,000 Fortnite tournament, bringing together 100 top creators for what’s shaping up to be the biggest celebrity Fortnite match to date.

14. 7. 2025, 19:40:06 | Fast company - tech
Zuckerberg announces Meta’s new AI data centers for superintelligence

Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday that Meta Platforms would spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build several massive

14. 7. 2025, 19:40:05 | Fast company - tech
Meta’s massive data center bet is a direct challenge to OpenAI and Alphabet

Meta may not currently lead the race for AI superintelligence, but it&

14. 7. 2025, 19:40:04 | Fast company - tech