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Walmart continues to evolve on its creative AI journey as it develops more capabilities to improve both productivity and customer care.
In a discussion today at the VB Transform 2024 event, Walmart's VP of Emerging Technologies, Desirée Gosby, discussed the state of AI at the world's largest retailer. Walmart is no stranger to the world of AI. A year ago Gosby told VentureBeat about Walmart's use of gen AI, including GPT-4. Walmart has made significant strides over the past year, expanding its use of AI to help transform the customer experience and support a number of different initiatives.
“We've started working on some very specific areas that we want to focus on,” Gosby said.
He explained that Walmart is continuing efforts to use AI to improve customer care and streamline productivity. The retail company is also now working on using AI to improve operations content and developer productivity.
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How Walmart is Developing AI Capabilities
Walmart's foundation has always been about being able to scale. The same premise extends to how the retailer is developing its AI capabilities.
“The way we build things is we build things as platforms, as capabilities, with those foundational things in place,” Gosby said.
That platform approach allows Walmart to quickly iterate and experiment with different methods and tools. He also noted that Walmart benefits from its large base of employees and associates as the first audience to test new technologies.
Limiting fraud is a key concern for Walmart. Gosby notes that accuracy is important because customers are looking for information. Limiting the risk of potential fraud is not only about protecting consumers, but also about protecting the brand. Gosby explained that Walmart is taking a number of steps with its use of AI to help ensure accuracy as the technology moves into production use cases.
“When we go into production, we do a lot of work to make sure we're looking at all these different locations and angles,” he said. “But still you're not going to catch everything so we're making sure we have the right monitoring in place so that when we catch something we can address it.”
Humans are still in the thick of it using Walmart AI.
Walmart is keeping a human presence in the loop when it comes to their AI systems, even as they work to automate more processes.
“From our perspective, there's always a human, whether it's helping to monitor or making sure that we're protecting our brand and making sure that we're not losing information,” Gosby said. “The question is where can we move that human in the loop, so they're doing the most impactful work.”
Gosby explained that Walmart's goal is to automate processes wherever possible while requiring humans to focus on high-value tasks.
“We have an obsessive focus on automation, because that's how we scale and you can't do that without AI,” he said. “Humans in the loop will always be looking at the next set of problems that come our way.”