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Walmart continues to advance its generative AI technology, creating latest opportunities to improve each productivity and customer support.
During a discussion today at VB Transform 2024, Desirée Gosby, Walmart’s vice chairman of emerging technologies, discussed the state of AI at the world’s largest retailer. Walmart is no stranger to the world of AI. A 12 months ago, Gosby spoke to VentureBeat about Walmart’s use of AI genes, including GPT-4. Walmart has made significant progress over the past 12 months, expanding its use of AI to support a range of initiatives that go beyond helping transform customer experiences.
“We started focusing on some very specific areas that we wanted to focus on,” Gosby said.
She explained that Walmart is still working on using AI to improve customer support and worker productivity. The retail giant is also now working on using AI to improve operational content and developer productivity.
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How Walmart Is Expanding Its AI Capabilities
Walmart’s foundation has all the time been its ability to scale. That same foundation extends to how the retailer is developing its AI capabilities.
“We build things in a way that we build them as platforms, as capabilities, implementing these fundamental things,” Gosby said.
This platform approach allows Walmart to iterate and experiment quickly with different approaches and tools. She also noted that Walmart leverages its large base of employees and associates as an early adopter of recent technologies.
Reducing hallucinations is an vital issue for Walmart. Gosby noted that accuracy is key as customers search for information. Reducing the risk of potential hallucinations is not only about protecting customers, but also protecting the brand. Gosby explained that Walmart is taking multiple steps in its use of AI to ensure accuracy as the technology moves into production use cases.
“When we go into production, we put a lot of work into making sure we’re looking at all these different places and angles,” she said. “But then you don’t catch everything, so we make sure we have the proper monitoring so that when we do catch something, we can address it.”
People still in focus as Walmart uses AI
Walmart is ensuring there is a human presence in its AI systems at the same time as it really works to automate more processes.
“From our perspective, there’s always a human in the loop, whether it’s helping with monitoring or making sure we’re protecting our brand and making sure we’re not missing information,” Gosby said. “The question is where can we move that human in the loop to do what has the most impact.”
Gosby explained that Walmart’s goal is to automate processes wherever possible while freeing up people to focus on higher-value tasks.
“We have a maniacal focus on automation because that’s how we scale, and you can’t do that without AI,” she said. “The humans in the loop are always going to be there, looking at the next set of problems that we have.”