Walmart testing AI shopping assistant, instant drone delivery

Walmart is testing a generative AI-enabled shopping assistant that goes beyond search to engage shoppers in “natural, free-flowing conversations” to help them find what they need faster, the retail giant announced today. For example the shopping assistant will respond to queries such as, “What’s the best present for a 5-year-old,” and will add more advanced features over time. Walmart previously launched generative AI-enabled search, product reviews, product summaries and product comparisons. See Ad Age’s Tech Power List honoring marketing leaders The shopping assistant is one of a handful of tech innovations Walmart unveiled today during its Associates Week in Bentonville, Arkansas. Others include allowing select customers in Dallas-Fort Worth to order items via drone delivery directly through the Walmart app and a major expansion of the Walmart InHome program, which allows consumers for $19.99 a month to subscribe to unlimited delivery dropped off in their kitchens or garages. Although people tend to use text for shopping assistant conversations, as they do for search, the technology should work with voice too, provided the user’s device can make the speech-to-text conversion, said Tom Ward, Walmart’s chief e-commerce officer, during a presentation. “I think the richer the search terms become, people use voice for those kinds of terms,” Ward said. Much of the training for the AI will occur as more people use the shopping assistant, he said. “We have a huge team working on this internally,” Ward said, ultimately making the capability proprietary to Walmart. “We have a lot of understanding of how customers use our services,” Ward said. “Increasingly, as we build on services like tire [replacement] and others, customers give us information about themselves so we can serve them better.” The goal of the shopping assistant and other tech innovations is ultimately to remove friction from the e-commerce experience for shoppers, Ward said. That includes features such as the algorithmically driven automatic replenishment of items for members of the Walmart InHome delivery service, he said. InHome, a service originally launched as a test in 2019 and expanded to areas covering 30 million households in 2022, will now be available to more than 50 markets and 45 million households, including in Philadelphia, Boston and Detroit. Ad Age Breakout Brand Leaders New award honors the people behind emerging brands Enter here Drone delivery will be available across 75% of the Dallas-Fort Worth markets, and customers will see in their Walmart apps whether they are “drone eligible” before making orders, Ward said. While it was initially assumed that people would use drone delivery for essential items, Ward said experience shows that people tend to use it more for indulgence and impulse items, such as ice cream, snacks and games for children. Walmart also announced it will roll digital shelf labels, which allow for price changes to be made almost instantly, across 2,300 stores nationwide by 2026. Besides saving a lot of time and paper on printed price label updates, that will make it a lot easier to update prices—something that will generally happen overnight and not on an hour-by-hour basis, said Greg Cathey, senior VP of transformation and innovation, in a presentation.

Walmart testing AI shopping assistant, instant drone delivery

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