Walmart Develops AI Assistant That Helps Merchants Source Products

Walmart has developed a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered assistant to help its merchants source items for its shelves and its online store.

Dubbed “Wally,” the AI assistant generates insights from complex datasets, diagnoses why products are under- or overperforming, answers operational questions, raises tickets for unresolved issues, and automates complex formulas and predictions, the company said in a Tuesday (March 18) blog post.

“Merchants can simply ask questions and receive actionable insights in seconds,” the post said. “With AI removing the friction of manual reporting, our merchants can focus on what they do best: delivering the right products to customers, at the right time, and with greater efficiency than ever before.”

Wally is built on Walmart’s proprietary data and includes a semantic layer that enables it to understand the intricacies of the data and meet the specific needs of the retailer’s merchandising business, according to the release.

Walmart plans to continue to improve the tool based on merchants’ feedback and aims to enable it to act autonomously on the merchant’s behalf, per the release.

“Walmart merchants’ response to Wally has been overwhelmingly positive, but we’re just getting started,” the post said.

Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said in August that the retailer is using generative AI to refine its product catalog, improve its search functionalities, roll out a new shopping assistant and support its marketplace sellers.

“We’re finding tangible ways to leverage generative AI to improve the customer, member and associate experience,” McMillon said during an Aug. 15 earnings call. “We’re leveraging data and large language models from others and building our own.”

Across consumer and retail companies, 77% of business leaders rank GenAI as the most impactful emerging economy, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence and AI-ID collaboration, “What Generative AI Has in Store for the Retail Industry.”

AI’s role in retail has shifted from experimental to essential in 2024, PYMNTS reported in December. Retailers deployed the technology for use in everything from inventory management to virtual shopping experiences.

Amazon beta launched a GenAI-powered conversational shopping assistant called Rufus in February 2024 and made it available to all U.S. customers in the Amazon Shopping app in July. The company said customers reported using the shopping assistant for both broad-range questions and specific shopping questions.

Target said in June that it was piloting a GenAI-powered chatbot that answers store staffers’ questions about on-the-job processes, making it easier for them to complete their daily tasks and respond to guests’ requests.