How Walmart Is Using A.I. to Make Shopping Better for Its Millions of Customers

Sam's Club warehouse chain provides huge amounts of data to the company about its members, including what they are looking for, what they're interested in, and what they're buying. You can do this by making sure that the items you want are in stock. Sam's uses floor scrubbers for this purpose. They are cleaning the floors and taking pictures of each item as they go. An autonomous floor scrubber from Brain Corp., the Auto-C, cleans an aisle in a Walmart store. Sam's Club installed approximately 600 scrubbers equipped with inventory scan towers in partnership with Brain Corp last October.

Bhardwaj explained that this means I can tell Kellogg’s Froot Loops apart from Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, and the depth at which they are stocked on the shelves. When you think of a shelf, it might not always have items at the front. Machine learning and AI are key to this. The company's algorithms are able to distinguish between brands and their inventory positions. They take into account light levels or depth of shelves, and can be used with over 95% accuracy. If there is nothing in the stockroom, but a delivery that day contains Kellogg products, the algorithm will instruct an associate to take the Kellogg palette to the sales floor and not to the stockroom. She said, "This is how you close the loop." The Walmart shopping app also uses AI. Walmart has been in the AI business for many years. But the goal remains the same: To find better ways to determine what customers want to purchase and how to get it there. She said that AI is a way to make these decisions super simple for us. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for customers to find what they want and buy what they need. Bhardwaj stated, "I hate shopping to buy things like milk or toilet paper." "We want our customers to have an easy shopping experience for everyday products."