One of America’s biggest retail names, Walmart, is making big moves. As we continue to live in a world driven by technology, businesses will be more and more exposed find ways to make the lives of their employees and especially the company’s consumers easier. Walmart is currently focusing on this through the reinvention of the GenAI-Powered Assistant for all merchants of the retailer.
Walmart’s merchants
Generally, merchants are the employees of a retailer, who are responsible for sourcing the products consumers find on the retailer’s shelves and online. Therefore, merchants play a crucial role and Walmart indicated that the company’s merchants play an essential part in the happiness of its consumers. Also, merchants have a crucial part in determining the success of the company, thus their work-life should be made more convenient.
In addition, being a merchant means that you are in a role that blends the company’s strategy, analytics, creativity, and relationship management. For this reason, it requires both a big-picture thinking process and a deep dive into data. additionally, in today’s fast-changing retail landscape, it is important that Walmart’s merchants move with speed. However, some of the most essential facets of merchandising – specifically data analysis and reporting – are time-intensive.
Moreover, imagine a merchant who is focused on bread, is searching to better understand how to meet increasing consumer demand for protein-based foods. To be able to make informed decisions, these merchants will have to focus on several aspects like:
- The analysis of sales performance across stores, markets, regions and nationally,
- The importance of channelling specific sales (in-store, online, pickup, delivery); item-level sales (keto, wheat, white), and
- Making brand performance comparisons.In addition, each of these data points requires numerous functions like, running various reports and sifting through complex spreadsheets and synthesizing insights. This is a process that, until now, was extremely time consuming and required a lot of effort.
The relevance of the GenAI-Powered Assistant
The GenAI-Powered Assistant Walmart is implementing to help its merchants is called Wally. Wally has been developed because the retailer saw the opportunity to streamline the tasks merchants have to do manually. Therefore, Wally was designed as an AI powered tool, to ensure the merchant’s productivity is increased. It is building on Walmart’s proprietary data, and for this reason Wally automates a variety of time-consuming processes, including:
- The data entry and analysis process – This AI tool instantly generates insights from complex datasets.
- The root cause identification – The tool diagnose why certain products are under – or overperforming.
- How-to support – It answers operational questions, and it raise tickets for unresolved issues.
- Advanced calculations – Wally automates complex formulas and predictions.
In addition, because usability is an essential aspect, Wally is created to be intuitive, which means that it does not require any technical training. Therefore, merchants can simply post their questions and expect to receive actionable insights in merely seconds. With AI removing the friction of manual reporting, the retailer’s merchants can now focus on what they do best: this is the delivering of the right products to customers, at the right time, and with greater efficiency and effectiveness than ever before.
Impact on the Walmart community
The response received from Walmart merchants are incredibly positive. However, it is important to note that the retailer is just starting with this new venture. Walmart is dedicated to continuously improving the tool – by using the feedback of its community but also allowing to be guided by the needs of Walmart merchants. Ultimately, the aim is to enable the tool to act autonomously on the merchant’s behalf within configurable guardrails, by executing tactical actions that are necessary to bring the company’s strategy to life.
Additionally, by automating time-consuming tasks and providing actionable insights, Wally allows merchants to focus on more strategic, creative and innovative activities. Activities that will improve consumers experience and meet evolving customer expectations.