Walmart is continuing to progress on its generative AI journey as it builds out more capabilities to improve both productivity and customer care.

In a discussion at the VB Transform 2024 event today, Desirée Gosby, Walmart’s VP of emerging technology, discussed the state of AI at the world’s largest retailer. Walmart is no stranger to the world of AI. A year ago Gosby told VentureBeat about Walmart’s use of gen AI including GPT-4. Walmart has made significant progress over the past year, further expanding its use of AI to support a number of different initiatives beyond just helping to transform the customer experience.

“We’ve started to hone in on some very specific areas that we want to focus on,” said Gosby.

She explained that Walmart is continuing to work on efforts to use AI to improve customer care and associate productivity. The retail giant is now also working on using AI to improve operations content and developer productivity.

How Walmart is building out AI capabilities 

The foundation of Walmart has always been about being able to scale. That same foundation extends to how the retailer is building out its AI capabilities.

“The way that we build things is we build things as platforms, as capabilities, putting those foundational things in place,” said Gosby.

That platform approach allows Walmart to iterate and experiment quickly with different approaches and tools. She also noted that Walmart benefits from its large base of employees and associates as the first audience to test new technologies.

Limiting hallucinations is an important concern for Walmart. Gosby noted that accuracy is critical as customers are looking for information. Limiting the risk of potential hallucination is not just about protecting customers but also about protecting the brand. Gosby explained that Walmart is taking multiple steps with its use of AI to help ensure accuracy as the technology moves into production use cases.

“When we go into production, we put a lot of work into making sure that we are looking at all those different places and angles,” she said. “But then also you’re not going to catch everything so we’re making sure we’ve got the right monitoring in place so that when we do catch something that we can address it.”

Humans are still in the loop as Walmart uses AI

Walmart is maintaining a human presence in the loop when it comes to their AI systems, even as they work to automate more processes.

“There’s always, from our perspective, a human in the loop, whether it’s helping to monitor or making sure that we are protecting our brand and making sure that we’re not missing the information,” said Gosby. “The question is, where can we shift that human in the loop, so that they’re doing the most impactful thing.”

Gosby explained that Walmart’s goal is to automate processes wherever it can while having humans focus on the higher value tasks.

“We do have a maniacal focus on automation, because that is how we scale and you can’t do that without AI,” she said. “The humans in the loop will always be there looking at the next set of problems that we have.”