Walmart Looking at AI to Provide a More Personalized Shopping Experience
Retail giant Walmart is looking to AI to help provide customers with a more personalized shopping experience. This isn’t the company’s first program that is using generative AI as earlier this year, it created an AI-powered app for workers in its corporate office.
According to a report by Fox News, the app in question called “The Shopping Assistant” is a chatbot that will help customers with certain everyday tasks. This can range from planning a party, to decorating a home, to a new outfit; all while providing the customer a platform to shop for specific items in question.
Part of the app’s feature is how simple it is to suggest a topic for it to assist the customer with. In the report, this included finding the right cellphone for a ten-year-old. Using NLP, the app will be able to communicate with customers both through text messaging within the app and through voice communications.
It will also leverage the power of generative AI to generate relevant suggestions and recommendations based on the customer’s existing data, needs, and preferences. The goal for Walmart is to begin testing the app in the coming weeks right before the Christmas season.
Following the feature from Amazon’s shopping app, the app from Walmart will also allow customers to preview items. In its case, it will generative AI to create 3D models based on existing product photos which then can be used to preview items. This can be done in scanned rooms or just using the app’s default preview.
If it’s anything like the Amazon Shopping App, it will also provide a proper size comparison for the shoppers so they can preview items such as kitchen appliances and what it would look like if placed.
Another improvement that will arrive with the app is an upgrade to the existing search feature on both its website and existing app. The goal of this will be to better understand the user’s request by taking context into account.
Which the retailer hopes will generate improved results and more relevant rankings. As mentioned previously, the voice-assist feature of the app will be an interesting addition. That’s because the company is hoping to roll out a feature that allows for complex purchasing planning that involves multiple variables, steps, etc.
There are several examples of this, such as planning for a birthday party, or even planning a grocery trip. Overall, the app is designed to interact with customers outside of simple requests and answers and provide a more robust and personalized experience both online and in-store.
Testing on Walmart’s website will also begin during the same period as the app.
Originally posted on OpenDataScience.com
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