Walmart’s CEO, Doug McMillon, recently spilled the beans on their latest cost-cutting strategy: replacing nearly 100 human workers with generative AI. Ouch.
Walmart’s slogan is “Save Money. Live Better.” Guess it also applies to the company, not just its customers.
Apparently, they’ve been using multiple large language models to spruce up their product catalog, creating or improving a whopping 850 million pieces of data. That’s a lot of product descriptions and images that won’t be written or edited by human hands anymore.
But hey, at least the robots are making things easier for the remaining employees, right? McMillon claims that showing warehouse workers high-quality images of product packages helps them find stuff faster.
And don’t worry, customers aren’t being left out of the AI fun either. Walmart’s rolling out a new AI shopping assistant to offer personalized recommendations and shopping advice.
It’s kind of like having a virtual shopping buddy, but one that’s probably tracking your every move and selling your data to the highest bidder.
Walmart’s AI experiment is a microcosm of the larger trend of automation in the retail industry. Companies are constantly looking for ways to cut costs and boost efficiency, and AI is the shiny new tool that promises to do just that.
