With Walmart Wally, Walmart has assed itself as floor leader in implementing AI tools for retail by developing Wally – a specialized AI marketing assistant. Wally’s responsibility is to simplify the complex lives of merchants by automating repetitive processes for managing thousands of customer-facing products across both physical and digital storefronts.
The merchandising side of Walmart is a one man army because they are strategists, analysts, engineers, and account managers all at once. To add, Merchants had to deal with stacks and spreadsheets and other manual processes with intensive data analysis, reporting, and sales figure scrutinizing. It does not take a genius to figure out how such activities zap away energy and time, restricting room to allocate energy towards innovation and strategic work. This is where solutions like Wally, Walmart’s merchnadising tool, designed to ease Walmart’s overwhelming burdens comes in.
What Can Walmart Wally Help With?
Wally is not just any AI assistant since Wally is atided with Walmart proprietary data, making it designed specifically for the challenges of retail merchandising. Capabilities include automating tasks such as:
Generate Reports: The advancement of Self Service Business Intelligence has allowed Wally to analyze intricate databases to identify insights and understand trends at unmatched speeds.
Problem Solving Assistance: From diagnosing why products suffer from summer slump season syndrome to identifying overachievers, Assist with Operations enables Wally to answer questions and even file support tickets autonomously.
Automate Calculations: Make complex calculations and predictive analysis simpler than ever.
Perhaps the best part? Walmart Wally doesn’t require a tech guru to operate. Merchants can obtain the relevant information in a matter of seconds through simple questions due to its intuitive interface.
Behind the Scenes
Wally was not created with ease. Unlike generic AI applications, Wally had to be tailored to fit the needs of Walmart. A specific team built a “semantic layer” that enables Wally to grasp the scope of product data that is available at Walmart. This cutting-edge infrastructure allows Wally to ingest and process large amounts of information in parallel.
Merchants already benefiting from Wally’s services are just scratching the surface of what’s to come. Feedback-driven refinement is in the plans, and the objective is to enhance Wally’s intelligence on multiple facets. Sooner versions might even be able to perform chores independently, allowing the merchants to concentrate on developing business plans and improving customer interactions.
