Walmart introduces AI-powered assistant for merchants

Walmart merchants are responsible for sourcing every item customers find on the company's shelves and online. It’s a role that blends strategy, analytics, creativity and relationship management — requiring both big-picture thinking and deep dives into data. In today’s fast-changing retail landscape, Walmart merchants need to move with speed.

Imagine a merchant looking to better understand how to meet growing customer demands. To make informed decisions, they might analyze sales performance across stores, markets, regions and nationally; channel-specific sales (in-store, online, pickup, delivery); item-level sales; and brand performance comparisons. Each of these data points requires running multiple reports, sifting through complex spreadsheets and synthesizing insights — a process that, until now, took significant time and effort.

Recognizing the opportunity to streamline these tasks, Walmart developed Wally, a GenAI-powered tool designed to be a productivity multiplier for merchants. Built on Walmart’s proprietary data, Wally automates a variety of time-consuming processes, including the following:

• Data entry and analysis – Instantly generating insights from complex datasets.
• Root cause identification – Diagnosing why certain products are under- or overperforming.
• How-to support – Answering operational questions and raising tickets for unresolved issues.
• Advanced calculations – Automating complex formulas and predictions.

Wally is designed to be intuitive, requiring no technical training. Merchants can simply ask questions and receive actionable insights in seconds. With AI removing the friction of manual reporting, merchants can focus on what they do best: delivering the right products to customers, at the right time and with greater efficiency than ever before.

Building an AI assistant for merchandising wasn’t straightforward. Unlike traditional AI models trained on broadly available data, Walmart’s merchandising business has specific needs.

To bridge this gap, the company built a semantic layer, enabling Wally to understand the intricacies of its proprietary data. Wally handles and processes large volumes of product data efficiently through advanced algorithms and a robust computational infrastructure.

Walmart said its merchants’ response to Wally has been overwhelmingly positive so far, though it plans to continuously improve the tool – guided by the feedback and needs of Walmart merchants.