Following on September 28's ""Walmart CEO Issues Wake-Up Call: ‘AI Is Going to Change Literally Every Job’"" here is what the behemoth is doing.
From Business Insider, September 15:
- Walmart is using AI to solve vast and complicated physical challenges.
- The company's mix of digital and physical operations is making it an unexpected AI powerhouse.
- Walmart has created new AI "super agents" to help users manage the proliferation of tools.
Analysts have characterized the recent strength in the stock market as an AI rally, but flying under the Magnificent Seven's radar is Walmart — a company so vast that it literally has its own weatherman.
And as it turns out, the retail juggernaut's scale and reach are proving to be tremendous assets in the AI race.
That's because most top AI companies — like OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, or Meta — operate in a primarily virtual space, processing unfathomably complex rivers of information into more digital information. AI-adjacent companies like Nvidia, Intel, and Oracle focus on providing the physical infrastructure upon which the AI machines function. Then there are the companies that are using digital intelligence to deliver physical results through automation and augmented experiences, like Tesla and Amazon.
Walmart, by contrast, has a vast and complicated set of physical challenges to solve as the largest retailer in the US — and the world. Those include everything from cleaning up spills in the dairy aisle to stocking shelves.
"We move billions of items around every month, every year," Walmart US CEO John Furner said Tuesday at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference. He said the company has been developing machine learning tools and other automation projects since around 2015.
Furner said that the company's AI models and supply chain automation help plan inventory to arrive at the right aisle at the right time, for example. One technique involves creating "digital twins" of each facility to model the movement of merchandise through the system on its way to customers....
....MUCH MORE
As noted in a March 11 post introduction:
"How a vast digital twin of the Yangtze River could prevent flooding in China"
Everyone's favorite AI chip co. has been pitching digital twins for years. At NVIDIA GTC 2024, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said in a keynote that “we believe that everything manufactured will have digital twins.”
And when you operate on the scale that Walmart does, spending $5 million dollars on a digital model to make sure you won't run into a $50 million error once you've started construction is cheap insurance. And their scale is almost unfathomable. Here's a new warehouse, via the logistics mavens at FreightWaves, October 2:
Walmart to build $300M North Carolina fulfillment center
90 million sensors: Walmart’s bold move in logistics
Walmart is expanding its use of artificial intelligence and IoT technology with a large-scale rollout of Wiliot’s ambient IoT platform, marking one of the biggest deployments of item-level sensing in retail to date....
Also at FreightWaves:
U.S. Postal Service mail carrier shot by Amazon driver
