Walmart Rolls Out GenAI Assistant for Its Merchants

In an effort to help its merchants make faster, more informed decisions in today’s fast-changing retail landscape, Walmart has developed a GenAI-powered assistant dubbed Wally. The tool helps streamline a merchant’s tasks by automating a number of time-consuming tasks, including:

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

According to Walmart, Wally is designed to be intuitive and requires no technical training by its users. Merchants can simply ask questions on the interface and receive actionable insights within seconds.

“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,” the company explained in a blog post. “To bridge this gap, we built a semantic layer, enabling Wally to understand the intricacies of our proprietary data. Wally handles and processes large volumes of product data efficiently through advanced algorithms and a robust computational infrastructure.”