How Walmart is using A.I. to make shopping better for its millions of customers
Amid the recent flurry of excitement around the transformational potential of ChatGPT is the fact that companies have been using artificial intelligence across their businesses for years.
But few companies have the ability to gather the massive data sets that power AI quite like Walmart. There are roughly 4,700 Walmart stores and 600 Sam’s Clubs in the U.S. employing a combined 1.6 million workers — or associates as the company likes to call them.
Deploying artificial intelligence and machine learning in ways that improve both the customer and employee experience across such a massive environment is the focus of Walmart’s AI strategy, said Anshu Bhardwaj, senior vice president of tech strategy and commercialization at the retail giant.
At warehouse chain Sam’s Club, the membership model provides the company with huge amounts of data about what members are searching for, what they like, what they’re buying and when. “[Customers] are generating all these breadcrumbs about what they like and want and that’s allowing us to make the shopping experience better,” she said.
One way to do that is to make sure the items they want to buy are in stock. At Sam’s, that means staying on top of roughly 6,000 items stacked on shelves in warehouse stores that average 136,000 sq. feet.
Sam’s is using, of all things, floor scrubbers to do just that. As they travel around the stores, keeping floors clean and free of debris, they’re also capturing, in real time, images of every item in the store. These scrubbers (there’s one in each store) are equipped with inventory intelligence towers that take more than 20 million photos of everything on the shelves every day.
A Brain Corp. autonomous floor scrubber, called an Auto-C, cleans the aisle of a Walmart’s store. Sam’s Club completed the rollout of roughly 600 specialized scrubbers with inventory scan towers last October in a partnership Brain Corp.
Source: Walmart
“What this means is that I can distinguish Kellogg’s Froot Loops from Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes and the depth in which they’re stocked on the shelves,” explained Bhardwaj. “And if you think about a shelf, it doesn’t always have items in the front. They could be staked in the back and then there are shadows as well.”
This is where AI and machine learning comes in. She said the company has trained its algorithms to discern the different brands and their inventory positions, taking into account how much light there is or how deep the shelf is, with more than 95% accuracy. When a product gets to a pre-determined level, the stock room is automatically alerted so that the item is always available.
If there’s nothing in the stock room, but a delivery scheduled that day contains Kellogg’s products, the algorithm will tell an associate to take that Kellogg palette directly to the sales floor, rather than to the stock room. Bhardwaj said since deploying this AI last year, employee productivity has increased 15%.
“This is how we close the loop,” she said. “We never want to be out of stock on any item.”
AI is also powering the Walmart shopping app. For example, if a customer orders Pampers on the app, it can now recognize when this customer last ordered the product and whether the size is still appropriate.
Even though Walmart has been on its AI journey for years, the goal has remained the same, Bhardwaj said: Find better ways to figure out what the customer wants to buy and how best to get it to them. “AI is a way to make those decisions super easy for us,” she said. “That’s how I look at it.”
The goal is to create as little friction between what customers want and what they ultimately buy. “I hate shopping for things like milk and toilet paper,” Bhardwaj said. “We want to make the shopping experience for everyday items a no-brainer for our customers.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai gestures to the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025.
Camille Cohen | Afp | Getty Images
Alphabet has joined the $3 trillion club.
Shares of the search giant jumped more than 4% on Monday, pushing the company into territory occupied only by Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple.
The stock got a big lift in early September from an antitrust ruling by a judge, whose penalties came in lighter than shareholders feared. The U.S. Department of Justice wanted Google to be forced to divest its Chrome browser, and last year a district court ruled that the company held an illegal monopoly in search and related advertising.
But Judge Amit Mehta decided against the most severe consequences proposed by the DOJ, which sent shares soaring to a record. After the big rally, President Donald Trump congratulated the company and called it “a very good day.”
Alphabet shares are now up more than 30% this year, compared to the 15% gain for the Nasdaq.
The $3 trillion milestone comes roughly 20 years after Google’s IPO and a little more than 10 years after the creation of Alphabet as a holding company, with Google its prime subsidiary.
CEO Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Alphabet in 2019, replacing co-founder Larry Page. Pichai’s latest challenge has been the surge of new competition due to the rise of artificial intelligence, which the company has had to manage through while also fending off an aggressive set of regulators in the U.S. and Europe.
The rise of Perplexity and OpenAI ended up helping Google land the recent favorable antitrust ruling. The company’s hopes of becoming a major AI player largely ride with Gemini, Google’s flagship suite of AI models.
Technology
Bessent: TikTok deal ‘framework’ reached with China, Trump and Xi will finalize it Friday
Samuel Boivin | Nurphoto | Getty Images
The U.S. and China have reached a ‘framework’ deal for social media platform TikTok, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday.
“It’s between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon,” he said from U.S.-China talks in Madrid.
Both President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet Friday to discuss the terms. Trump also said in a Truth Social post Monday that a deal was reached “on a ‘certain’ company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save.”
Bessent indicated that the framework could pivot the platform to U.S.-controlled ownership.
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The comments came during the latest round of trade discussions between the U.S. and China. Relations have soured between the two countries in recent months from Trump’s tariffs and other trade restrictions.
At the same time, TikTok parent company ByteDance faces a Sept. 17 deadline to divest the platform’s U.S. business or face being shut down in the country.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Monday that the deadline may need to be pushed back to get the deal signed, but there won’t be ongoing extensions.
Congress passed a law last year prohibiting app store operators like Apple and Google from distributing TikTok in the U.S. due to its “foreign adversary-controlled application” status.
But Trump postponed the shutdown in January, signing an executive order in January that gave ByteDance 75 more days to make a deal. Further extensions came by way of executive orders in April and in June.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in July that TikTok would shutter for Americans if China doesn’t give the U.S. more autonomy over the popular short-form video app.
As for who controls the platform, Trump told Fox News in June that he had a group of “very wealthy people” ready to buy the app and could reveal their identities in two weeks. The reveal never came.
He has previously said he’d be open to Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison or Tesla CEO Elon Musk buying TikTok in the U.S. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity has submitted a bid for an acquisition, as has businessman Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty internet advocacy group, CNBC reported in January.
Trump told CNBC in an interview last year that he believed the platform was a national security threat, although the White House started a TikTok account in August.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Lisa Su, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, testify during the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee hearing titled “Winning the AI Race: Strengthening U.S. Capabilities in Computing and Innovation,” in Hart building on Thursday, May 8, 2025.
Tom Williams | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images
In a sweeping interview last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed a plethora of moral and ethical questions regarding his company and the popular ChatGPT AI model.
“Look, I don’t sleep that well at night. There’s a lot of stuff that I feel a lot of weight on, but probably nothing more than the fact that every day, hundreds of millions of people talk to our model,” Altman told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in a nearly hour-long interview.
“I don’t actually worry about us getting the big moral decisions wrong,” Altman said, though he admitted “maybe we will get those wrong too.”
Rather, he said he loses the most sleep over the “very small decisions” on model behavior, which can ultimately have big repercussions.
These decisions tend to center around the ethics that inform ChatGPT, and what questions the chatbot does and doesn’t answer. Here’s an outline of some of those moral and ethical dilemmas that appear to be keeping Altman awake at night.
How does ChatGPT address suicide?
According to Altman, the most difficult issue the company is grappling with recently is how ChatGPT approaches suicide, in light of a lawsuit from a family who blamed the chatbot for their teenage son’s suicide.
The CEO said that out of the thousands of people who commit suicide each week, many of them could possibly have been talking to ChatGPT in the lead-up.
“They probably talked about [suicide], and we probably didn’t save their lives,” Altman said candidly. “Maybe we could have said something better. Maybe we could have been more proactive. Maybe we could have provided a little bit better advice about, hey, you need to get this help.”
Last month, the parents of Adam Raine filed a product liability and wrongful death suit against OpenAI after their son died by suicide at age 16. In the lawsuit, the family said that “ChatGPT actively helped Adam explore suicide methods.”
Soon after, in a blog post titled “Helping people when they need it most,” OpenAI detailed plans to address ChatGPT’s shortcomings when handling “sensitive situations,” and said it would keep improving its technology to protect people who are at their most vulnerable.
How are ChatGPT’s ethics determined?
Another large topic broached in the sit-down interview was the ethics and morals that inform ChatGPT and its stewards.
While Altman described the base model of ChatGPT as trained on the collective experience, knowledge and learnings of humanity, he said that OpenAI must then align certain behaviors of the chatbot and decide what questions it won’t answer.
“This is a really hard problem. We have a lot of users now, and they come from very different life perspectives… But on the whole, I have been pleasantly surprised with the model’s ability to learn and apply a moral framework.”
When pressed on how certain model specifications are decided, Altman said the company had consulted “hundreds of moral philosophers and people who thought about ethics of technology and systems.”
An example he gave of a model specification made was that ChatGPT will avoid answering questions on how to make biological weapons if prompted by users.
“There are clear examples of where society has an interest that is in significant tension with user freedom,” Altman said, though he added the company “won’t get everything right, and also needs the input of the world” to help make these decisions.
How private is ChatGPT?
Another big discussion topic was the concept of user privacy regarding chatbots, with Carlson arguing that generative AI could be used for “totalitarian control.”
In response, Altman said one piece of policy he has been pushing for in Washington is “AI privilege,” which refers to the idea that anything a user says to a chatbot should be completely confidential.
“When you talk to a doctor about your health or a lawyer about your legal problems, the government cannot get that information, right?… I think we should have the same concept for AI.”
According to Altman, that would allow users to consult AI chatbots about their medical history and legal problems, among other things. Currently, U.S. officials can subpoena the company for user data, he added.
“I think I feel optimistic that we can get the government to understand the importance of this,” he said.
Will ChatGPT be used in military operations?
Asked by Carlson if ChatGPT would be used by the military to harm humans, Altman didn’t provide a direct answer.
“I don’t know the way that people in the military use ChatGPT today… but I suspect there’s a lot of people in the military talking to ChatGPT for advice.”
Later, he added that he wasn’t sure “exactly how to feel about that.”
OpenAI was one of the AI companies that received a $200 million contract from the U.S. Department of Defense to put generative AI to work for the U.S. military. The firm said in a blog post that it would provide the U.S. government access to custom AI models for national security, support and product roadmap information.
Just how powerful is OpenAI?
Carlson, in his interview, predicted that on its current trajectory, generative AI and by extension, Sam Altman, could amass more power than any other person, going so far as to call ChatGPT a “religion.”
In response, Altman said he used to worry a lot about the concentration of power that could result from generative AI, but he now believes that AI will result in “a huge up leveling” of all people.
“What’s happening now is tons of people use ChatGPT and other chatbots, and they’re all more capable. They’re all kind of doing more. They’re all able to achieve more, start new businesses, come up with new knowledge, and that feels pretty good.”
However, the CEO said he thinks AI will eliminate many jobs that exist today, especially in the short-term.
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports2 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment11 months agoHere are the best electric bikes you can buy at every price level in October 2024