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.”
The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.
Chris Jung | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.
S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.
Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.
Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.
While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.
DoorDash was the latest tech company to join during the last rebalancing in March. Cloud software vendor Workday was added in December, and that was preceded earlier in 2024 with the additions of Palantir, Dell, CrowdStrike, GoDaddy and Super Micro Computer.
Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.
New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.
Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.
— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.
CNBC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook
A representation of cryptocurrency Ethereum is placed on a PC motherboard in this illustration taken on June 16, 2023.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
Stocks tied to the price of ether, better known as ETH, were higher on Wednesday, reflecting renewed enthusiasm for the crypto asset amid a surge of interest in stablecoins and tokenization.
BitMine Immersion Technologies, a bitcoin miner that announced plans this week to make ETH its primary treasury reserve asset, jumped about 20%. It’s gained more than 1,000% since the announcement. Betting platform SharpLink Gaming, which has also initiated an ETH treasury strategy, added more than 11%. Bit Digital, which last week exited bitcoin mining to focus on its ETH treasury and staking plans, jumped more than 6%.
“We’re finally at the point where real use cases are emerging, and stablecoins have been the first version of that at scale but they’re going to open the door to a much bigger story around tokenizing other assets and using digital assets in new ways,” Devin Ryan, head of financial technology research at Citizens.
On Tuesday, as bitcoin ETFs snapped a 15-day streak of inflows, ether ETFs saw $40 million in inflows led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust. ETH ETFs came back to life in June after much concern that they were becoming zombie funds.
The price of the coin itself was last higher by 5%, according to Coin Metrics, though it’s still down 24% this year.
Ethereum has been struggling with an identity crisis fueled by uncertainty about the network’s value proposition, weaker revenue since its last big technical upgrade and increasing competition from Solana. Market volatility, driven by geopolitical uncertainty this year, has not helped.
The Ethereum network’s smart contracts capability makes it a prominent platform for the tokenization of traditional assets, which includes U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins. Fundstrat’s Tom Lee this week called Ethereum “the backbone and architecture” of stablecoins. Both Tether (USDT) and Circle‘s USD Coin (USDC) are issued on the network.
BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund (known as BUIDL, which stands for USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) also launched on Ethereum last year before expanding to other blockchain networks.
Tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.
The latest wave of interest in ETH-related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood this week that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, after a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s IPO and the Senate passage of its proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.
Ether, which turns 10 years old at the end of July, is sitting about 75% off its all-time high.
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