Walmart, the retail giant, uses ChatGPT for online shopping

The American distribution giant partners with OpenAI. Walmart promises a more seamless and personalized shopping experience, where artificial intelligence anticipates consumers’ needs before they even express them.

Walmart, the distribution giant, joined ChatGPT almost like everyone else. The largest private employer in the United States is joining forces with Open AI, a giant in its field with its now famous ChatGPT conversational robot with tens of millions of regular users. Walmart’s promise in a press release is that artificial intelligence will learn from a consumer’s habits and then anticipate their needs before they themselves know it. “A proactive rather than reactive method”, says the hypermarket chain again.

Basically, ChatGPT and Walmart would take care of almost everything, saving the consumer from wasting time. For example, instead of going to the site and typing “men’s t-shirt” in the search bar and then scrolling through all the options displayed on the screen, the consumer can describe to ChatGPT what they need and the AI ​​will offer them a smaller, personalized selection that they can click on without needing to return to the Walmart site to place an order.

Walmart is not completely new to the world of AI by the way. The firm born in 1962 in Arkansas does not necessarily have the image of a technology leader, compared to its rival Amazon, but it has already integrated AI for its inventory management, which would have reduced the waiting time for its customer service by 40% thanks to AI. Walmart has already created its own AI assistant, Sparky. Employees, or associates as they are called at Walmart, are also trained in the basics of artificial intelligence, which could have an impact on employment in the years to come. The group has 1.6 million employees in the United States, more than 2 million worldwide.

Amazon also launched its AI assistant, named Rufus. The Etsy and Shopify sites also collaborate with ChatGPT. This type of partnership is presented as the future of online commerce and ChatGPT intends to play a role in it, as it has started to do in many other sectors of the economy. The consumer would no longer necessarily go through Google to search for a product to buy. One more threat for the Silicon Valley juggernaut.