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Walmart on Tuesday, June 24 announced it is rolling out a suite of artificial intelligence tools for its store associates, including a real-time translation feature to help communicate with customers.
The company is the latest large corporation and retailer to unveil new platforms and tools using artificial intelligence, as the technology is increasingly integrated into various markets. Walmart has already been using some AI tools for the past few years, according to its June 24 press release, and intends to build further on those features and add new ones.
Among the new suite is a real-time translation feature available in 44 languages, intended to facilitate multilingual conversations among store employees and customers.
“The tool enables conversations in both text-to-text and speech-to-speech formats and is enhanced with Walmart-specific knowledge,” the company said in the release. “For example, if the customer asked for something more specific − like ‘Where’s Great Value Orange Juice?’ − the tool would recognize ‘Great Value’ as a Walmart house brand and keep it properly translated or referenced.”
For the past five years Walmart employees have been able to use conversational AI to answer simple questions, and the company says that platform will get an upgrade in order to handle more complex questions and provide step-by-step instructions in its responses. The company says the platform already sees more than 900,000 weekly users and more than 3 million daily queries. Walmart has over 2 million employees worldwide and more than 10,750 stores.
The roll out also includes an augmented reality tool intended to help associates “easily find merchandise to stock on the sales floor,” specifically meant for tasks in apparel stocking and inventory.
Walmart says its AI tools are powered by its proprietary machine learning platform, Element, and has been implementing various tools throughout the company over the past several years, in both corporate and store environments.
The AI expansion comes a few weeks after the company announced it will be growing its drone delivery service to five more major United States cities, joining Dallas, Texas and Bentonville, Arkansas.
Kathryn Palmer is a national trending news reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach her at kapalmer@usatoday.com and on X @KathrynPlmr.
