Walmart is taking a big bet on the retail tech space by launching Wally, a generative AI-powered assistant, which will help its merchants in product sourcing, inventory optimization, and parsing vast sales data in seconds. The retail giant, known for its forward-thinking technology investments, announced the development of Wally in a company blog post, positioning the new app as a game-changer for the company’s merchandising team.
Sourcing the right products at the right time has always been a challenge for retailers, especially at Walmart’s scale. With thousands of stores and a huge online market, Walmart’s merchants handle an extensive set of data regularly. Historically, the process of analyzing sales trends, forecasting demand, as well as overseeing supply chain relationships was also a matter of hours of dull work. And now, Wally is coming out to change just that.
“Merchants can simply ask questions and receive actionable insights in seconds,” Walmart stated in its announcement. “With AI removing the friction of manual reporting, our merchants can focus on what they do best: delivering the right products to customers, at the right time, and with greater efficiency than ever before.”
Built on Walmart’s proprietary data, Wally features an advanced semantic layer that allows it to interpret complex datasets, understand merchandising nuances, and generate instant insights tailored to the company’s unique operational needs.
For Walmart’s merchants, Wally’s value lies in its ability to automate tedious yet critical tasks. Whether diagnosing why a product is underperforming, suggesting pricing adjustments, or flagging potential stock issues, Wally aims to provide the kind of insights that previously required deep dives into multiple spreadsheets and databases.
“Wally is learning to help us get to the root cause of issues related to things like out of stocks or overstocks with more accuracy and speed,” said Doug McMillon, president & CEO at Walmart Inc.
Wally also raises tickets for unresolved operational issues and automates advanced calculations, further reducing the time spent on back-end tasks. According to Walmart, the AI-powered assistant is built with usability in mind and requires no technical expertise to operate. Merchants simply interact with Wally through a chat-style interface, much like they would with a human assistant.
The debut of Wally is just the beginning. Walmart has made it clear that future iterations of the tool will push the boundaries of AI-driven merchandising even further. The company aims to develop Wally into a fully autonomous assistant capable of making independent operational decisions within pre-set guardrails.
“There’s a whole group of us that love sifting through the feedback that merchants are giving,” the company stated. “There are questions that they’ll ask and they’ll want to know a slightly different angle, and that gives us a roadmap to go execute on for Wally.”
Wally is the latest in a series of AI-driven initiatives from Walmart. The company has been actively integrating generative AI across its business operations, from enhancing product search functionalities to assisting marketplace sellers. In an earnings call, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon highlighted the company’s commitment to AI, stating, “We’re finding tangible ways to leverage generative AI to improve the customer, member, and associate experience”
Other major retailers are also leaning into AI-driven solutions. Amazon rolled out its generative AI-powered shopping assistant, Rufus, earlier this year, designed to help customers navigate product choices. Meanwhile, Target has been testing AI-powered chatbots to streamline store associates’ workflows and improve customer interactions.
According to a McKinsey report, AI-driven personalization in retail has the potential to increase revenues by up to 15%, while a recent PYMNTS Intelligence study found that 77% of retail executives view generative AI as the most transformative emerging technology in their industry. The rapid adoption of AI underscores a broader shift toward more data-driven, automated decision-making in retail.
Walmart’s push into AI-driven merchandising underscores a broader industry shift where data-backed decision-making is becoming the norm. By leveraging generative AI to automate and enhance merchandising functions, Walmart is not just optimizing its internal operations but also redefining how large-scale retailers manage product sourcing in an increasingly complex market.
With Wally, Walmart is not just enhancing efficiency—it’s reshaping the future of retail decision-making. As AI becomes more embedded in operations, the role of human merchants is evolving from data crunchers to strategic visionaries. The question now isn’t just how AI will change retail, but how quickly retailers can adapt to an AI-powered future.
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