Retailers and Tech Giants Push A.I. Into Every Corner of Shopping

At the National Retail Federation summit in New York this week, Walmart and Google executives said they would use artificial intelligence to reshape how retailers sell products. John Furner, the incoming chief executive of Walmart who will step into the top job on Feb. 1, joined Google’s Sundar Pichai onstage to announce that the two companies would “rewrite the playbook” for retail with A.I.

Stores of all kinds are adopting A.I. for tasks ranging from chatbots at checkout to supply chains, security, advertising, inventory management, product design and hiring, the conference underscored. Hundreds of start-ups are pitching in-store cameras, shelf-managing robots and headsets that give workers real-time product information, even as a July study from M.I.T.

found that most companies were not using A.I. programs at significant scale. Mr. Pichai announced a new open-source protocol from Google that he said can power brand A.I. agents, and Macy’s Max Magni noted, “Everybody talks about A.I. every five seconds.” Agentic A.I. assistants, autonomous bots that guide shoppers through research and checkout, were a major focus.

Retailers have given some of the systems names: Walmart’s assistant is called Sparky, Amazon’s is Rufus, and Ralph Lauren offers “Ask Ralph,” a virtual shopping assistant developed with Microsoft.

Key Topics

Business, Walmart, Google, National Retail Federation, Agentic Ai, Ralph Lauren