Walmart's Integration of GPT4: Transforming E-commerce Dynamics

0:00One of America's absolute biggest consumer facing brands and companies that everyone knows and uses is now embracing GPT. technology and that is Walmart. So in a recent interview with VentureBeat, the vice president of emerging technology at Walmart, his name is Desiree Gosby. He was talking and he said that for them at Walmart, GPT-4 is going to be as big a shift as mobile in terms of how their customers are going to expect to interact with them. So this is really interesting coming from such a big company, right? A lot of times when we see these big companies, especially when you think of Walmart, you don't necessarily think of a tech company.

0:41You more of think of like, you know, they've got all these big stores, maybe more logistics and that kind of stuff. But Walmart has been pretty, pretty forthcoming on tech. And I think that they understand that if they're not right there on the cutting edge of tech, they have big companies like Amazon who are, who are going to absolutely eat their lunch. So I think Walmart is putting a really big focus on this. I've seen, you know, I have a bunch of friends that work in tech at Walmart, and I've seen this for quite a long time, quite a number of years, they actually have been putting a focus on this.

1:12You know, what's interesting is they're about to start implementing a lot of this GPT technology, but they've done similar stuff in the past. And as you know, as it is right now, they have over 20 different AI experiences integrated into Walmart from logistics to, you know, inventory tracking and a whole bunch of other different things that we may not see on the front end. But now from a user's perspective, I believe Walmart just revamped all of their, You know website and app design and now they're about to get into gpt4 So one of the biggest reasons they're doing this and one of the biggest things that they're planning on doing this Is so that it can boost their existing Offerings such as text to shop which essentially allows customers to add Walmart products to their cart by texting or speaking The names of the items that they need I mean obviously gpt4 is just such a powerful technology for this so So specifically what Gosby said is that we've had a platform that has allowed teams across Walmart to build conversational experiences for about five years.

2:11This is nothing new for Walmart, but they did say that we focus on building a natural language understanding capability that is retail specific. so kind of like how i recently on a podcast talked about bloomberg going specifically into finance with bloomberg gpt it looks like walmart is going to be going into a retail specific uh style of gpt and what's interesting is um walmart is i believe partnered with open ai uh for gpt4 and integrating that but they have also expressed um they've expressed that they do have a lot of their own data and that they're able to incorporate and fine-tune existing models with their own data in a way that is powerful and proprietary to them.

2:54A lot of their competitors will not have such a vast amount of data. Walmart is such a massive company and I think what a lot of people don't know is that these big huge retailers, they do track, right, like what types of inventory sell, what types of, you know, what times of years, what times of day, like there's so much data that they have collected over the years that it is actually going to make for a really really powerful fine-tuning of these ai models so getting into um you know exactly exactly what this looks like i think walmart has close to two dozen different experiences using um gpt4 for natural language understanding capabilities right now that they've built out and that's including a chatbot that around a million Walmart associates interact with for customer support.

3:42So obviously a lot of big companies have integrated this kind of stuff for customer support. That's pretty big. But I do think it is a big step for them considering they're just such a massive company. And I think that it's going to be pretty interesting. Large, like these models like GPT-3 and 4 are starting to allow Walmart now to go beyond just, you know, tax task based chatbots. So, you know, adding like a product to your shopping cart or whatever that they've done in the past to actually problem based chatbots. So allowing that people like users to express, you know, what they need in natural language.

4:18And I think the, you know, the holy grail or whatever for Walmart when it comes to conversational AI is going to be if Walmart can really leverage chat GPT like experiences or models to anticipate what customers are looking for. And they've actually said this. So Gosby literally said, he admitted that it's borderline creepy, but they want to be able to predict what customers want before they want it or what they're going to need before they need it. And he said that if they can figure out how to implement the idea safely and responsibly, and he gave the example, if we know that your son's going off to camp this summer and that he has allergies, we can add allergy medications to their cart.

5:03Or, you know, here are the things that they would recommend to prepare him for camp, etc. It's going to be pretty interesting if they can do that. A lot of people, I mean, in my opinion, it almost sounds dystopian, right? Because it's not just like, the recommendations one, but Gosby, she literally said, like, if they know that he's going to summer camp, they're going to add those things to your cart, not just recommend, but like add them to your cart. And in my opinion, that seems a little, I don't know. I wonder if there's a line there, like if things are added to your cart, because you know, what if you add a bunch of things to your cart, don't look what's already in there and you check it out.

5:38So I'm not sure how far that will go if they really will add things to your cart or if they're just going to be making the recommendations. So that will definitely be an interesting area to watch. But you know, she did point out that Walmart isn't only using GPT-4. They have other large language models as well. And actually, Walmart began working on this quite a while ago, and they were originally using Google's BERT models, which were released back in 2018. But she did say that the space is changing so rapidly that they don't really want to unnecessarily lock themselves in. So this is actually, I think, one of the biggest items of this whole story here is the fact that Walmart, right, they're trying to be on the cutting edge.

6:22They're trying to, you know, push the needle as much as possible. They were originally using Google back in 2018, and Google kind of was the leader back then. And then all of a sudden we have Chad Chibiti and OpenAI who kind of have just snuck out from the sidelines and completely usurped them. And now these massive companies are saying, look, we don't want to be locked in. I'm sure Google really wanted to keep them. But all of a sudden when these way more powerful technologies come out, the big players, the Walmarts and the Amazons and everyone else are going to move somewhere else. if they don't already have their own technology in-house, like probably Amazon does, then they're going to go other places.

6:58So this is going to be really interesting to see if Google starts to take their BERT model more seriously, if they start to up their game and try to claw back and keep Walmart in the fold. But this is something that we're seeing a lot of places. OpenAI really is disrupting. and if people like Google and other big tech giants that previously had kind of a lead in some of these areas if they don't really step up their game they're going to lose a lot of market share and a lot of money in this space and you know a lot of people might be like oh whatever it's not a big deal right Google makes 85 % of their money from search this isn't you know that big of a deal for them but like if you look at where the market's going this is going to be a massive area in the future and so if they're not taking it seriously now I think they're setting themselves up for some pretty massive failures.

7:47So it's going to be pretty interesting. What they did say was that having that foundation to be able to build on, aka having like the work they did with Google in the past to build on is very exciting. It's about putting these tools in the hands of the teams that are building these experiences. And she said that I don't think it's going to be hard to leap. It's going to be a hard leap for our customers once they start seeing what's possible. So I mean, that is a that's a pretty optimistic statement there. Essentially, they're saying like once people see how powerful this technology is and maybe how convenient it is and how much time it saves them um they're gonna they're gonna love it and you know as someone who who uh you know in our house we we do all of our shopping on walmart we do walmart delivery uh so my wife you know she'll plan out what we are uh what we're eating this week and the meals and then she'll go and find it all on the walmart app and it gets delivered to us and that already saves us a ton of time.

8:40I personally kind of hate going into Walmart with a giant grocery list and trying to find where everything is. It's one of my least favorite experiences. But that being said, if you go from, you know, the previous experience of finding it all on the app, you still got to search for it. But what if I just had my shopping list of all my stuff and I open up the app and I say, hey, Walmart, add three cans of corn, two cans of black beans, five bags or five tomatoes, blah blah you just like say the whole thing in the add all to your cart oh my gosh that's way faster than sitting there having to type it individually find and search now some people are gonna be like well which tomato are they gonna add to your car is it gonna be the most expensive one is it gonna be the organic one is it gonna be you know the one that's on sale are they gonna try to like squeeze a little bit of money because for example our current experience is Walmart does this thing called substitutions so if they like if you order a product on the app and they don't have it in that specific store, they'll substitute it for something different.

9:36Now in the past, you know, we, we order like a specific organic bag of oatmeal. And if they didn't have it, they would swap it for, you know, a bigger or more expensive one. And they would just charge you the same price as before. Now they've started charging you for the substitutions. And sometimes my, my wife gets really annoyed because she'll order something really specific. And they, you know, they, they come up with like a completely different brand or completely completely different type you know she really wanted these whole wheat tortillas and then they give her the white tortillas and just you know she ordered like 25 of them because we're having uh you know people over and they gave her like 10 of them i don't know there's just like different things that like it kind of like defeats the purpose of uh what you're doing sometimes and so it's going to be interesting to see if ai kind of exacerbates that problem um and you know if people are going to get upset because they won't get the specific choice now that being said if you are in a rush and you want to get something done quick I can see this being you know you blast through your list of everything you want boom it adds it then you go search through it then you're you see that it added like something specific you didn't want you go and swap out a couple things I mean that already saves you uh you know 50 % of the time so I when you see something like this that's a lot simpler a lot more convenient and saves you time I don't see how this wouldn't be pretty popular with a vast probably majority of their customers using the Walmart app and so if that's the case this is kind of a no-brainer for Walmart to to really implement stuff like this so something else interesting that they did mention they were looking at right because they obviously this is that's one interesting use case but they want to integrate AI into everything they're doing this whole area isn't just you know text to large language models that are understanding text they actually said things like generative AI for imagery that they can use to generate 3d versions of their products um would be really crazy and they said even if it can't do the whole thing completely if it just kind of gets them part the way there and removes a lot of the manual process as is um one really like popular common way for people to get 3d images of products right now and probably the most common way is that like essentially you have a special kind of camera uh you have a special kind of setup usually in a studio where you'll take like a product like let's say it's a shoe and you'll stick it on there's like two there's a couple different ways to do it sometimes it's just a clear platform sometimes it's like literally pins it's like a pin on the bottom and a pin on the top and either the camera or the the product itself will spin around but like in a perfect circle um and like for these cameras that do like the all the way around it gets more intense so and it's usually just like taking millions of photos sometimes um of like every single angle and the the product doesn't move and then it's you know, you get like this 3d view.

12:15So that's one way to do it. But they're saying, why do that when we can take a picture of the product, throw it into mid journey or another tool. Um, I guess not mid journey for the 3d making it 3d, but throw it into another tool that takes that image of the product and literally renders a 3d version. So that's going to be pretty insane. And that's not just Walmart, that's Amazon. That's like every single, um, that's every single e-commerce person is going to be wanting to take advantage of that kind of capability. They did say that, you know, Walmart's obviously going to have to be pretty careful around copyright issues with that sort of thing when they're doing generative images.

12:53But the advantage is that Walmart has a lot of their own data that they can use to help them train and get them to a place where they can start to leverage a lot of those models without having to be so concerned about the copyright, right? Like they already have a lot of these images. They're not just pulling it from online. They already have a lot of 3D imaged products. So they're going to be able to build some powerful models or build on top of ones that exist. So, you know, when asked if Walmart was going to create a ChatGPT plugin, this is something a lot of people have talked about. They said that the company is certainly not taking anything off the table, but, you know, it's kind of about enabling the right kind of experiences and executing in the right way.

13:34So I think what they're saying by that is they don't really want to come up with some sort of product and then people call it you know gimmicky or like not useful and being like why wouldn't i just use the walmart app or go to the walmart website where you have like sort of a more in-depth experience and they said at the end of the day they're going to let their customers guide them on what it is they want and if it benefits them it's going to be good for walmart so i think at the end of the day if enough people start asking for something they're going to build it out they've done a good job of really focusing and building out a solid tech team it's gonna be really incredible to see how walmart plays into this they are seem to be embracing ai wholeheartedly um and the reason why this is so interesting is because it's going to force a lot of the other players amazon in particular to embrace ai more in what they're doing as we've kind of seen um ai or amazon itself on their platform kind of shy away from ai it's not such a big thing obviously you know aws is integrating with hugging faces to host a lot of AI models.

14:31So like they're making AI plays and Amazon did announce that they're going to invest in 25 generative AI companies. Well, actually they said they're not investing. They're going to give them$300 ,000 of credits for AWS. So, I mean, you know, that's anyone would do that. I mean, Microsoft, that's a massive part of their investment to open AI. So it'll be interesting to see what happens if, uh, Amazon starts taking this more seriously and a lot of other e-commerce people, uh, Spotify and a lot of the other players and see how they integrate AI in the future of e-commerce.