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Welcome back! It’s not always easy for customers of Lowe’s Home Improvement to locate employees when they need to ask for help inside its cavernous facilities. But the retailer is at least giving its employees access to artificial intelligence so they can be a lot more helpful in answering questions when customers do track them down. Over the last year, the company has used models from OpenAI to develop a voice and text app to answer employees’ questions on selling points for products or key differences between similar items, said Chandhu Nair, senior vice president of data, AI and innovation. Staff at any store can access the system, Mylow Companion, through handheld computers that scan barcodes and display product information. Nair said executives hope the investment benefits new hires with less experience as well as employees who might be called in to help in areas outside their normal expertise. “How we sell appliances is very different from how we sell electrical products,” he said. “The same concept of expertise and training can now all be democratized.” (Nair declined to specify how much the company is spending on Mylow Companion.) We assume some of Lowe’s customers are wising up to AI too, snapping photos of products and sending them to ChatGPT or other chatbots for analysis and advice while they roam the store. Customers can also access a different version of the AI bot themselves through the Lowe’s app, Nair said. Either way, better informing customers is a must for Lowe’s, as roughly 90% of its $84 billion in annual sales still happen at its more than 1,700 stores across the U.S. Lowe’s launched Mylow Companion to staff at a handful of stores late last year, in hopes of collecting feedback and refining it. One lesson executives learned early on was that staff much preferred to communicate with the bot by voice rather than written messages. That insight came with new challenges, however. Lowe’s needed to make sure that the AI could easily understand voice prompts and that the audio wasn’t drowned out by the often-loud store environment, where someone might be sawing a piece of lumber nearby. Lowe’s’ work on Mylow Companion grew out of a committee the company formed around the start of last year to study how it could use AI to cut costs and increase revenue. That has since morphed into what the retailer calls its “AI transformation office”—an effort to centralize AI projects across the company, which Nair oversees. Lowe’s has roughly 400 engineers, data scientists, product managers and other staff working on projects related to AI, he said. The company sees big promise in using AI to visualize how products would look in a customer’s home. As we’ve reported, some OpenAI customers have already been using ChatGPT for that purpose. Lowe’s is building tools to let customers picture how a kitchen or bathroom renovation would look before they make their purchase, Nair said. “You don’t want to come to your house, take your cabinets down from your kitchen and then say, ‘Hey, sorry, these cabinets don’t fit,’ or ‘The colors don’t match,’” he said. Businesses that have been relying on AI startups like Granola or Read AI to generate meeting summaries can now use ChatGPT for the same purpose. OpenAI said Wednesday that users of the company’s Mac desktop app can turn on record mode to generate summaries of meetings and calls. The new feature is available only to enterprises that purchase the ChatGPT Team subscription. While meeting summaries aren’t the most dazzling application of large language models, they have become important for businesses as workers use AI to search for insightful information or ideas within AI summaries and other documents, executives have told me. Companies also can use AI-generated meeting notes to produce new entries in customer relationship management databases, saving workers time.
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