Walmart Canada launches AI-powered chat box for work-at-home staff

Walmart Canada has launched an AI-powered chat box for home-office based employees.

“My Assistant” is designed to support workers who work at home offices and offers tools such as help to speed up a drafting process, summarize large documents or meeting notes. The idea, says AnnMarie Mercer, chief people officer at Walmart Canada, is to have AI take on easy, but time-consuming tasks to focus on more complex operations that require creative thinking.

“As a people-led, tech-powered omnichannel retailer, we’re always looking for ways to integrate technology into our daily lives to help simplify and modernize our ways of working,” says Michon Williams, chief technology officer, Walmart Canada. “We want to lean into this technology to help our associates simplify tasks in their day to day.”

The goal for My Assistant is to eventually serve as even more of a self-service tool for employees, with full integration with the company’s intranet and HR platforms: a ‘one-stop shop’ for associates to access information they need on demand. 

“We’re excited to embrace this new technology,” says Mercer. “For Walmart Canada, Gen AI is not a replacement for human work or thinking. It’s a tool associates can leverage to complement the way we work and improve our productivity.”

Leveraging AI isn’t new to Walmart Canada. The retailer says it’s embracing AI and machine learning across its supply chain and stores to support inventory management, forecasting, storage profiling, and routing optimizations.