A robot is making burgers at Sam’s Club. Robots pick up items for order fulfillment in Bentonville. AI chatbots help Walmart merchants. Drones are making deliveries in northwest Arkansas. Highlighting such technology was part of Walmart’s annual Shareholders Week.
Walmart has opened its Market Fulfillment Center (MFC) at Store 100 in Bentonville to the media, showing how its own Alphabot works in a trolley-like system that moves inside a large vertical storage tower. was demonstrated. The center has been open for about three months and continues to expand its capacity. The unit is designed so that only robots carrying grocery boxes are working in the process.
Workers load products into the tower and enter expiration dates and other product information into computer terminals. A vertical tower can hold thousands of items for Alphabot to pick up and bring to the order stager. The center operates in he three temperature zones: ambient, chilled and frozen. When an order is placed, the bot moves through the tower to pick up the ordered items and deliver them to a stager where the ordered items are packed and stored for pickup.
Walmart said MFC’s goal is to reduce pressure on stores by increasing online ordering capacity. There are still individual shoppers who pick up items at the storefront, such as fresh fruits and vegetables. These items are added to orders in MFC’s large staging area and stored until the customer arrives for pickup or is shipped for delivery. Walmart said it continues to test and learn, and at some point its goal is to allow MFC to fulfill orders from multiple stores.
Just outside of MFC, DroneUp operates a delivery system that has been in operation for about a year. The drone has a weight limit of 10 pounds and a radius of about 1 mile from the store. Walmart says there is a $3.99 fee for drone deliveries. Consumers will have to use his DroneUp app to have their order delivered, but this option is not available on his Walmart.com. Walmart is also testing drone-up deliveries at Farmington and Rogers, and another zipline drone delivery option at Pee Ridge.
Anshu Bhardwaj, senior vice president of Walmart Global Tech, said the company is innovating with generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) to enhance its operations and shopping experience. Walmart has been using Gen AI for several years now. Applications of Gen AI include shopping assistants such as text-to-shop, voice shopping, and decision-making assistants available in Walmart apps.
Bhardwaj said the underlying building blocks known as the Converse platform are the same technology as ChatGPT. He said Walmart’s Converse platform will enable 22 conversational AI use cases. Those uses include the Ask Sam app, which employees need to access store and club operational help and his Spark Shopper-mile delivery platform.
The new application is known as “Ask Claude,” which was inspired by the late Claude Harris, who was Walmart’s first buyer. Merchants buyers can access help in the Ask Claude app to automate repetitive tasks, conduct research to find solutions to problems, or act as experts on merchandising fundamentals. can be fulfilled. Bhardwaj said the application helps retailer buyers improve the efficiency of his team, giving them more time to interact with suppliers on innovative products.
Sam’s Club is testing a burger-making robot at its Fayetteville location. The Warehouse Club said it also has a warehouse in the Bentonville home office cafeteria. The technology was developed by Studio 35, Sam’s Club’s small in-house technical workshop. Tim Simmons, chief product officer at Sam’s Club, said the technology developed for the robot is being implemented in club operations and that there are already more uses.
