Retail jobs often require a lot of cleaning up after other people. Dusty shelves, spilled liquids, stained display cases and, most recently, AI agent mistakes.
In Walmart’s attempt to realize its growth ambitions, the retailer is doing just that a lot of focus on AI and arming thousands of frontline workers with new ones tools and training.
Adopting a new process has a learning curve, but this time it’s AI agents who also need training to improve the accuracy of the models.
Walmart’s rollout highlights some of the challenges of using this new technology: Employees often have to spend time training the software, providing the context and judgment AI agents lack about their work.
Walmart’s AI rollout has prompted employees to share information and complaints on social media. There are dozens of posts and hundreds of comments on Reddit from people who say they work for the company about baffling security warnings from the AI, how the AI measures their performance, and other issues.
“It just assumes they’re going to be perfect every time,” a store-level HR manager who handles onboarding, training and scheduling told Business Insider, referring to the duties of an AI agent who assigns tasks. expectations of the employees completing the task.
Walmart has said in recent years that it is a people-led, technology-powered company, and that any new tools are intended to simplify and support the work of human workers across the organization. The company says its approach to AI in stores follows the same philosophy.
For example, employees at stores where the features have launched are increasingly being assigned tasks and goals by AI that appear in the MyWalmart app, which runs on company-provided phones and can be downloaded to personal devices.
That means a growing portion of Walmart’s 1.6 million U.S. employees now have a digital assistant meant to help with their daily tasks. But that assistant sometimes still has to learn something to be fully useful.
AI agents are a mixed bag: sometimes useful, sometimes distracting
It could be very helpful if AI creates a to-do list for some employees who no longer have to wait at the start of their shift for a manager to tell them what to do, said Elizabeth Nigh, an asset protection manager in Wisconsin, during a company-hosted store tour with Business Insider.
“If this employee is really good at stocking aisle eight, and we put them in aisle eight all the time, the AI assistant will learn that,” she said. “Then they can just come in and look at their MyWalmart, instead of having to wait for a plan.”
Other employees told Business Insider that the system often doesn’t account for complications in completing a work assignment, including some side tasks they consider necessary.
For example, replenishing inventory involves more than just putting new items on an empty shelf. Expiration dates should be checked. Damaged items must be thrown away. Dust and spills must be swept up and cleaned. These tasks, plus any other steps, can take a variable amount of time.
The HR manager said her store doesn’t discipline employees on AI metrics that don’t match real-world experience. “We’re not going to subject people to these impossible standards,” she said.
Walmart uses AI assistants like Sidekick to assign tasks and goals to employees. Dominick Reuter/Business Insider
An online fulfillment worker told Business Insider that she couldn’t pick orders for general merchandise as quickly as the AI app says, partly because of the AI-generated route through the store.
“You end up everywhere,” she said, explaining that she is rarely able to match AI-projected times for routes. “There’s no way you can beat that.”
Drivers for the Walmart delivery service Spark also told Business Insider that a new “smart pad” feature sometimes tells them to pick up frozen items, such as TV dinners and bags of ice cream, at the beginning of a shopping trip instead of the end, giving them more time to thaw. One employee said it takes “additional time and energy that I could spend on the next order.”
A new AI agent monitoring store security has confused some employees as it learns how to interpret data from security cameras and sensors throughout the store.
The online fulfillment worker says she is inundated with safety alerts from other departments when she opens the Walmart app on her personal phone to clock in and out for her shift.
These alerts are intended to highlight potential problems that employees need to respond to, such as spills that need to be cleaned up or refrigerator temperatures that are outside a safe range, but often employees are needed to correct or provide context for situations they deem risky.
The online fulfillment worker said she has a simple response to the irrelevant warnings: “I ignore them.”
Walmart says honest user feedback is essential to the successful development of AI tools for store associates.
Stores have the autonomy to use the tools in a way that works best for them, said Brooks Forrest, Walmart’s VP of Associate Tools, during an interview with Business Insider in July.
“We don’t punish people for not following the technical guidelines,” he said.
Forrest said his product development approach includes frequent store visits and regularly scheduled listening sessions from the Bentonville headquarters to better understand how his team’s tools perform in the field.
“The technology is there to help them, but ultimately they have a say in what they do,” he said.
Employees are both cautious and optimistic about AI
A survey this year from the advocacy group United for Respect, which included responses from more than 250 Walmart employees, asked about the impact of AI on their jobs and raised concerns among frontline workers at the retailer.
While more than 85% of respondents said they did not trust Walmart to prioritize their needs in AI development, about 40% said they expect AI could make their jobs easier, and a similar number said it could help eliminate menial or repetitive tasks.
Nearly three-quarters of Walmart employees in the survey said their biggest concern was that AI would make HR decisions such as pay reviews and leave requests, while two-thirds worried they would have less contact with managers and coworkers. Half said they were worried about AI punishing them for making mistakes.
The organization submitted a shareholder proposal in April asking Walmart to prepare a report on the impact of AI on its workforce.
“We’re expected to meet impossible timelines,” says Ava Williams, a night trader in Spokane, Washington. She presented the proposal at Walmart’s shareholder meeting last month and shared her own experiences with AI-assigned tasks.
Williams said AI-driven workflows are prompting members of her team to cut corners or skip steps, such as sanitizing shelves or checking for expired products, to keep pace.
Walmart’s board opposed the proposal, saying technology should serve workers by “enhancing human capabilities, improving the customer experience and making work more meaningful.” The company is committed to investing in training, skills building and new career pathsit added. The measure was not approved.
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