As technology continues to reshape the business world, Walmart is taking bold steps to stay ahead. The retail giant is launching Wally, a GenAI-powered assistant designed to revolutionize the way its merchants work — streamlining their tasks, enhancing decision-making, and ultimately creating a better shopping experience for customers.
Who Are Walmart’s Merchants?
In the retail ecosystem, merchants are the behind-the-scenes strategists who source, analyze, and manage products across store shelves and online platforms. Their role blends creativity, strategy, analytics, and relationship-building, making them a vital part of the company’s success.
From managing product assortments to analyzing trends and coordinating vendor partnerships, Walmart’s merchants are responsible for ensuring customers find the right products at the right time. But with so many moving parts, a lot of their work involves time-consuming manual data analysis, which limits their ability to act quickly.
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Why Walmart Built Wally
In today’s fast-paced retail environment, speed and precision are everything. Walmart recognized that merchants spend excessive time running reports, organizing spreadsheets, and diagnosing product performance — all of which slow down the merchandising cycle.
That’s where Wally steps in.
Wally is a GenAI-powered assistant built specifically to:
- Automate data entry and analysis – Instantly generate insights from large datasets.
- Identify root causes – Diagnose why specific products may be underperforming.
- Support operational tasks – Answer questions and raise service tickets when needed.
- Perform advanced calculations – Handle complex projections and predictive modeling.
And perhaps most impressively, Wally is intuitive, meaning merchants don’t need technical training to use it. They can simply ask Wally questions in plain language — and get clear, actionable insights in seconds.
Example in Action: Bread Merchant Meets Protein Demand
Consider a merchant in charge of the bread category, noticing a rise in demand for protein-based foods. Before Wally, this person would have to:
- Run multiple reports across different stores and sales channels
- Compare item-level sales like keto vs. wheat vs. white bread
- Analyze in-store vs. online vs. pickup vs. delivery performance
- Manually aggregate and synthesize all data into insights
Now with Wally, that merchant can instantly pull all this data, interpret it, and receive AI-generated recommendations — allowing them to make faster and more informed decisions.
The Impact on Walmart’s Workforce
Walmart merchants have responded with overwhelming positivity to Wally’s rollout. While the assistant is still in the early phases of deployment, the company is actively gathering feedback to enhance its functionality further.
Over time, Walmart aims to evolve Wally into a semi-autonomous assistant, capable of making tactical decisions within set boundaries — from adjusting product mix to executing operational tasks that support broader company goals.
By taking on the manual grunt work, Wally enables merchants to:
- Focus more on strategic planning
- Drive innovation in category management
- Improve the customer experience by aligning better with evolving preferences
This not only improves job satisfaction among employees but helps Walmart stay competitive in a digital-first retail environment.
Wally is more than just an internal tool — it’s a reflection of Walmart’s long-term vision: combining human intelligence with cutting-edge technology to serve consumers better and run more efficiently at scale.
