Retail jobs often involve a lot of cleaning up after other people. Dusty shelves, spilled liquids, smudged display cases, and, more recently, AI agent errors.
In Walmart’s bid to fuel its growth ambitions, the retailer is betting big on AI and arming thousands of frontline employees with new tools and training.
Adopting any new process has a learning curve, but this time it’s AI agents that also need training to improve the accuracy of its models.
Walmart’s rollout shows some of the challenges of using this new tech: Employees often have to spend time training the software, supplying the context and judgment AI agents lack about their jobs.
Walmart’s AI rollout has prompted employees to swap information and complaints on social media. There are scores of posts and hundreds of comments on Reddit from people who say they work for the company about perplexing security alerts from the AI, how the AI is measuring their performance, and other issues.
“It just assumes that they’re going to be perfect every single time,” a store-level HR manager who handles onboarding, training, and scheduling told Business Insider, referring to a task-assigning AI agent’s expectations of the workers completing the task.
Walmart has spent the last several years saying it is a people-led, tech-powered company, and any new tools are intended to simplify and support the work of human employees across the organization. The company says its approach to AI in stores follows that same philosophy.
For example, workers at stores where the features have been launched are increasingly being assigned tasks and targets by AI that appear in the MyWalmart app, which runs on company-provided phones and is available to download on personal devices.
That means a growing share of Walmart’s 1.6 million US workers now have a digital assistant intended to help with their daily tasks. But that assistant sometimes has some learning to do to in order to be fully useful.
AI agents are a mixed bag — sometimes helpful, sometimes distracting
Having AI come up with a list of tasks can be very helpful for some associates who no longer have to wait around 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-arranged store tour with Business Insider.
“If this associate is really good at stocking aisle eight, and we put them in aisle eight all the time, the AI assistant learns that,” she said. “Then they can just come in and look at their MyWalmart, instead of having to wait around for a plan.”
Other workers told Business Insider the system often doesn’t account for complications in completing a work assignment, including some side tasks they described as necessary.
For example, restocking involves more than simply putting up new merchandise on an empty shelf. Expiration dates need to be checked. Damaged items need to be discarded. Dust and spills need to be wiped up and sanitized. Those tasks, plus any host of other steps, can take a variable amount of time.
The HR manager said her store isn’t disciplining employees over AI metrics that are out of step with real-world experience. “We’re not going to hold people to these impossible standards,” she said.
Dominick Reuter/Business Insider
An online fulfillment worker told Business Insider she hasn’t been able to pick general merchandise orders as quickly as the AI app says she should, in part because of the AI-generated route through the store.
“It’s going to take you all over the place,” she said, explaining that she is rarely able to match AI-projected times for routes. “There’s no way to win on those.”
Drivers for the Walmart-owned Spark delivery service also told Business Insider that a new “smart path” feature sometimes tells them to pick up frozen items like TV dinners and bags of ice at the start of a shopping trip rather than at the end, giving them more time to thaw. One worker said it takes “extra time and energy I could be spending on the next order.”
A new AI agent that monitors store safety agent has confused some workers as it learns how to interpret data from security cameras and sensors throughout the store.
The online fulfillment worker said she gets inundated with safety alerts from other departments whenever she opens the Walmart app on her personal phone to clock in and out of her shift.
Those alerts are meant to flag potential issues for workers to respond to, like spills to mop up or refrigerator temperatures going out of a safe range, but it often needs workers to correct or provide context for situations it deems risky.
The online fulfillment worker said she has a simple response to the irrelevant alerts: “I ignore them.”
Walmart says honest user feedback is essential to the successful development of AI tools for store employees.
Stores have autonomy to use the tools in ways that work best for them, said Walmart’s VP for associate tools, Brooks Forrest, during an interview with Business Insider in July.
“We do not punish people for not following the tech guidance,” 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 they ultimately have the say in what they do,” he said.
Workers are both cautious and optimistic about AI
A survey from the worker advocacy organization United for Respect, which included responses from more than 250 Walmart employees this year, asked about how AI is affecting their jobs and found worry among frontline workers at the retailer.
While more than 85% of respondents said they did not trust Walmart to prioritize their needs in developing AI, roughly 40% said they expect AI could make their job easier, and a similar number said it could help eliminate menial or repetitive tasks.
Nearly three-quarters of Walmart workers in the survey said their top concern was that AI would make HR decisions, such as wage reviews and time-off requests, while two-thirds worried they would have less contact with managers and co-workers. Half said they were concerned about AI penalizing them for making mistakes.
The organization filed a shareholder proposal in April asking Walmart to produce a report on the impact of AI on its workforce.
“We’re expected to meet impossible timelines,” said Ava Williams, an overnight stocker 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-directed workflows push 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 that technology should serve workers by “elevating human capability, improving the customer experience, and making work more meaningful.” The company is committed to investment in training, skill-building, and new career pathways, it added. The measure was not approved.
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