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.
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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."
Source: Read the original article on www.businessinsider.com