AI Briefing: Why Walmart is developing its own retail-specific AI models

The world’s long list of large language models now includes a macropod.

On Wednesday, Walmart debuted a new set of retail-specific AI models to help power the company’s “Adaptive Retail” era of personalized shopping and customer service. Called Wallaby, the LLMs were trained on decades of Walmart data with company-specific knowledge about customers, employees, Walmart terminology, its corporate values and other brand-specific data. Walmart also plans to integrate Wallaby with other AI models based on the goals for each application.

Along with Wallaby, other initiatives in the works include a new “content decision platform” that uses AI to understand customers, and a generative AI-powered tool to predict content each shopper would want to see on the Walmart’s website. Walmart also has developed an AR platform called Retina to engage with customers in new online environments using virtual spaces and avatars. Another update includes new immersive commerce APIs, which are in alpha tests with the gaming engine Unity and the virtual world platform Zepeto.

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