Abstract

The world’s largest retailer, US-based Walmart Inc. (Walmart), developed a Generative AI tool for its employees called My Assistant. The idea behind My Assistant was to provide the associates the experience that customers and members had while shopping at Walmart. As My Assistant would reduce the load of repetitive tasks, employees would get more time to focus on customer experience. Walmart, following its ‘people-led, tech-powered’ philosophy, wanted to develop its own GenAI tool using proprietary data to empower the associates and make their daily work easier. It went on to build its own large language model using proprietary data. The result was ‘My Assistant’, a GenAI application. The company conducted training programs for all the associates to familiarize them with the technology. They were trained on prompt writing and comparing different AI-generated outputs. Managers and leaders received additional training. My Assistant was released in August 2023 for corporate employees and was a part of the superapp Me@Walmart. Associates across all the departments used it widely for summarizing reports, drafting emails, preparing documents, conducting performance reviews, generating product descriptions, etc. It was also used to retrieve policy information and operational data. Employees shared successful use cases during town hall meetings. In 2024, Walmart expanded My Assistant across several international markets. Even as My Assistant was touted as a tool that improved productivity and enhanced associate experience, the leaders at Walmart wanted to ensure that the associates continued to exercise human judgment, contextual understanding, and ethical oversight in their work.

Learning Objectives

The case is structured to achieve the following Learning Objectives:

• Understand how organizations can deploy generative AI for internal workforce productivity.
• Assess how reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) can improve enterprise AI systems
• Develop metrics for evaluating the success of enterprise generative AI initiatives

Keywords

Generative Artificial Intelligence; GenAI; Large Language Models; LLMs; Scaling; Enterprise AI; Human-AI Collaboration; Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback; Employee Experience; Digital Transformation; AI Adoption; Change Management; Responsible AI; Walmart; MyAssistant