EP 116: Using Gen AI in the Enterprise Space - Insights From Walmart

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How can enterprise companies use Generative AI? I think so. Many times on the Everyday AI show we talk about a lot of small business entrepreneurs solopreneurs. But I'm excited today because we can get a look from someone on the inside about how big companies, enterprise companies are using generative AI. I'm excited today for our guest from Walmart. But before we get to that, I want to start today as we do every single day, with AI news. And if you're joining us live, thank you. As a reminder, this is the daily live stream podcast and free daily newsletter. So if you're joining us live, make sure to get your questions in about whatever you want to know about how enterprise companies are using gen AI. Let me know if you're joining on the podcast. Thank you. As well, make sure to check out the show notes as always for a ton of other information. But let's, let's talk about what's going on in the world of AI news first. So Meta making a huge splash with AI and advertising. So Meta just announced its first generative AI features for advertisers. So the new features allow advertisers to use AI to essentially do everything when it comes to ads. So creating backgrounds, expand images, you know, generate multiple versions of ad text, a little of everything. And AI can even generate up to six variations of text based on the advertiser's original copy. So this is an interesting move from Meta as we see advertisers take some of the, or sorry media companies take some of these basic things that people are doing in other platforms and working them into their own advertising suite. So pretty, pretty exciting news there from Meta platforms that will affect obviously Facebook, Instagram, anywhere you can advertise on their platforms. Second, Adobe. Yeah, Adobe. Don't forget about Adobe. They're making a splash in AI photo editing so they teased Project Stardust, a new object Aware editing engine. So the Adobe Max Creativity Conference is next week, so expect to see some more kind of Adobe leaks Adobe News, especially right after Canva just had their kind of magic AI announcement yesterday. We covered that in the newsletter. A host of 10 different AI very user friendly AI features inside of Canvas platform. So it's, it's going to be going a lot of, a lot of back and forth here. We're going to be seeing over the next couple of weeks on, on whose kind of AI Design AI features and the design platform are better and probably take take a look at today's newsletter. We're probably going to give an over an overview of Canvas. Last but not least, have the tables turned on AI maybe. So, uh, new research shows how humans can read the minds of AI and control it better. Yes, that's right. Not AI controlling the minds of humans, but how humans can read and control AI better. So a new study from the center for AI Safety just released a new paper which looks at ways humans can better understand and control AI technologies. So this paper they released looked at the ways that humans can detect when AI systems are telling the truth or lies and when they also behave morally or immorally. Wow, I'm excited about that.

Right?

We always see and we hear and we fear. Oh, can AI read our minds? And you know, there's actually been some studies out of, you know, research universities and hospitals that show yeah, they kind of can. So we're turning the tables on uai. You can't trick us. Hey, thank you. Thank you everyone for joining. I'm excited. You know, everyone's ready. Good morning, Peter. Good morning. Thank you everyone for, for joining. But you didn't come here to listen to me ramble about the AI news. You came to hear about ways generative AI can be used at the enterprise level. So very excited to bring on my guest for today. Please help me welcome Jack Adams, the. He is an associate merchant and Gen AI champion at Walmart. Jack, thank you for joining us.

Yeah, thank you for having me, Jordan. It's, it's awesome to be here. And I, and I like your, your bit about the mind reading of AI. We're taking a step to fight back. We're fighting back already.

Yeah, I think, I think there's been so many things with, with, you know, the AI reading human mind. So, you know, when I saw that piece of news, I'm like, all right, humans, we're going to chalk, chalk one up for us, right?

That's awesome.

Yeah. So Jack, I mean, I, I guess we don't have to introduce Walmart at all because people know what Walmart is. We all shop there all the time. But maybe tell a little bit everyone kind of a little bit about your role and kind of what you even do as a Gen AI champion there.

Yeah. Yeah. So I've been, I've been in the Walmart ecosystem for about three years now. I was an intern for, for two summers in a row actually, while I was at University of Alabama getting my degree in math and finance. I actually did about six months in Walmart stores as I was finishing up my degree. And then I just completed a 12 month rotational program called the Associate Merchant Development program which essentially prepares you to be a merchant at Walmart and what merchants do. Essentially I help determine the assortment that goes on the shelf for my category and a variety of other responsibilities as well. And I'm essentially evaluated on the P and L of that business in addition to those responsibilities. About six months ago I got involved in the Generative AI space at Walmart. Really outside of our global tech organization, nobody was really Talking about Gen AI, nobody was really thinking about Gen AI until sort of ChatGPT 3.5 emerged and then, and then ChatGPT 4, I identified sort of a low hanging fruit use case in helping optimize our site's content quality. So basically the way our product names, product short descriptions, product long descriptions, basically you as a customer, what you see on site when shopping for a product. I developed a system using Generative AI to help optimize that content and it's been super successful so far. That's sort of how I, I'd say that was sort of my in to the space. And then since then I've been involved in a variety of other generative AI initiatives as well, as well as sort of just on the training side of things as well. So I'm touring all around the company, both within the merchandising organization and outside of that organization, leading both short and long sessions, workshops, educational seminars, et cetera, to all different functional groups across the organization, trying to make sure that we're at least all to a baseline level of knowledge when it comes to generative AI and what's going on in the world and sort of where we're headed?

Wow, I love it. And I think there's such a great example right there. If you, if you missed that little piece there, Jack used AI to solve a problem at the company. Even though there, you know, may not have been the kind of the architecture or that setup. I think that's a great use case. And for some companies, especially if you're smaller, you might be that person, right? Maybe your company hasn't even embraced Generative AI yet and you're hearing that. So I'm actually curious, Jack, do you have any advice for other people out there that are maybe in that position that maybe they don't work at a big company as big as Walmart, but they're interested in Gen AI and they know how to use it? How can people take that first step Kind of like you did to create solutions with generative AI.

Yeah, that's a great question. I think that, I wouldn't say that I'm an expert in that or anything. I'm still very young and I'm still learning every single day. Something that I have learned in my first year though is that there are a lot of things that people are never going to tell you to do when you're just starting out in your career, but nobody's going to complain when you go add a bunch of value. So like nobody, nobody told me, hey Jack, go like go figure out how we can use generative AI to optimize content quality. Nobody told me, hey Jack, get involved in a variety of different educational programs. Nobody told me to do any of that. Right. And so nobody cares about your career as much as you do. And if you're really passionate about something like generative AI, go out and find the low hanging fruit and then execute change.

I love that, I love that. Just hey, print that out, everyone put that on a banner, you know. But one thing that I've, I've actually loved following Walmart's progress with generative AI because out of all the big companies, you know, that most of us experience or use or shop at, you know, daily or weekly, I think Walmart's actually putting out a lot of information on how they're using generative AI where other companies, you know, maybe we're not quite sure. You know Jack, I would love to talk a little bit about kind of the generative AI playground. You know, I've read about this a little bit, but explain to everyone what that is and you know, kind of how Walmart is taking advantage of this playground that they've set up.

Yeah, so the generative AI playground is a system that Walmart Home office associates have the ability to go in and access today. It's essentially, it's just a UI built into our, it's built into our internal firewall and we've partnered with Microsoft OpenAI, Google so that within that generative generative AI playground you have the option to select GPT 3.5, GPT 4, Google, Bard and I believe more models are coming soon. I believe even open source models are coming soon. And you're able to interface with, with that just as you would interface with GPT 3.5 or GPT 4 or Bard or whatever you prefer to use without the FE of any internal data you're inputting into that system leaking beyond our firewalls. So it's been an excellent space for Both associates that, you know, had competence in external tools like GPT4 to come into the Walmart ecosystem and begin to experiment with work related use cases. It's also been an awesome space where like, if I'm going around and leading an educational workshop, I can encourage everyone in the room to hop on, try out the playground, maybe do 15 minutes of unstructured prompting where they're just sort of seeing what's possible and then I can provide them with some prompt structure, provide some context, give the AI system a role, give it a little more detail about what you want it to do. And it's really cool to see people within a 20 or 30 minute session in that playground really figure out where it can go. And then what happens after that is people start to ideate and people say, oh, is it trained on this? Is it trained on this? Is it trained on this? And I say no, but let's go, let's go submit to our generative AI enablement team exactly what you need it to do. And we'll, we'll go, fine tune a model exactly for what you're talking about, you know, and so it's a great, just sort of starting point for exploration for the organization.

Yeah, I love that. And, and you know, maybe, maybe give, you know, our listeners and viewers an example of, you know, what someone might use that generative AI playground for. Is this, you know, as an example, maybe is this, you know, people in the marketing department ideating for new ad campaigns. Is this to, you know, help, you know, compare different vendors? I mean, I mean, what exactly, you know, might people be using this playground for? And how does it help employees at Walmart?

Yeah, I mean we kind of say like at this point the generative AI playground and generative AI in general is the starting point and not the ending point. So it's a lot of those starting point use cases at this time, at least within that system. I would say it's a lot of email drafting, it's a lot of brainstorming, it's a lot of product development ideating, at least within the merchandising organization. And then I would imagine too, I'm not as plugged in on marketing use cases, but I would imagine too that there's brainstorming campaigns and, and it's, it's surprisingly good at like, like if you ask ChatGPT to create a brand out of thin air, like it's, it's surprisingly good at that. So it's, it's happening all over the organization. I know, I know Legal has been really involved as well. The amount of, you know, PDF format text that they have to go in and analyze that they can now run through a system like this. The time save unlock here is just going to be insane. Wow.

And you know, maybe for those listening who are, you know, working, working at enterprise companies because it's, it's also very curious to me because so many early on, right when you know, chat GBT kind of, you know, first hit its peak, I'd say, you know, early in 2023, so many companies were very quick to just bought like ban, right ban generative AI because they didn't understand it. And it seems like Walmart was not in that field. They embraced it and they're using it to their advantage. So can you maybe not even from your official Walmart role, but can you maybe even just talk a little bit about the enterprise landscape and why some companies are maybe adopting to gen AI faster than others?

Yeah, I mean you saw early on I think it was just the idea of newness there and like it was so unknown when, when 3.5 and 4 emerged and, and even now it really is so unknown. People don't have a lot of clarity on where the, the outputs are coming from. People don't have a lot of clarity on the legal and ethical complexities around this space. There hasn't been probably sufficient regulatory guidance passed down on what organizations should and could do. And so I think a lot of companies, and especially, I mean you saw with Samsung and Target and a couple of other key enterprises that there were issues with data leaks through third party systems. And I think organizations saw that happening and they wanted to put the brakes on because they couldn't control what was happening at the time. Um, fortunately Walmart didn't run into any major issues like that and I know several teams that worked really, really hard to stand up that generative AI playground early and it wasn't perfect when it, when it launched and it's still not perfect. And we have a long, long way to go and it's going to be an uphill battle but standing up that internal environment where, where associates could go play essentially with no fear of losing their job over what they input into the system. That's, that's when things turned around for Walmart. And I know that our leadership, Doug McMillan, our CEO, Donna Morris, our chief people officer, Cheryl I knowa who leads tech for Sam's Club now there's been several major, major champions of this technology since the very beginning. I know that, that Walmart historically has been sort of a second mover when it comes to emerging technology. If you think about E commerce, you know, we're still sort of catching up to Amazon in that regard, but we're making significant strides there as well. And I think leadership didn't want that to be the case with this technology. And so the direction has kind of been let's run, let's run safely and minimize risk, but let's run. And that's been really, really cool to be a part of.

And you know, speaking of that, because, you know, we've been talking a little bit so far about different ways that Walmart's using it for kind of internal purposes, which I think is, is fantastic. But that's, that's not where the story ends here. But you know, maybe Jack, I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about ways that, that Walmart is already and is planning to kind of tap into generative AI also on the customer side. Because I've seen some news stories, you know, about kind of a smart AI chat that's available on the website. I'm sure it's, you know, continually changing and improving. But maybe talk a little bit about how Walmart is leveraging generative AI to make it better for its, its millions of customers, you know, throughout the world.

Yeah, definitely. I think the reason you've seen the majority of the use cases spring up on the associate productivity side of things is just because the lower hanging fruit is there and it's also relatively safer to, you know, initiate associate facing use cases as the customer's experience is the top priority. And there's a lot of questions around, you know, is the customer ready for generative AI? What degree are they ready for generative AI? But you will see a variety of different customer facing use cases come to play here within the next couple of years, one of which is a generative AI enhanced search function. So you think about the way that you might search things in the Walmart app or on Walmart.com at the moment and you might say barbecue. And then in the search bar, what might be returned is probably a couple of barbecue sauces, maybe a couple of barbecue grills. It doesn't really understand what you're trying to get at when you type in barbecue. Right? And what this natural language search can help us do is convert that barbecue search result to. You're able to type in, I am having a barbecue, there are 12 people. It's going to be outside and the system will know, okay, you need hot dogs and hamburgers and buns and you Might need a spatula and do you need a charcoal grill and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right. Like it can help you create the whole event and basically remove friction from the process of whatever you're trying to buy. So I think that's going to be great. I think there's probably going to be initiatives to help customers find products within large store footprints. I think you'll see a variety of other initiatives come out within the next year, two years, three years. I know teams are working very, very hard.

You know, just Jack, that, that to me sounds, sounds wild. Right? Like it seems like such a. Oh my gosh, of course. Like, like, like, like use case, you know, for Walmart to have something like that because not only, obviously from the company standpoint, I think it's, it's, it's gonna really help sales, but also I think it's a win, win because that makes things so much easier for the consumer as well. Because I'm sure if, you know, in your example, I'm having a backyard barbecue, you know, A, B and C. I'm guessing this, this natural language processing, you know, smart chat agent from Walmart. I'm sure there's a better name than that, but I'm sure it's going to think of things that us humans wouldn't think of that's going to give us a better experience, right?

Exactly, exactly. Yeah. There's so much data in Walmart systems, you know, and it's sort of just, there's so much latent potential in the data that is there. Obviously it's super important that we're prioritizing data privacy and data responsibility. But I think that generative AI is going to go so far in helping us create experiences, assortments that are very, very tailored to local and individual customer needs. I think that one of the huge challenges of Walmart is how do you retain this overarching Walmart brand across 4,000 plus stores across the country while creating local experiences that satisfy the needs of customers? Right. I think this is going to go a long, long way in helping us achieve that goal.

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You know, again, let's, let's maybe take off the Walmart hat here just for one second because I'd love to, you know, as someone I know you are, you are always learning more, you're always sharing more on generative AI. But you know, when it comes to just gen AI in enterprise, where do you see this going? Right? Like, like the example of the Walmart chat for customers. I love that. But you know, where else, especially on the enterprise, do you see this going? Because, you know, we kind of talked about the narrative early on where, you know, companies at first were like, nope, we're not touching it. And now it's, you know, leaders such as Walmart are taking advantage of it and now other enterprise companies are maybe scrambling to catch up and they're saying, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we've got a, you know, we were maybe wrong, you know, a year ago to, to say, you know, no, no, this, know that. But where do you see this, this landscape heading especially for those, those large companies, you know, is, are they all going to have their own, you know, large language models in house? Is everyone going to be, you know, acquiring small companies to help create their own. Like, how do you see this, this space in general playing out?

Yeah, it's, that's a really interesting question. And again, I would not consider myself to be an expert. I cannot read the future. I only know what I know from my experience. And what I'll say is that I think that a lot of the companies, even the companies that probably you have top of mind as companies that have said no, have banned ChatGPT, have taken a stance against AI. I don't think that any of them are truly saying or if there are any of them, I don't think very many of them are truly saying, yeah, let's, let's just avoid exploring generative AI. Let's avoid investing in generative AI. It was probably much more of a, this is very early stages, let's pump the brakes and see what's going on here and then let's make educated investments factoring in risk. So I think that most everyone will play in this space. It's like, it's like asking if, if all enterprises are going to play in the Internet space like in 1997. But, but the question is your question about, you know, will companies create their own foundation models? Will companies buy out other foundation models? Will they, you know, how will they move forward? And, and I think there's going to be a mixed bag. I mean I think you saw one of Walmart's major competitors partnered with, partnered with the foundational model within the last week or two. That was really big news. That's a very different approach than what Walmart has taken. We are very cognizant of the idea of vendor lock in and the fact that with this AI hype cycle, thousands and thousands of AI startups, even foundation models have come up over the last six months and continue to come out now. And although this is a technology that is here for the long term, there will be a short term consolidation and I think companies should be really, really wary of locking in any sort of contractual agreements with AI third parties that may be at risk down the line. I think that the strategy is to make yourself as agile as possible to wherever this space leads you. And that's what we're trying to do. Not to tie it back to Walmart, but that's just the lens through which I view it.

It's, it's such a good point though because even, even you know, take like if, if we're not even talking enterprise, I think that's even a great mindset and a great piece of advice Jack just gave there. Because you know, the reality is this, right. You know, Chat GPT is coming out with their, you know, and they've already rolled out their enterprise version. Microsoft Bing Chat enterprise version, you know, Microsoft 365 copilot is coming soon. So yeah, so many of these smaller, you know, you know, startup gen AI companies, there may or may not be a utility for them, right? Like, like Jack, I'd love to hear your take on that. You know, even specifically with, with new features in Chat GPT, you know, do you, do you see like once these big releases are out in the wild, you know, specifically those three I mentioned, are we going to be talking about these, these smaller models or smaller startups? Less.

I wish that I could say no.

I love it, I love it.

I think that, I think that Competition is great for the space and I do think that there is merit to, especially to open source. However, I think that with the amount of data that OpenAI has captured and that Google has captured over the last 20 years, let's just say I think it will be a very tough battle competing with either of them long term. So much money, so much resources and so much data behind those two projects and it's hard for me to imagine that they won't be able to drive costs down enough in their model to make it a feasible solution for the majority of, of enterprises across the world.

I love it. I love it. You know, I can't. We're actually sorry and apologize everyone joining us live. Our commenting system is, is not really working but you know, Mike just said, you know, wise beyond his years for Jack because I think that was a great take there. Uh, one, one question we do have here. Let me, let me scroll and get it here. So, so Ben, great question and uh, you know, asking you know, is is this technology, you know, such as chat GPT, you know, at Walmart, is it being used for things like, you know, supply chain inventory? Like I guess are some of these, you know, new technologies, are they being incorporated where presumably like you, you all have had these systems, you know, up and running for, for decades. So you know, are you are teams using these kind of the same type of systems that the rest of us are using on a day to day basis.

When it comes to supply chain and inventory management? Definitely. Walmart has been using AI in supply chain and inventory management for a long time. Not necessarily generative AI, but I again I'm not as plugged in on the supply chain side of things, but I do know that there are initiatives underway to integrate and enable generative AI over there. And then what was the follow up to that question, Jordan?

I think, I think you hit, I think you hit both, both sides of it there. It was, yeah, in inventory management and supply chain. So yeah, I think, I think we covered it all right, so we've, we've been a little bit all over the place, Jack. We've, we, we've learned about what Walmart's doing both, you know, for its employees in the generative AI playground. We've talked about how consumers and shoppers, you know, are going to be able to better leverage some of this, these generative AI offerings, you know, being able to chat with the, you know, kind of Walmart assistant. But I'd really love what is your, you know, as we wrap up here, what is your one Kind of takeaway, maybe for people, whether they're enterprise employees trying to, you know, create kind of some initiatives to push something forward, or maybe they're just business owners, you know, trying to best use generative AI. So in your experience, what is your piece of advice for individuals to kind of leverage this technology and move their careers or companies forward?

That's a really tough question. And I would say that the thing that I have gotten the most value from is honestly, through my personal life, I have learned to manipulate the machine much, much, much more effectively. Like, I go direct to ChatGPT4 for literally everything. My scheduling, meal planning, fitness planning, a variety of other points within my day. I'm using ChatGPT4 to help with. And through that, I've basically learned how to get what I want out of any given model. And I've taken that to work with me and it makes me much, much, much more effective at work. But I would say stay on top of the space, like, curate your social media feed. Social media, especially LinkedIn, is an underrated way of staying on top of what's going on. It really doesn't take much more than 10 or 15 minutes a day of browsing. And if you have your feed set up correctly, you should know what's going on. Jordan is great for that, and I can recommend several other accounts as well. I'm sure Jordan can as well. But yeah, just play and explore and learn how to manipulate the machine better is my one big advice. And then I have one more kind of like a, kind of a preacher moment that, that I'd like to share too, if that's helped. I think that if you look past, if you look into the past at, at any major technological innovation and you, you picture the world like it's a wave, right? Like a sound wave or a light wave, with the top of that wave being what's possible, that is good, and the bottom of that wave being what's possible that is bad or evil. Any emerging technology, any disruptive technology is going to expand the amplitude of that wave. So it's going to expand what's possible, that's good, and it's going to expand what's possible that is evil. And I think that's especially true with AI. I think that historically, just because of. I don't know if it's the way our economic system is set up or what it is, but I think we've done a very, very good job as society at reaping the upside to that increase in amplitude. I don't think we've done a very good job at mitigating the downside to that increase in amplitude. And I'm worried about what happens with this technology if we don't make concerted efforts to get out in front of that now. And so sort of my, my preacher moment thing is to say, like, it's going to be my generation, it's going to be your generation. It's going to be probably everyone that's on this call that these major questions and these major issues are going to be up to heading into the future. And my whole thing is just don't bury your head in the sand. Stay attached to the space, develop an opinion, whether it's positive or negative, and stand for it hard, y'.

All. We just wow. We got not only in today's episode, an inside look at how one of the largest companies in the world is using generative AI, but we got ample bullet board motivational advice from our, our friend Jack Adams. Jack, thank you so much for joining the Everyday AI Show. We really appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

All right, hey. And hey. As a quick reminder, everyone, we covered so much like and, and there's so much more to cover. There's a lot of other really great ways that we just didn't have time to to share about how Walmart's using generative AI. So if you haven't already, make sure you go to your everyday AI.com Sign up for that free daily newsletter. We're going to be recapping everything we talked about with Jack, all the things we couldn't get to, and a whole lot more. So make sure you go sign up for that and I hope to see you back for another day of Everyday AI. Thanks, y'.

All.

And that's a wrap for today's edition of Everyday AI. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating. It helps keep us going for a little more AI magic. Visit your everydayai.com and sign up to our daily newsletter so you don't get left behind. Go break some barriers and we'll see you next time.