Walmart Testing New AI-Enabled Store On Long Island

LEVITTOWN, N.Y. -- Over the past few months, the Walmart Neighborhood Market in Levittown has been quietly transforming. With artificial intelligence-enabled cameras, interactive displays and a massive data center, the store is now on the cutting-edge of the future of retail.

Walmart says the store is a unique shopping environment designed to explore the possibilities artificial intelligence can contribute to the store experience. It’s Walmart’s new Intelligent Retail Lab – or “IRL” for short.

IRL is designed to see how AI, which is already shaping the e-commerce marketplace, can be applied to brick-and-mortar stores. It chose the Levittown store as it is one of the largest and busiest Walmart Neighborhood Markets in the country.

“We’ve got 50,000 square feet of real retail space. The scope of what we can do operationally is so exciting,” said Mike Hanrahan, CEO of IRL. “Technology enables us to understand so much more – in real time – about our business. When you combine all the information we’re gathering in IRL with Walmart’s 50-plus years of expertise in running stores, you can create really powerful experiences that improve the lives of both our customers and associates.”

IRL is set up to gather information about what’s happening inside the store through a massive array of sensors, cameras and processors. All this hardware is connected by enough cabling to scale Mt. Everest five times and capture data equal to three years’ worth of music (27,000 hours) each second, Walmart says.

According to Hanrahan, the first thing this equipment will help the team focus on is product inventory and availability. The IRL team will use real-time information to explore efficiencies that will allow associates to know more precisely when to restock products, so items are available on shelves when they’re needed.

“Customers can be confident about products being there, about the freshness of produce and meat. Those are the types of things that AI can really help with,” Hanrahan said.

According the Walmart, a combination of cameras and real-time analytics will automatically trigger out-of-stock notifications to alert associates when to re-stock. This sounds simple, but it means the store has to automatically detect the product on the shelf, recognize the specific product (meaning, decipher the differences between one and two pounds of ground beef, for example) and compare the quantities on the shelf to the upcoming sales demand.

The result, Walmart says, is that associates won’t have to continually comb the store to replace products running low on the shelves. They’ll know what to bring out of the back room before customers show up. The goal is that shelves will always be stocked when customers come to shop.

IRL will be in data-gathering mode in its early days. The focus will be on learning from the technology and not implementing changes to operations in haste.

“You can’t be overly enamored with the shiny object element of AI,” Hanrahan said. “There are a lot of shiny objects out there that are doing things we think are unrealistic to scale and probably, long-term, not beneficial for the consumer.”

In addition to the cameras and sensors, there is also new technology that customers can interact with directly. Small educational kiosks are interspersed throughout the store so customers can learn how AI is helping them shop. A Welcome Center at the front end allows customers to dive deeper into technical specifications and common questions.

Customers can also get a close-up look at the Data Center, where the store's servers are housed. Flanking the plexiglass windows are two large displays – one of which encourages participants to move around and learn how technology reacts to body positioning.