Home improvement retailer Lowe’s is using AI for more and more tasks, but CEO Marvin Ellison says he isn’t looking to the tech to cut labor costs.
Ellison said he views tech less as a means to replace jobs and more as a way to increase revenue, speaking at Morgan Stanley’s Consumer and Retail Conference on Tuesday.
“Rather than thinking about it solely as a job replacement tool, how do you think about reducing someone’s workload by 50%?” he said.
“Can we now free a merchant up who’s spending 50% of their time building spreadsheets, responding to emails, communicating with suppliers? If AI can take that task away, can you now take 50% of that merchant’s time, and they can focus on sales-driving initiatives?” he continued. “That’s what we’re trying to understand.”
Ellison said that back when he took over as CEO in 2018, the home improvement industry was in an era of “binders and whiteboards” that has since been supplanted — at his company, at least — with a powerful suite of digital tools, including a partnership with OpenAI.
Indeed, now the development of that very tech stack is seeing efficiency improvements thanks to AI-assisted coding and approval, he said. Ellison has also said AI resources enable store employees to be more helpful on the sales floor.
The investments are also paying off directly with customers via the Mylow chatbot in the Lowe’s app.
“We had a couple of questions, like on Thanksgiving, ‘My stove is not working. It will not heat.” Ellison said. “Luckily, we were able to give them some really good advice on things they can do to check to determine how they can repair.”
“It’s a lot more difficult than asking what aisle the shampoo is on,” he added.
While Ellison has been one of the more prominent retail executives engaging publicly with AI issues, he’s by no means alone.
“It’s very clear that AI is going to change literally every job,” outgoing Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said in September.
At the same Morgan Stanley conference on Tuesday, Walmart CFO John David Rainey likened the adoption of AI to the advent of spreadsheet tools like Microsoft Excel a generation ago — albeit on a much broader and quicker timeline.
“The best performers were those that learned it the most and used it to perform their job,” he said.
“AI is going to give people tools to improve their jobs,” Rainey added. “In some cases, I think it’s fair to say jobs may go away. In other cases, new jobs will be developed.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
The post Lowe’s CEO says AI isn’t just about replacing jobs appeared first on Business Insider.
