Chandhu Nair, senior vice president of stores, data, artificial intelligence and innovation at Lowe’s, walks the store — sometimes every week — to gain real-world feedback on the company’s AI-backed assistant Mylow.
“It’s a critical part of how we work,” Nair told Retail Dive in an interview, noting that stores are the heartbeat of the retailer’s business.
Lowe’s launched its AI-powered assistant Mylow about a year ago to help answer customers’ home improvement questions. The retailer also launched a version for store associates, called Mylow Companion, last May.
Home improvement is inherently a complex category for retail, which makes AI an even more exciting potential solution for it, according to Nair.
The home improvement retailer gets about a million questions a month between Mylow and Mylow Companion, Nair said. Given that Lowe’s has both DIY-focused and professional customers, that requires tailoring the technology to all types of questions and expertise levels.
“A lot of customers come into a Lowe’s store to do much more complex projects that they really don't have the expertise for,” Nair said, adding that those types of customers would often review several YouTube videos and read through blogs to help direct their project.
That’s a process that could now be synthesized into a home improvement assistant thanks to generative AI, according to Nair. Mylow consolidates guidance and relevant product suggestions into one space for the DIY customer.
For a professional customer who already has the background expertise for a project, the experience is meant to support a different type of inquiry.
“For them, it is very much [about] product availability in large quantities,” Nair added. “It is about being able to deliver the products to the job site on time, because they have to coordinate a whole bunch of things to make sure that that bathroom gets done, right? ... So we are trying to tailor our journeys tied to that for the pro customers.”
For those pro customers, they also often form relationships with their local pro desk Lowe’s associate — opening another avenue to tailor Mylow. The company has a pro-specific version of its associate AI suite to help employees handle their unique buying needs.
Pro-focused employees used to sometimes take a few hours to compile information and recommendations in preparation for calls with pro customers about their latest project needs. That process can now happen in under a minute, according to Nair.
“You can literally press a button as a product associate” through Pro Companion to help guide professional customers on product recommendations with the retailer’s AI capabilities, Nair said.
Another way the company has tailored Mylow and Mylow Companion is through language. The retailer launched Mylow with Spanish language capabilities for both voice and text-based inquiries, and it recently extended that capability to Mylow Companion in February.
“We [have] a lot of Spanish-speaking associates and customers,” Nair said. “So we needed to be able to enable both sides with that ... And that was a big part of feedback from the floor. So we continuously evolve and that same feature is also enabled online.”
It’s all part of the AI strategy at Lowe’s to not just build tech capabilities, but also drive adoption of new tools like Mylow.
“Driving adoption and impact was key,” Nair told Retail Dive. “How customers shop with us, that'll change, how we sell will change and how we work will change ... That simple framework gave us kind of an anchoring point to say: What retail functions should evolve and what kind of capabilities should be built out and adopted to drive, truly, growth of the business?”
