It’s no surprise that the coronavirus pandemic has changed the way we shop, especially when it comes to groceries. Grocery delivery apps experienced a record number of downloads in March 2020, and by the following month, Walmart Grocery (which is now integrated into the Walmart app) surpassed Amazon as the No. 1 shopping app on both Google Play and the App Store. But even as pandemic restrictions have eased, consumers are still using ordering groceries for delivery or pickup more frequently than they were pre-pandemic.
As Walmart’s grocery delivery services have continued to boom, posing competition to companies like Amazon and Instacart, the tech that Walmart uses has expanded too. Today, Walmart shared information about how it’s training its AI to make smarter substitutions in online grocery orders.
Bringing this technology to grocery delivery isn’t novel by any means. Last May, Walmart reported how it used to AI to determine eligibility for its Express delivery service, which was brand new at the time. A year into the United States’ coronavirus outbreak, Instacart engineers reported that they crunched “petabytes daily to predict what will be on grocery shelves and even how long it will take to find parking.”
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