Walmart just opened a 50,000 square foot store of the future - see inside
Walmart just opened a 50,000 square foot store of the future - see inside
Welcome to Walmart IRL — or Intelligent Retail Lab.
Walmart transitioned a 50,000 square foot Neighborhood Market in Levittown, New York for the project.
The new concept is designed to test the use of artificial intelligence in retail stores.
First up: product inventory and availability. The store will use a combination of both cameras and analytics to trigger out-of-stock alerts for employees when a customer takes the last item, so the store can quickly restock.
To power that, the store has its own attached data center with 100 servers behind a glass wall that customers can see and interact with.
There are also educational screens customers can interact with, to learn more about what Walmart is doing differently in this store.
Two large displays enable customers to interact with it using their bodies.
The 100 servers contain 400 GPUs and 10 cooling towers.
IRL isn't just customer-focused, and the AI-enabled benefits will change the game for Walmart's employees as well.