Retailers are increasingly employing artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize their customers’ shopping experience. Walmart is using AI “super agents,” such as its “Marty” AI assistant, to save time for both consumers and employees. Walmart is also invested in physical and spatial AI, pointing to the company’s use of digital twins (a virtual copy of any physical object or space) in its stores. Using digital twin technology powered by spatial AI, Walmart can “detect, diagnose and remediate issues up to two weeks in advance,” Brandon Ballard, group director for real estate at Walmart US, said. Using this technology comes with big savings, according to Ballard. “Last year, we cut all of our emergency alerts by 30% and we reduced our maintenance spend in refrigeration by 19% across Walmart US,” he added. This is happening against the backdrop of a wider shift in retail, with Amazon seeing generative AI use skyrocket by 3,300% during this year’s Prime Day event. And Google Cloud AI, has teamed with body care retailer Lush to visually identify projects without packaging, thus cutting down on the expense of training new employees. “At its core, retail is a physical business,” said Alex de Vigan, CEO and founder of Nfinite, which provides large-scale visual data for training spatial and physical AI models. “We’ve seen retailers use digital twins to reduce setup time for new promotions, reallocate labor more efficiently, and improve robotic picking accuracy, small gains that add up quickly when margins are under stress,” he said. This is happening at a time when Walmart is reconfiguring its physical and digital assets to entice third-party sellers