待翻譯：Artificial Intelligence at Lowes

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Lowe’s Companies operates as a Fortune 100 home improvement retailer, with fiscal year 2025 sales that exceeded $86 billion. The company employs approximately 300,000 associates and operates more than 1,750 stores, 540 branches, and 120 distribution centers across the United States. Lowe’s reported 16 million customers weekly across an omnichannel network that spans in-store, online, and Pro contractor channels. By 2026, the company’s loyalty ecosystem had grown to over 30 million MyLowe’s Rewards members in its annual report filing. Professional contractors represented roughly 30% of that customer base in 2024, a segment Lowe’s has identified as a strategic growth priority alongside its core DIY retail business. Since 2021, Lowe’s has built formal AI partnerships with technology providers including OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Palantir, moving beyond pilot programs into company-wide deployments that touch both its workforce and its customer base. Company leadership has tied these AI investments directly to customer experience and sales performance metrics on recent quarterly earnings calls, signaling that AI has moved from an innovation-lab experiment to a reported driver of business results. This article will examine how Lowe’s has applied AI technology to its business and industry through two use cases: Closing the Knowledge Gap through Mylow Companion — Lowe’s uses a generative AI assistant embedded in associate devices to give every store worker instant, expert-level product knowledge, raising customer satisfaction scores and reducing the cost and risk of high frontline turnover. Speeding Up Pro Estimates through Automated Document Digitization — Lowe’s uses AI-powered SKU matching and document digitization to turn contractors’ raw jobsite notes into quote-ready material lists in minutes, in order to win a larger share of high-value Pro orders before competitors respond. We begin by examining how Lowe’s applies its generative AI assistant, Mylow Companion, to address the knowledge and consistency gap created by frontline retail turnover. Closing the Knowledge Gap through Mylow Companion Home improvement retail carries a structural knowledge problem: a customer asking a paint-department associate about mulch coverage for a garden project is asking someone outside their area of expertise. When that answer isn’t available, the outcome isn’t neutral — it shows up as a lost sale, a return trip to a competitor, or a product returned because it was the wrong fit for the job. Industry research estimates that negative in-store experiences, often driven by undertrained or overwhelmed staff, cost retailers $262 billion in lost sales annually. High frontline turnover compounds the problem. The retail industry posted a total separations rate of 4.1% as of March 2026, well above the 3.0% average across all sectors, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Every departure resets the knowledge clock: replacing a single frontline retail employee costs roughly $10,000–$12,000 once recruiting, onboarding, and lost productivity during ramp-up are factored in, and one retailer’s internal data found it took nearly two months for new hires to reach full performance benchmarks — two months of comparatively weaker service and lost sales per new hire, multiplied across every location and every departure. For a company operating at Lowe’s scale, that isn’t a training footnote — it’s a recurring, quantifiable drag on both sales conversion and customer retention at scale. Lowe’s designed Mylow Companion to close the knowledge gap. Chandhu Nair, Lowe’s SVP of Data, AI and Innovation, has described the tool’s purpose as helping “an associate get to the right answers if the customer is asking a question” outside their own department. Notably, the tool did not start as a customer-service product: it began as an internal chatbot for analyzing store sales metrics, used only by managers, before a Lowe’s business leader proposed extending that knowledge layer to every associate. Mylow Companion runs on the same generative AI foundation as Lowe’s customer-facing assistant, Mylow, built in partnership with OpenAI. It draws on Lowe’s own product catalog, inventory data, and project guidance content. It is accessed through natural, conversational prompts on associate sales-floor devices, supporting both typed and voice input. Video: Lowe’s Deploys Generative AI for In-Store Associates | Shelly Palmer on Fox 5’s Good Day New York (Source: Shelley Palmer) The workflow for associates changes as follows:: Instead of paging a specialist or telling a customer to “check with someone else,” an associate can query the tool in real time, in front of the customer. New hires gain access to the same depth of product knowledge as tenured staff from their first shift, rather than building it gradually through months of on-the-job exposure. Lowe’s built a thumbs up/down feedback control into every response, reviewed daily by the product team, which surfaced an early usability problem: associates strongly preferred voice input over typing, since a customer standing in front of them made looking down at a phone impractical. Engineering prioritized fixing the voice feature specifically because of that daily-reviewed signal. This use case is deployed at full scale, not in pilot. Lowe’s rolled out Mylow Companion to all associates across its more than 1,700 stores in May 2025, which the company describes as the first at-scale implementation of this kind of tool in retail. Lowe’s has since reported roughly a 200 basis point increase in its internal likelihood-to-recommend score tied to the tool, a figure CEO Marvin Ellison echoed as a 200 basis point lift in customer satisfaction, and on the company’s Q4 2025 earnings call he characterized the tool’s effect on customer service as “dramatic,” with customer experience metrics up roughly 2% in stores where associates actively use it. EVP of Stores Joe McFarland noted on an earlier earnings call that associate adoption outpaced expectations. Lowe’s has not published a specific figure for reduced new-hire ramp time, despite citing faster onboarding as an original goal of the tool. Speeding Up Pro Estimates through Automated Document Digitization Professional contractors operate under a structural inefficiency. Project quotes typically originate as handwritten notes, jobsite photos, or informal spreadsheets that must be manually converted into an itemized, priced order before a customer can approve the work. That conversion step sits between a completed walkthrough and a signed contract, and its speed and accuracy directly affect whether a contractor wins the job. Contractors who submit formal written quotes win up to 30% more jobs than those relying on verbal estimates, according to FMI research. The stakes for Lowe’s are tied to where its growth is actually coming from. The Pro segment climbed from roughly 22% of Lowe’s revenue in 2023 to about 40% by 2025, and Lowe’s 2025 acquisition of Foundation Building Materials was aimed at capturing more of the roughly $250 billion U.S. professional building market. A contractor who loses hours reconciling a paper list into a formal quote is not simply working inefficiently — that delay creates an opening for a competitor, or a rival supplier, to deliver the same quote faster. Lowe’s launched Material Lists in May 2026 to remove that friction. Que Vance, Lowe’s EVP of Pro and Home Services, tied the tool’s rationale to the contractor’s own economics rather than to Lowe’s operational convenience, noting that every minute a Pro spends manually building an estimate or organizing a material list is a minute taken away from serving customers and growing their business. The system uses SKU matching and automated list digitization, built by Lowe’s internal technology team, to read unstructured input — handwritten notes, photographs, spreadsheets, and other supported file formats — and convert it into an organized, priced product list. The tool supports both English and Spanish input, a detail consistent with Lowe’s broader positioning to capture share among its fast-growing Latino contractor customer base. Video: Lowe’s Boosts Pro Efficiency with AI-Driven Material Lists, a New Tool That Delivers Quotes in Mins (Source: Lowes Newsroom) For the Pro customer, the workflow changes in three concrete ways: A jobsite list scrawled by hand or photographed on a phone no longer needs to be retyped into a Lowe’s order form — the system reads it directly. Estimating and quoting, previously a manual, error-prone step squeezed between other back-office tasks, compresses into a process measured in minutes rather than hours. Fewer manual entry errors mean fewer pricing disputes or missing materials discovered mid-project, reducing costly change orders. Material Lists sits inside a broader Pro-focused AI stack, alongside Blueprint Takeoffs, which generates material lists and estimates directly from project plans, and Pro Extended Aisle, which expands product availability for Pro orders beyond what is on the shelf. That pattern — several purpose-built AI tools addressing different points in the same contractor workflow — suggests Lowe’s is treating the Pro segment as a connected product line rather than a set of isolated features. This use case is newer and less proven at scale than Mylow Companion. Lowe’s has stated that it expects Material Lists to improve close rates on larger orders, but as of this writing the company has not published a specific figure for quote-turnaround-time reduction, order volume lift, or close-rate improvement tied to the tool. Given that Material Lists launched only in May 2026, that absence of hard numbers likely reflects the tool’s early maturity rather than a disclosure gap.