Walmart AI Patent Signals Continued Pressure to Compete with Amazon
A patent from Walmart for an in-house machine learning development framework highlights that the company’s strategy to compete with Amazon extends to…

Walmart is bringing AI to brick-and-mortar.
The retail giant filed a patent application for a “machine learning framework.” Walmart’s patent details the infrastructure and method for transferring data between machine learning models, aiming to make it easier to gather data and save on time and resources.
“While application of machine learning algorithms can be beneficial for an organization, the startup costs can be very high for a number of reasons,” Walmart said in the filing.
Walmart’s filing specifically details how to transfer “feature data” between two models. The term feature data has a lot of potential meanings in Walmart’s contexts, though when relating to customers, the filing noted that it could include things like interactions, demographics or “identity mapping data.”
The tech itself is relatively simple: Walmart’s system uses a “configuration file” to identify exactly which of this feature data, along with a subset of related historical transaction data, is relevant and necessary to train a machine learning algorithm.
That data is then put into an “output file,” which is “configured to be transferred between at least two machine learning models.” Because these output files can be created easily and used to train several different models, the framework allows Walmart more easily develop and deploy models for things like customer targeting or predictive analytics.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Walmart take an interest in AI. The company had previously sought patents for ways to predict user acquisition and churn, as well as a personalized recommendation engine based on user transaction history. It also tested in-store AI to advise employees on how to sell products and rolled out an AI-powered logistics offering earlier this year.
Though this may seem like a sign that the retail industry is seeking to keep up with tech’s AI frenzy, smaller brick-and-mortar institutions seemingly aren’t in a rush to innovate, said Thomas Randall, advisory director at Info-Tech Research Group.
“I think for smaller stores, there’s less fear of missing out. They’re just trying to maintain profit levels against the volatile supply chain as it is,” he said. “Larger institutions … they’re still trying to find the right use cases themselves. I think it’s fair to be a bit of a laggard.”
A likely factor in Walmart’s push, however, is Amazon. Walmart has long faced competition from the e-commerce giant, upgrading its third-party online marketplace, launching its own subscription offering to rival Prime, and even testing its own drone delivery service.
That competition extends to its tech strategy, too: In recent years, Walmart backed away from Big Tech cloud services offerings by building its own in-house server infrastructure to handle its processing. Creating its own machine learning development infrastructure as this patent details is likely part of that bid for independence, too, said Randall.
“Because of the competitive environment, (Walmart) is having to put forward a lot of their own technologies to … allow them to keep competing with other large ecommerce stores like Amazon – which, of course, has got its entire ecosystem of AI infrastructure, foundational models and partnerships,” said Randall.