TLDR: Lowe’s is integrating direct end-user feedback into the development and refinement of its artificial intelligence tools. This strategy, part of a broader business transformation, aims to boost market share, enhance customer experiences, and achieve significant operational efficiencies by ensuring AI applications are practical and effective for both employees and customers.
Lowe’s, the home improvement retail giant, is making significant strides in its AI adoption by directly linking end-user feedback to the improvement cycle of its AI tools. This initiative is a core component of the company’s overarching business transformation strategy, designed to expand AI access to employees and refine tools based on direct stakeholder input.
Published on July 17, 2025, by CIO Dive reporter Lindsey Wilkinson, the article highlights Lowe’s long-standing commitment to AI, noting its partnership with OpenAI nearly a year before ChatGPT’s public launch. Chandhu Nair, Lowe’s Senior Vice President of AI, Data, and Innovation, emphasized the company’s strong belief in AI’s value as more applications transition into production and internal access expands.
A pivotal aspect of Lowe’s AI journey involves establishing robust feedback loops with stakeholders to continuously enhance the utility of its systems and ensure they perform as expected. A prime example is the ‘Mylow Companion,’ an AI assistant for employees, complemented by a similar customer-facing tool. Both tools feature simple thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons for immediate feedback, which is meticulously monitored daily alongside other usage metrics.
This direct feedback mechanism has yielded crucial insights. For instance, engineers discovered that associates, when interacting with customers, overwhelmingly preferred even a glitchy voice-to-text feature over manual typing. Nair explained, ‘If you have a customer in front of you, you don’t want to be looking down on the phone and typing, so they were using the voice feature, which had problems, so we quickly pivoted [to improve it].’ He added that ‘there’s a whole host of nuances and things when it comes to voice-enabled AI.’ This on-the-ground perspective and direct connection with stakeholders have transformed the tool into a more valuable asset for associates, significantly improving both employee and customer experiences.
Beyond these assistant-style applications, Lowe’s is deploying AI across various business functions, from marketing to website search capabilities. The company views AI as a critical lever in its enterprise-wide productivity push, aiming to generate approximately $1 billion in annual cost savings. Nair acknowledged the challenge of managing numerous AI initiatives, stating, ‘We had the problem that probably every company had: 300-plus use cases coming from everywhere.’
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To streamline its AI approach for the year, Lowe’s aligned its plans with its 2025 growth objectives, known as the ‘Total Home Strategy.’ The company identified key areas where AI could provide the most benefit, specifically focusing on enhancing shopping, selling, and working experiences. From this strategic alignment, Lowe’s is prioritizing and pursuing top-tier use cases that promise the highest value. Nair concluded that ‘Generative AI really addressed a big white space opportunity, especially in home improvement,’ underscoring that successful AI adoption is contingent on end-users actively engaging with the tools and technology.
