Artificial Intelligence at Lowes

Lowe’s Companies operates as a Fortune 100 house enchancment retailer, with fiscal 12 months 2025 gross sales that exceeded $86 billion. The firm employs roughly 300,000 associates and operates greater than 1,750 shops, 540 branches, and 120 distribution facilities throughout the United States.

Lowe’s reported 16 million prospects weekly throughout an omnichannel community that spans in-store, on-line, and Pro contractor channels.  By 2026, the corporate’s loyalty ecosystem had grown to over 30 million MyLowe’s Rewards members in its annual report submitting. Professional contractors represented roughly 30% of that buyer base in 2024, a phase Lowe’s has identified as a strategic progress precedence alongside its core DIY retail enterprise.

Since 2021, Lowe’s has built formal AI partnerships with know-how suppliers together with OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Palantir, shifting past pilot packages into company-wide deployments that contact each its workforce and its buyer base.

Company management has tied these AI investments on to buyer expertise and gross sales efficiency metrics on latest quarterly earnings calls, signaling that AI has moved from an innovation-lab experiment to a reported driver of enterprise outcomes.

This article will study how Lowe’s has utilized AI know-how to its enterprise and trade via two use circumstances:

• Closing the Knowledge Gap via Mylow Companion — Lowe’s makes use of a generative AI assistant embedded in affiliate gadgets to offer each retailer employee on the spot, expert-level product information, elevating buyer satisfaction scores and lowering the price and threat of excessive frontline turnover.
• Speeding Up Pro Estimates via Automated Document Digitization — Lowe’s makes use of AI-powered SKU matching and doc digitization to show contractors’ uncooked jobsite notes into quote-ready materials lists in minutes, in an effort to win a bigger share of high-value Pro orders earlier than rivals reply.

We start by inspecting how Lowe’s applies its generative AI assistant, Mylow Companion, to deal with the information and consistency hole created by frontline retail turnover.

Closing the Knowledge Gap via Mylow Companion

Home enchancment retail carries a structural information drawback: a buyer asking a paint-department affiliate about mulch protection for a backyard venture is asking somebody outdoors their space of experience. When that reply isn’t accessible, the result isn’t impartial — it reveals up as a misplaced sale, a return journey to a competitor, or a product returned as a result of it was the improper match for the job. Industry analysis estimates that detrimental in-store experiences, typically pushed by undertrained or overwhelmed employees, value retailers $262 billion in misplaced gross sales yearly.

High frontline turnover compounds the issue. The retail trade posted a complete separations price of 4.1% as of March 2026, nicely above the three.0% common throughout all sectors, in keeping with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Every departure resets the information clock: changing a single frontline retail worker costs roughly $10,000–$12,000 as soon as recruiting, onboarding, and misplaced productiveness throughout ramp-up are factored in, and one retailer’s inner information found it took almost two months for brand spanking new hires to succeed in full efficiency benchmarks — two months of comparatively weaker service and misplaced gross sales per new rent, multiplied throughout each location and each departure.

For an organization working at Lowe’s scale, that isn’t a coaching footnote — it’s a recurring, quantifiable drag on each gross sales conversion and buyer retention at scale.

Lowe’s designed Mylow Companion to shut the information hole. Chandhu Nair, Lowe’s SVP of Data, AI and Innovation, has described the instrument’s objective as serving to “an affiliate get to the appropriate solutions if the shopper is asking a query” outdoors their very own division.

Notably, the instrument didn’t begin as a customer-service product: it began as an inner chatbot for analyzing retailer gross sales metrics, used solely by managers, earlier than a Lowe’s enterprise chief proposed extending that information layer to each affiliate.

Mylow Companion runs on the identical generative AI basis as Lowe’s customer-facing assistant, Mylow, in-built partnership with OpenAI. It attracts on Lowe’s personal product catalog, stock information, and venture steering content material. It is accessed via pure, conversational prompts on affiliate sales-floor gadgets, supporting each typed and voice enter.

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 adjustments as follows::

• Instead of paging a specialist or telling a buyer to “verify with another person,” an affiliate can question the instrument in actual time, in entrance of the shopper.
• New hires acquire entry to the identical depth of product information as tenured employees from their first shift, somewhat than constructing it regularly via months of on-the-job publicity.
• Lowe’s built a thumbs up/down suggestions management into each response, reviewed every day by the product group, which surfaced an early usability drawback: associates strongly most popular voice enter over typing, since a buyer standing in entrance of them made wanting down at a cellphone impractical. Engineering prioritized fixing the voice characteristic particularly due to that daily-reviewed sign.

This use case is deployed at full scale, not in pilot. Lowe’s rolled out Mylow Companion to all associates throughout its greater than 1,700 shops in May 2025, which the corporate describes as the primary at-scale implementation of this sort of instrument in retail.

Lowe’s has since reported roughly a 200 foundation level enhance in its inner likelihood-to-recommend rating tied to the instrument, a determine CEO Marvin Ellison echoed as a 200 foundation level elevate in buyer satisfaction, and on the corporate’s This autumn 2025 earnings name he characterized the instrument’s impact on customer support as “dramatic,” with buyer expertise metrics up roughly 2% in shops the place associates actively use it.

EVP of Stores Joe McFarland noted on an earlier earnings name that affiliate adoption outpaced expectations. Lowe’s has not revealed a selected determine for lowered new-hire ramp time, regardless of citing quicker onboarding as an authentic objective of the instrument.

Speeding Up Pro Estimates via Automated Document Digitization

Professional contractors function beneath a structural inefficiency. Project quotes sometimes originate as handwritten notes, jobsite pictures, or casual spreadsheets that should be manually transformed into an itemized, priced order earlier than a buyer can approve the work.

That conversion step sits between a accomplished walkthrough and a signed contract, and its velocity and accuracy immediately have an effect on whether or not a contractor wins the job. Contractors who submit formal written quotes win as much as 30% extra jobs than these counting on verbal estimates, in keeping with FMI analysis.

The stakes for Lowe’s are tied to the place its progress is definitely coming from. The Pro phase climbed from roughly 22% of Lowe’s income in 2023 to about 40% by 2025, and Lowe’s 2025 acquisition of Foundation Building Materials was aimed at capturing extra of the roughly $250 billion U.S. skilled constructing market. A contractor who loses hours reconciling a paper checklist into a proper quote isn’t merely working inefficiently — that delay creates a gap for a competitor, or a rival provider, to ship the identical quote quicker.

Lowe’s launched Material Lists in May 2026 to take away that friction. Que Vance, Lowe’s EVP of Pro and Home Services, tied the instrument’s rationale to the contractor’s personal economics somewhat than to Lowe’s operational comfort, noting that each minute a Pro spends manually constructing an estimate or organizing a cloth checklist is a minute taken away from serving prospects and rising their enterprise.

The system uses SKU matching and automatic checklist digitization, constructed by Lowe’s inner know-how group, to learn unstructured enter — handwritten notes, images, spreadsheets, and different supported file codecs — and convert it into an organized, priced product checklist. The instrument supports each English and Spanish enter, a element in step with Lowe’s broader positioning to capture share amongst its fast-growing Latino contractor buyer 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 buyer, the workflow adjustments in three concrete methods:

• A jobsite checklist scrawled by hand or photographed on a cellphone not must be retyped right into a Lowe’s order type — the system reads it immediately.
• Estimating and quoting, beforehand a guide, error-prone step squeezed between different back-office duties, compresses right into a course of measured in minutes somewhat than hours.
• Fewer guide entry errors imply fewer pricing disputes or lacking supplies found mid-project, lowering expensive change orders.

Material Lists sits inside a broader Pro-focused AI stack, alongside Blueprint Takeoffs, which generates materials lists and estimates immediately from venture plans, and Pro Extended Aisle, which expands product availability for Pro orders past what’s on the shelf.

That sample — a number of purpose-built AI instruments addressing completely different factors in the identical contractor workflow — suggests Lowe’s is treating the Pro phase as a related product line somewhat than a set of remoted options.

This use case is newer and fewer confirmed at scale than Mylow Companion. Lowe’s has stated that it expects Material Lists to enhance shut charges on bigger orders, however as of this writing the corporate has not revealed a selected determine for quote-turnaround-time discount, order quantity elevate, or close-rate enchancment tied to the instrument.

Given that Material Lists launched solely in May 2026, that absence of arduous numbers seemingly displays the instrument’s early maturity somewhat than a disclosure hole.