Walmart’s US CEO said customers’ order value jumps 40 percent when they use the company’s AI shopping assistant.
Truthout is a vital news source and a living history of political struggle. If you think our work is valuable,a new report detailing more than a dozen patents the $833 billion corporation holds or has applied for — all aimed at monitoring customers’ behavior to determine what products to market to them, deceiving them about an item’s price, and upcharging them.
“Corporations don’t spend years building high-tech pricing tools, hiring experts, and filing patents just to let them collect dust. They do it because they see a path to higher profit — one that runs right through everyday consumers’ budgets,” said Lindsay Owens, president and CEO of Groundwork and the author of the bookregarding the company’s artificial intelligence-enabled pricing tactics.
While Walmart executives have “openly touted” the ability of “Sparky,” the AI shopping assistant the company launched last year, to push customers to spend an average of 40% more during a shopping trip, Furner insisted last month that Walmart will “price the product, not the person. ” But Groundwork said that beyond its deployment of Sparky, “Walmart’s own investments and patents suggest that the retail giant is building a vast arsenal of tools that can be used to track shoppers and even potentially determine what they pay.
” Estimate a child’s age through past purchases and steer families toward certain products and price points as they grow; Run pricing experiments on shoppers to determine how much they are willing to pay, by pushing prices higher and higher over a period of time;Change prices of items based on what is already in a customer’s cart; and Set the price a customer sees in search results on Walmart’s website based on their purchase history, where they live, and other identifying characteristics, with one customer being charged $90 while another sees a $110 price tag. Monitor customers’ daily routines, including kids’ sports practices, exercise classes, work, and visits to friends and relatives.
“Walmart has amassed the most intimate information about its customers and is developing the technology that can be used to put that data to work at checkout,” said Owens. “Shoppers will have to decide whether to believe Walmart’s patent applications or its PR statements. ”“Walmart does not and will not use an individual customer’s personal information, income, shopping history, urgency, or willingness to pay to set an individualized price,” said Barlett.
“We do not engage in dynamic pricing, raising prices in response to a hot afternoon or an approaching snowstorm, for example. ” He also said Groundwork has wrongly taken Walmart’s patents “as evidence that we will pursue individualized or dynamic pricing,” and said the company has “committed not to. ”Owens responded to Bartlett’s letter by saying that any “confusion around Walmart’s pricing practices is of its own making.
” “Walmart says one thing in its damage-control letters to customers, another to its investors behind closed doors, and a different thing entirely to the She called on Walmart to publicly release information about “what data Sparky can see, how that information shapes the recommendations and purchases it makes, and whether sensitive consumer information could be exposed, misused, or used against shoppers,” especially considering recent “The arsenal of technologies the company is building that can be used to profile and track us should worry every American who is concerned about theirand pocketbooks,” Owens said.
“This personal data, according to Walmart’s own patents, is a critical element of the new pricing strategies the company is developing. ” The report on Walmart’s patents released by Groundwork on Monday, said Owens, will allow Americans to “decide for themselves” whether to believe executives’ denials.
We now have three full months of data since Google changed its search to feature AI results. The numbers are worse than we anticipated. Overall readership that comes to Truthout through Google is down 54 percent against last year. The number of new readers who discover Truthout via Google searches is down 49 percent, and returning users from Google are down 51 percent. We lost 15 percent of our readership overnight. This was a readership we painstakingly built over decades, and it vanished because Google chose corporate greed over a healthy democracy.
We anticipate a loss of roughly $500,000 in online revenue as a result of this massive traffic plunge in the next year alone. The only way we can keep publishing is with strong reader support. We are asking you to start a monthly donation to Truthout today — anything you can do, whether $5 or $25, makes a difference.
