Nowadays, many companies are trying to make the most of artificial intelligence for their business. While we’d expect most of this from tech companies, occasionally companies focused on something a little different surprise us. That’s the case with Walmart, which is using new chatbots in a truly original way – letting them haggle with suppliers.

Walmart uses artificial intelligence

US retailer Walmart, one of the largest retail chains in the US, is reportedly using artificial intelligence capabilities to do one rather frustrating thing. Specifically, it is using chatbots to pre-negotiate price and other purchasing terms with other businesses.

Admittedly, the results of the AI’s work are then corrected by a real employee, but it’s still very impressive that Walmart has managed to do something like this. After all, to negotiate things like this, a chatbot has to know a lot of things and take into account the many requirements it has been given when it is given the task.

Photo by Walmart

Contract from AI

But Walmart is not alone in its AI efforts. As Bloomberg reports, California-based company Pactum is helping develop similar chatbots. It then deploys artificial intelligence primarily in negotiating smaller contracts with some of the vendors that supply mostly tools and products for Walmart, rather than products that Walmart would sell.

So while the technology still has a long way to go, it could save people work in the future and make the whole process cheaper at the same time. As the capabilities of chatbots improve, we can expect other companies to deploy them as well.