Walmart store workers have a new responsibility: correcting AI errors

A Walmart store in North Miami Beach, Florida. :Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Walmart is accelerating the rollout of AI with a suite of tools for store workers.

Workers say the tech is prone to making mistakes they must fix, manage, or ignore.

Walmart says employee feedback is essential to improving software tools.

Retail jobs often involve a lot of cleaning up after other people.

Dusty shelves, spilled liquids, smudged display cases, and, more recently, AI agent errors.

In Walmart's bid to fuel its growth ambitions, the retailer is betting big on AI and arming thousands of frontline employees with new tools and training .

Adopting any new process has a learning curve, but this time it's AI agents that also need training to improve the accuracy of its models.

Walmart's rollout shows some of the challenges of using this new tech: Employees often have to spend time training the software, supplying the context and judgment AI agents lack about their jobs.

Walmart's AI rollout has prompted employees to swap information and complaints on social media.

There are scores of posts and hundreds of comments on Reddit from people who say they work for the company about perplexing security alerts from the AI, how the AI is measuring their performance, and other issues.

"It just assumes that they're going to be perfect every single time," a store-level HR manager who handles onboarding, training, and scheduling told Business Insider, referring to a task-assigning AI agent's expectations of the workers completing the task.

Walmart has spent the last several years saying it is a people-led, tech-powered company, and any new tools are intended to simplify and support the work of human employees across the organization.

The company says its approach to AI in stores follows that same philosophy.

For example, workers at stores where the features have been launched are increasingly being assigned tasks and targets by AI that appear in the MyWalmart app, which runs on company-provided phones and is available to download on personal devices.