Lowe's CEO says its AI assistant is fixing some major headaches

• Lowe's CEO Marvin Ellison is all in on artificial intelligence at the home improvement retailer.
• Ellison said the tech is transforming how the company sells, shops, and works.
• In particular, he said AI is helping with some of the biggest challenges in training store workers.

At a time when many workers are worried about AI-related job losses, Lowe's CEO Marvin Ellison says the technology is helping his employees work better.

"We're very focused on employing AI to help our associates sell, to improve the shopping environment for our customers, both in-store and online, and creating productivity in the workspace," he said during the company's fourth quarter earnings call on Wednesday.

The home improvement retailer has been leaning hard into a partnership with OpenAI that powers its Mylow digital assistant for employees and customers. Ellison said the technology is getting better with every interaction.

"It helps our associates do the most difficult part of transition to a home improvement world, and that is product knowledge," Ellison said.

He said that new hires sometimes lack the confidence to be out on the sales floor selling specialized products to the chain's combination of DIY and professional customers, and the Mylow assistant fills that knowledge gap.

"Not only does this platform and this assistant allow that to happen, it also now can do it in Spanish," Ellison said.

He said that's led to "dramatic improvements" in customer service, including helping "break the language gap" in some geographic areas and a two percentage-point lift in in-store satisfaction scores.

Online, Ellison said Lowe's is seeing conversion rates double when customers use Mylow's AI shopping assistant, which rolled out in March 2025.

Other retailers, most notably Walmart and Amazon, have reported e-commerce bumps they attribute to AI shopping assistants: Walmart said last week its Sparky chatbot results in 35% larger basket sizes online, and Amazon has said it anticipates its Rufus bot to boost sales by $10 billion a year.

Better sales and customer service are critical at a time when the home improvement retail segment is now in its third year of challenging macroeconomic conditions marked by high borrowing costs and low housing turnover.

Still, Lowe's managed to outperform rival Home Depot in comparable sales growth for the fourth quarter.

Lowe's corporate employees are using AI tools in other ways, Ellison said. The tools are freeing up merchandising teams to shift their focus from routine tasks to more strategic problems, and tech workers are using AI to develop and review code, achieving double-digit gains in productivity.

"We're excited about some of the work we're doing in agentic commerce with some of the leading tech platforms out there as well," he said. "It's something as a large company that we understand is critically important to our current state and our future, and we're embracing it."