“When you’re buying a t-shirt and it doesn’t fit, you just return it. No big deal,” says Seemantini Godbole, EVP, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Lowe’s. “But if you’re renovating a kitchen or redoing your floors, those are expensive decisions. You want to feel confident. And that requires expertise.”​

Lowe’s Red Vest associates have long helped customers navigate that complexity. But with stores up to 130,000 square feet and tens of thousands of SKUs in store, even seasoned team members can’t know everything. And online shoppers face similar challenges: traditional search tools only help if you already know what to look for.

To meet those expectations, Lowe’s needed a partner with deep AI capabilities and a flexible platform. OpenAI’s models offered the reasoning, conversation quality, and performance at scale that Lowe’s needed to serve both its customers and associates.

“We’ve been really intentional,” says Godbole. “We didn’t want to just update our systems. We wanted to rewire the entire business to support projects, not just products.”​