Key Takeaways
- Lowe’s, a Fortune 100 home‑improvement retailer with $86 billion FY 2025 sales, has embedded AI across its workforce and customer‑facing operations through partnerships with OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Palantir.
- The generative‑AI assistant Mylow Companion provides instant, expert‑level product knowledge to every store associate, boosting customer‑satisfaction scores by roughly 200 basis points and shortening new‑hire ramp‑up time.
- For professional contractors, Lowe’s launched Material Lists (May 2026), an AI‑driven tool that digitizes handwritten notes, photos, or spreadsheets into priced SKU lists in minutes, aiming to win more high‑value Pro jobs.
- Both use cases illustrate Lowe’s strategy of treating AI as a measurable driver of sales and customer experience rather than a lab experiment, with early results showing improved likelihood‑to‑recommend scores and faster quote turnaround.
- While Mylow Companion is already deployed at scale across all 1,750+ stores, Material Lists remains in an early‑adoption phase, with hard performance metrics yet to be published.
Lowe’s Scale and Strategic AI Focus
Lowe’s Companies operates as a Fortune 100 home‑improvement retailer, posting fiscal‑year 2025 sales that exceeded $86 billion and employing roughly 300,000 associates across more than 1,750 stores, 540 branches, and 120 distribution centers in the United States. The retailer serves an estimated 16 million customers weekly through an omnichannel network that includes in‑store, online, and Pro contractor channels. By 2026, its loyalty program, MyLowe’s Rewards, had grown to over 30 million members, with professional contractors accounting for about 30 % of that base in 2024—a segment Lowe’s has identified as a strategic growth priority alongside its core DIY business. Recognizing the need to differentiate in a crowded market, Lowe’s has since 2021 built formal AI partnerships with technology leaders such as OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Palantir, moving beyond isolated pilots to company‑wide deployments that affect both employees and shoppers. Company leadership repeatedly ties these investments to customer‑experience and sales‑performance metrics on quarterly earnings calls, signaling that AI has transitioned from an innovation‑lab experiment to a reported driver of business results.
Closing the Knowledge Gap with Mylow Companion
Home‑improvement retail suffers from a structural knowledge problem: a customer asking a paint‑department associate about mulch coverage for a garden project is often speaking to someone outside their area of expertise. When the associate cannot answer, the outcome is rarely neutral—it appears as a lost sale, a return trip to a competitor, or a product returned because it was the wrong fit for the job. Industry research estimates that negative in‑store experiences, frequently driven by undertrained or overwhelmed staff, cost retailers $262 billion in lost sales annually. High frontline turnover exacerbates the issue; the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a total separations rate of 4.1 % as of March 2026, well above the 3.0 % average across all sectors. Replacing a single frontline retail employee costs roughly $10,000–$12,000 once recruiting, onboarding, and lost productivity during ramp‑up are factored in, and internal data indicate it takes nearly two months for new hires to reach full performance benchmarks—two months of comparatively weaker service and lost sales per new hire, multiplied across every location and every departure. For a company of Lowe’s scale, this is not a training footnote but a recurring, quantifiable drag on sales conversion and customer retention.
Design and Deployment of Mylow Companion
To address this gap, Lowe’s created Mylow Companion, a generative‑AI assistant embedded in associate devices that delivers instant, expert‑level product knowledge. Chandhu Nair, Lowe’s SVP of Data, AI and Innovation, described the tool’s purpose as helping “an associate get to the right answers if the customer is asking a question” outside their own department. Notably, the tool did not originate as a customer‑service product; it began as an internal chatbot for analyzing store sales metrics, used only by managers, before a Lowe’s business leader proposed extending that knowledge layer to every associate. Mylow Companion runs on the same generative‑AI foundation as Lowe’s customer‑facing assistant, Mylow, built in partnership with OpenAI. It draws on Lowe’s own product catalog, inventory data, and project‑guidance content and is accessed through natural, conversational prompts on associate sales‑floor devices, supporting both typed and voice input.
Impact on Associate Workflow and Customer Experience
The workflow for associates changes dramatically with Mylow Companion. Instead of paging a specialist or telling a customer to “check with someone else,” an associate can query the tool in real time, in front of the customer. New hires gain access to the same depth of product knowledge as tenured staff from their first shift, rather than building it gradually through months of on‑the‑job exposure. Lowe’s built a thumbs‑up/down feedback control into every response, reviewed daily by the product team, which surfaced an early usability problem: associates strongly preferred voice input over typing, since a customer standing in front of them made looking down at a phone impractical. Engineering prioritized fixing the voice feature specifically because of that daily‑reviewed signal. This use case is deployed at full scale, not in pilot. Lowe’s rolled out Mylow Companion to all associates across its more than 1,700 stores in May 2025, which the company describes as the first at‑scale implementation of this kind of tool in retail.
Quantified Benefits of Mylow Companion
Lowe’s has since reported a roughly 200‑basis‑point increase in its internal likelihood‑to‑recommend score tied to the tool—a figure CEO Marvin Ellison echoed as a 200‑basis‑point lift in customer satisfaction. On the company’s Q4 2025 earnings call, Ellison characterized the tool’s effect on customer service as “dramatic,” noting that customer experience metrics are up roughly 2 % in stores where associates actively use it. EVP of Stores Joe McFarland observed on an earlier earnings call that associate adoption outpaced expectations. Although Lowe’s has not published a specific figure for reduced new‑hire ramp time, the company originally cited faster onboarding as a goal of the tool, and the early satisfaction gains suggest the knowledge gap is being narrowed effectively.
Contractor Inefficiencies and the Need for Speed
Professional contractors operate under a different structural inefficiency: project quotes typically originate as handwritten notes, jobsite photos, or informal spreadsheets that must be manually converted into an itemized, priced order before a customer can approve the work. This conversion step sits between a completed walkthrough and a signed contract, and its speed and accuracy directly affect whether a contractor wins the job. According to FMI research, contractors who submit formal written quotes win up to 30 % more jobs than those relying on verbal estimates. For Lowe’s, the stakes are tied to where its growth is actually coming from. The Pro segment climbed from roughly 22 % of Lowe’s revenue in 2023 to about 40 % by 2025, and the 2025 acquisition of Foundation Building Materials aimed at capturing more of the roughly $250 billion U.S. professional building market. A contractor who loses hours reconciling a paper list into a formal quote is not merely working inefficiently—that delay creates an opening for a competitor or rival supplier to deliver the same quote faster.
Introducing Material Lists
To remove that friction, Lowe’s launched Material Lists in May 2026. Que Vance, Lowe’s EVP of Pro and Home Services, tied the tool’s rationale to the contractor’s own economics rather than to Lowe’s operational convenience, noting that “every minute a Pro spends manually building an estimate or organizing a material list is a minute taken away from serving customers and growing their business.” The system uses SKU matching and automated list digitization, built by Lowe’s internal technology team, to read unstructured input—handwritten notes, photographs, spreadsheets, and other supported file formats—and convert it into an organized, priced product list. The tool supports both English and Spanish input, a detail consistent with Lowe’s broader positioning to capture share among its fast‑growing Latino contractor customer base.
Workflow Improvements for Pro Customers
For the Pro customer, the workflow changes in three concrete ways. First, a jobsite list scrawled by hand or photographed on a phone no longer needs to be retyped into a Lowe’s order form—the system reads it directly. Second, estimating and quoting, previously a manual, error‑prone step squeezed between other back‑office tasks, compresses into a process measured in minutes rather than hours. Third, fewer manual entry errors mean fewer pricing disputes or missing materials discovered mid‑project, reducing costly change orders. Material Lists sits inside a broader Pro‑focused AI stack, alongside Blueprint Takeoffs, which generates material lists and estimates directly from project plans, and Pro Extended Aisle, which expands product availability for Pro orders beyond what is on the shelf. This pattern—several purpose‑built AI tools addressing different points in the same contractor workflow—suggests Lowe’s is treating the Pro segment as a connected product line rather than a set of isolated features.
Current Status and Outlook for Material Lists
This use case is newer and less proven at scale than Mylow Companion. Lowe’s has stated that it expects Material Lists to improve close rates on larger orders, but as of this writing the company has not published a specific figure for quote‑turnaround‑time reduction, order‑volume lift, or close‑rate improvement tied to the tool. Given that Material Lists launched only in May 2026, that absence of hard numbers likely reflects the tool’s early maturity rather than a disclosure gap. Nonetheless, the strategic alignment—leveraging AI to solve a known pain point for high‑value Pro customers—positions Lowe’s to capture a larger share of the lucrative professional building market as the tool matures and performance data become available.
Overall Assessment
Lowe’s AI journey illustrates a shift from experimental pilots to enterprise‑scale solutions that directly influence key business metrics. Through Mylow Companion, the retailer has equipped its frontline workforce with instantaneous product knowledge, yielding measurable lifts in customer satisfaction and mitigating the costly effects of high turnover. Through Material Lists, Lowe’s is attacking a critical inefficiency in the contractor quoting process, aiming to win more high‑value Pro jobs by turning raw jobsite notes into quote‑ready lists in minutes. Both initiatives are grounded in real‑world quotes from senior leaders—Chandhu Nair’s focus on getting associates “the right answers,” Marvin Ellison’s praise of a “dramatic” service lift, Joe McFarland’s observation of rapid associate adoption, and Que Vance’s emphasis on reclaiming contractors’ time—showcasing how Lowe’s translates AI capability into tangible business outcomes. As these tools continue to scale and generate performance data, they are likely to reinforce Lowe’s competitive advantage in both the DIY and professional segments of the home‑improvement market.