When Marvin Ellison arrived at Lowe’s in 2018, the home-improvement retailer was still operating with what he describes as “binders and whiteboards.” For a company running thousands of stores across the US, the workflows were traditional, manual and increasingly mismatched with the scale of its operations. Seven years later, Lowe’s is deep into an AI-driven transformation that touches merchandising, supply chain, customer support, internal engineering and the company’s e-commerce experience. But even as Lowe’s aggressively deploys AI, Ellison maintains that the technology is not part of a plan to cut jobs.
Speaking at Morgan Stanley’s Consumer and Retail Conference, Ellison made an unusually clear distinction that sets Lowe’s apart from other large retailers experimenting with automation. “Rather than thinking about it solely as a job replacement tool, how do you think about reducing someone’s workload by 50%?” he said. In Ellison’s view, AI should strip away repetitive work like emails, spreadsheet building, back-and-forth vendor communication that consumes a disproportionate amount of time for corporate teams. Freed from those tasks, he believes employees can reinvest that time into initiatives that directly grow the business.
For merchants, this means using AI to automate the kind of administrative work that keeps them away from store visits, supplier negotiations and product strategies. For store associates, it means faster access to product data, inventory status and project guidance so they can help customers more effectively. “AI resources enable store employees to be more helpful on the sales floor,” Ellison said, emphasizing that the goal is productivity, not labor reduction.
