Lowe’s tests AI voice agents to handle customer calls across all stores

Home improvement retailer Lowe’s is in the mindset of how to grow as a business, and that’s where AI’s presumed superpowers that dominated CES can help, at least according to Chandu Nair, SVP for stores, data, artificial intelligence, and innovation at Lowe’s.

Nair, who joined Lowe’s in 2020, runs AI strategy for the company, including overseeing the Lowe’s Innovation Labs introduced in 2014. He, like many CES attendees, was hoping to track emerging technologies the retailer can use in-store or behind the scenes in its supply chain.

“When we look at technologies, we look to see what is the broader problem or the opportunity it is trying to solve,” Nair told Retail Brew at CES. “And then we try to say, ‘Is there a real, relevant retail problem that the technology can apply?’”

Last year, Lowe’s started testing an AI-enabled voice agent—an intelligent virtual agent (IVA)—in all its stores that Nair said has helped free up staff for more face-to-face interaction. Nair spoke to Retail Brew on the sidelines of CES about how the company is thinking about AI and its use cases.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about the new agent.

We get calls to our call centers, but we also get a lot of calls to our stores. It could be something [like], “Hey, what kind of concrete mix do you need? Do you know what time the store opens? What are the store hours?” And it’s always hard for an associate who’s helping a customer on the floor to go and take a call.

We’re trying to get the agent to take that call. We’ve seen some good containment rate responses. Containment is you can always answer without having to hand it off to a human. Those are real agents. Now the question is, “How do I continue to improve the containment rate, and how do I make sure that the responses it’s given is accurate?”

What are you looking out for at CES this year?

I’m specifically looking at a lot of different other modalities and models, especially 3D and world models and what it can do. It’s important for us because home is a space, so anything that has got spatial context is important for us. So we [are] keeping an eye on what that could be. And then everything you do in your home is visual. You’re visually imagining spaces and imagining how your home should be. So, it’s important to look at that and how AI can help there. So that’s one angle of looking at AI.

The other angle is definitely physical AI—robotics, specifically for our supply chain space.

Can you expand more on physical AI?

I’m talking more industrial robotics, and we are trying to see how we get them to operate better in these environments. That is the first order of business. I think humanoids are still early. And it probably will take a little bit more maturity to make it work.

At a high level, [physical AI] is very focused on supply chain, making it more efficient, reducing and bringing in much more automation. We are looking to scale and grow our business, which means we’ve got a lot of products moving. The volume of products moving is going up. We need more and more automation for the best delivery times, better inventory positions.

We’ve got a lot of advanced technology coming out within physical AI. That’s a big focus for us. Think [of it like] how do you put the brain in the robot? That’s physical AI. That’s really an area of focus for us from a Labs perspective.

Obviously, there’s a lot of buzz around agentic AI. And I think 2026, if you ask me, will be a lot about how to make agentic AI real. Real in the sense to instrument something as an agent is fairly straightforward with the technology. To make it consistently do what it’s supposed to do at scale…is hard.

What advice do you have for smaller companies trying to navigate tech in retail?

Don’t go with the hype.

When you get in, if you’re starting small, look for the best partners. There are a lot of great partners out there who can help augment and make sure that you start small, iterate, and make sure that you bring your core business functions along. This is 70% a change management game, 30% a technology game.