The Value of Generative AI Is Thriving in Big Companies and Startups

From startups to Walmart, more and more organizations are highlighting the tremendous value GenAI brings to their businesses.

A month after skepticism about the value AI creates versus investment emerged, a counter-narrative recently emerged from Walmart, a perennial Fortune 500 leader.

Walmart has seen impressive productivity gains by combining its troves of data and large language models (LLMs) to improve customer, member, and employee experiences. For example, GenAI has played a key role in expanding the retailer’s massive product catalog.

“We used multiple large language models to accurately create or enhance more than 850 million data items in the catalog,” Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said during the retailer’s second-quarter earnings report. “Without the use of generative AI, this work would require nearly 100 times as many workers to complete in the same amount of time.”

Whether that’s an exaggeration or not, the figure is significant for a technology that McKinsey estimated last July could add $4.4 trillion to global profits.

Since then, hyperscalers have spent billions of dollars scaling AI infrastructure. Early optimism has met resistance as innovation has highlighted more powerful LLMs, smaller models running on smaller devices, and multimodal capabilities in small products.

This makes it difficult for organizations to quantify the value that GenAI provides to enterprises.

New evidence illuminates the way

That’s what makes the details Walmart shared so refreshing, as McMillon has fleshed out GenAI’s value proposition with more detail.

For example, AI helps Walmart employees select online orders faster by displaying high-quality photos of product packaging. AI-powered search also helps Walmart employees and customers find products on the company’s mobile app as well as on its website.

New AI-powered shopping assistant offers product advice, answering questions like “Which TV is best for watching sports?”

What McMillion describes—using digital assistants to more accurately deliver product information based on basic queries—has the potential to facilitate business transformation. Or as McMillion puts it:

“This technology has very broad applications and impacts almost all areas of our business. We will continue to experiment and deploy AI solutions and generative AI applications worldwide.”

But it’s not just the giant retailer; GenAI is giving a boost to companies across a range of industries. Organizations are using GenAI to improve everything from healthcare to rail operations and public transit.

As the New York Times recently noted, entrepreneurs are using GenAI to help launch new ventures. Skittenz, for example, used ChatGPT for everything from conceptualizing customer surveys to translating legal jargon into plain language.

It’s anecdotes like this that make us more sympathetic to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s assumption that GenAI’s services will create a $1 billion “unicorn” startup.

GenAI Strikes Back

From giants like Walmart to startups, anecdotal evidence from corporate GenAI consumers charts an arc in the technology narrative from heady promises to tangible business value.

New technological solutions appear regularly, which indicates that the market is focusing more on products than on their functions.

For example, 82% of leaders surveyed by Capgemini said they expect to integrate AI agents into their companies to generate everything from emails and software code to data analysis in the next one to three years. These multi-agents, which operate autonomously to achieve goals, will eventually be able to plan and even heal themselves.

These won’t be features, but full-fledged products. In addition, experts believe that vertical applications that combine LLM with other tools will represent a potentially explosive growth category for enterprise AI. Some of these will include multimodal as well as advanced voice capabilities.

None of this will happen tomorrow or next week, but you will see progress on all of these fronts in 2025. In the meantime, you need to test and learn from GenAI services while being creative and patient.

Fortunately, the GenAI ecosystem is as deep as it is broad, with trusted partners ready to help you every step of the way.

What are you waiting for? Get out there and build. Your business demands it.

Learn more about Dell’s AI Factory.