Lowe’s answers millions of home improvement questions with OpenAI

Built with OpenAI, Mylow and Mylow Companion, Lowe’s AI assistants for customers and store associates, have helped Lowe’s answer millions of questions from customers and associates since launch in Spring 2025. Those questions start with a project, whether a customer is planning a room to paint or an associate is helping with an unexpected repair.

“When you’re buying a t-shirt and it doesn’t fit, you just return it. No big deal,” says Seemantini Godbole, Executive Vice President, Chief Information and AI 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, even seasoned team members cannot know everything, especially when a question falls outside their department or experience. Online shoppers face a similar challenge because traditional search tools and website experiences only help if they already know what to look for.

“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.”

Lowe’s uses OpenAI models to power two experiences that support home improvement projects.

Lowe’s has expanded Mylow Companion to support natural voice interaction and adopted ChatGPT Enterprise for its Store Support Center, extending its use of OpenAI beyond the store aisle. Lowe’s is continuing to bring Intelligence at Work with OpenAI through voice and model capabilities that make it easier for customers and associates to get help—so shoppers can find the right products, make confident decisions, and move their projects forward.

Lowe’s saw an opportunity to put project expertise closer to the people making decisions, whether a customer was starting online or an associate was helping in the aisle. That required AI that could understand natural-language project questions, reason across the details of a home improvement job, and respond conversationally. It also needed to work by voice for associates on the move and perform reliably across customer and associate experiences at Lowe’s scale. OpenAI’s models gave Lowe’s those capabilities.

Lowe’s had already been investing in AI for years. What changed in 2023 was customer behavior.

“ChatGPT changed expectations,” says Joe Cano, SVP of Digital Commerce. “Customers now expect fast, expert answers 24/7. They want to describe their project in natural language and get help, not open ten tabs to figure out what mulch works in their zip code.”