Retail Daily Minute | Walmart's FY2026 Annual Report, Lowe's AI Inventory Push & Instacart and Uber Eats Join Claude

Hello everyone, I'm Chris Walton and you are listening to the Retail Daily Minute, your quickest, fastest breakdown of all of today's top retail news. Today is April 28th, 2026. I am still in Berlin looking to take in day one of the World Retail Congress. And this edition is brought to you with the help and support of Duvo. Someone on your operations team is likely copying and pasting data between systems right now. Who knows, you might even be doing it while you're listening to this very podcast. I hope not, but why not ask Duvo to do that work instead? To learn more, visit duvo.ai. That's D-U-V-O dot A-I. Today, we've got news on Lowe's unifying its inventory planning with AI and Instacart and Uber Eats plugging directly into Anthropics' Claude platform. But we begin today with Walmart's 2026 annual report, which dropped last week and reads less like a year in review and more like a strategic manifesto for what it means to be an omnichannel retailer at scale. Total revenues hit $713 billion for the fiscal year, up 4.7% or 5.1% in constant currency, driven by global e-commerce growth of 24%, reaching $150.4 billion. Let's let that number sink in. billion in e For a company that just a decade ago was roundly criticized for falling behind Amazon in digital Walmart has very decisively turned up the heat And what's powering this growth is critically important to understand. The e-commerce gains were primarily driven by store-fulfilled pickup and delivery, meaning Walmart's physical footprint, which it continues to invest in aggressively, is the engine behind its digital momentum. Walmart is proving that the store, when architected correctly, is a competitive moat that pure play digital rivals simply cannot replicate. And the economics are improving, too, with Jeffrey's analysts noting this week that incremental e-commerce dollars are now carrying higher margins than stores as routing, batching and express fees scale across the network. Then there also is the AI story, which we cannot forget about. And new CEO John Ferner is leaning in hard. He wrote in his shareholder letter that Walmart is, quote, at a pivotal moment, end quote, as artificial intelligence fundamentally reshapes how customers shop and how associates work. The company's agentic AI assistant Sparky is reportedly driving roughly 35 percent higher basket sizes for users, an early data point that illustrates just how powerful personalized e-commerce can become at Walmart scale. and super centers are making a real comeback too with seven added to the fleet in fiscal 2026 including the company first Store the Future location in Cypress Texas Now before we get to our next headline let's take a quick break to hear about another one of our sponsors, Miracle. Miracle is the catalyst of commerce. Over 450 retailers are opening new revenue streams with marketplaces, dropship, and retail media and succeeding. With Miracle, unlock more products, more partners, and more profits without the heavy lifting. What's holding you back? Visit Miracle.com, that's M-I-R-A-K-L.com to learn more. All right, we are back. And our next headline has to do with Lowe's expanding its partnership with Relax Solutions to unify its entire inventory planning and replenishment operation under a single AI-driven platform. The details here are worth unpacking. Lowe's is combining its own in-house supply chain technology with Rolex's forecasting replenishment and allocation capabilities to create an end-to-end view of inventory across its entire network. The goal is to better analyze demand trends, pinpoint the root causes of stockouts, and improve in-stock levels for both its DIY and pro customers. Lowe SVP of inventory replenishment and planning framed the old approach as quote more static and reactive end quote and said the new system will allow the team to continuously analyze demand inventory and network conditions in real time enabling faster more precise decisions across the board Full implementation is targeted for early 2027 and Relax has been building serious momentum with similar deployments at Guitar Center, United Natural Foods, and Wawa. Lowe's signing on this scale is a meaningful validation of the platform and a signal that AI-driven inventory management is rapidly becoming table stakes for new large-format retailers serious about competing on availability and productivity. And finally, we close today with Instacart and Uber Eats becoming two of the first 15 apps to integrate directly with Anthropik's Cloud AI platform. Now listen closely because this integration is a little bit different than the other ChatGPT integrations we've discussed in the past. The integration works like this. When a Cloud user asks a natural language question that could be answered by a connected app, Cloud suggests the right app or multiple apps and lets the user choose. Now we're talking, and importantly, there are no paid placements or sponsored answers influencing those suggestions. That positioning matters because it frames Claude as a neutral matchmaker in the emerging agentic commerce ecosystem, rather than as a walled garden tilted toward whoever pays the most. That's all for today. Thanks for tuning in. Once again, this has been OmniTalk Retail. I am Chris Walton, and as always, be careful out there.