Lowe’s answers millions of home improvement questions with OpenAI

Lowe's has built two OpenAI-powered tools, Mylow and Mylow Companion, to handle home improvement questions from both shoppers and its own staff, according to OpenAI. Together the tools have answered more than 25 million questions, the company says.

The announcement names OpenAI models as the underlying technology but does not specify which models, when the deployment began, or the split of questions between customers and associates.

For developers and product teams, this is a familiar pattern: a large retailer embedding a general-purpose assistant into both a customer-facing surface and an internal one, then pointing to cumulative query volume as the adoption metric. That metric measures usage rather than accuracy or task completion, so it is worth reading as a sign of deployment scale rather than proof of quality.

Why it matters: retail deployments of this size give vendors a reference customer for assistant products and put pressure on rivals to publish comparable adoption numbers. The main open question, from what is stated, is whether the two tools share a backend or are tuned separately for shoppers and employees.