Walmart built a sandbox instead of banning AI outright

What happened

Rather than restrict generative AI, Walmart launched the GenAI Playground, a controlled environment where employees could experiment. From there it built My Assistant, rolled out to roughly 50,000 US office employees to help draft documents, summarize long files, and generate ideas - later expanded to more countries.

Walmart deliberately let usage patterns emerge before deciding what to build and where the guardrails needed to be.

The business problem

The company wanted to let employees experiment with AI, but needed to do it inside a controlled environment rather than an ungoverned free-for-all.

Why it worked

• Governance doesn't have to mean "you can't use AI"
• It can mean "you can - inside a tool, with rules, that we provide"
• A sandbox surfaces real use cases before you commit to building the wrong thing
• Rollouts can scale once the pattern is proven

Where this points