Lowe's SVP on AI's rosy future for e-commerce

In the first quarter of 2025, home improvement retail chain Lowe's reported a slight decline in overall sales. But its online business is on a roll: It grew 6% in Q1 2025 compared with Q1 2024, which followed a 9.5% bump in Q4 2024 over the previous year.

Neelima Sharma, senior vice president of omnichannel and e-commerce technology at Lowe's, is part of the leadership team driving that growth. We sat down with her to discuss Lowe's technology strategy and how AI figures into its future plans.

Editor's note: This Q&A has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

Can you pinpoint any particular technology or initiative that propelled Lowe's successful e-commerce growth?

Neelima Sharma: We are very focused on making sure that we are removing all friction points for our customers. That represents multiple initiatives on our digital properties, inside the store and a lot of the back-end work that we're doing within the supply chain.

So it's really a lot of different tech initiatives coming together and making shopping easier, intuitive, personalized -- and then making the delivery experience as good as it can be, building confidence with our customers. And I think that's paying off.

What comprises Lowe's digital properties?

Neelima Sharma

Sharma: We have 1,700-plus stores, we have Lowes.com, and we have our app. That's the majority of our customer-facing digital properties. Our central selling [contact center for quotes and customer support for items such as flooring, millwork and window treatments] and our in-home selling [where a sales associate visits a customer's home to discuss large projects] leverages a lot of digital technologies to support the customer as well.

You replatformed on Google Cloud in 2019. What did that entail?

Sharma: We wrote our entire commerce microservices base and cloud-native commerce stack and deployed it on Google Cloud. That allowed us to really scale our customer experience enhancement journey. So, we finished our Google Cloud migration in 2020, during the pandemic.

What happened when generative AI came out?

Sharma: We had been leveraging AI before it was in fashion. Whether it was traditional machine learning models or statistical AI, we've been using it. We like to think of our [digital] products as intelligent. We want them to be beautiful, intuitive and easy to use. We want them to support customer needs as much as possible, and we want them to be healthy, resilient and stable.

Generative AI has changed the world, taken it by storm. We've already launched a couple of different customer-facing products that are generative AI-based. One we call Style Your Space, an inspiration product on our app. It allows the customer to take a picture of a space, do object detection in your room and generate images based on certain styles -- to give you options of how your new space might look. It uses large language models [LLMs] and, on top of that, deep learning models that we've built ourselves.

Once you select an image or a style that you really like, Style Your Space allows options matched to a product catalog. We started with indoor spaces and just launched the backyard version. Now you can take a picture of your backyard, and either it's going to give you options with hardscapes or just redo the backyard with new beds and garden and new plants that it will recommend for you, based on geolocation.

There must be a lot of technological heavy lifting behind that.

Sharma: A lot of LLMs, but also a lot of our own models as well, and a combination of the technologies that we have been building since our migration to Google Cloud in 2020. It's kind of like a Lego block architecture. So we've been building the foundation, one Lego block over the other. It allows us to reimagine how we might be able to curate an experience that is very personalized and pertinent for the customer.

What is your build-or-buy strategy when it comes to technology?

Sharma: Our philosophy is that we want to be differentiated [from Lowe's competitors]. We want to own our domain, which is home improvement, and that's where we want to build so that it gives us the ability to bring the best version of that experience to our customers. And then when we feel that something is not a differentiator, it's more of a commodity, we absolutely will buy.

How do you think agentic AI will eventually change e-commerce?

Sharma: While it's new, I think agentic AI can definitely do a lot of things for us. When it comes to AI, we look at it as not just AI, but really our technology transformation. We have a framework for how we approach transforming our technology: We focus on how customers shop, on how our associates sell and on how we work in the back office as well.

Now we're using a similar framework to look at AI. Just like everybody used to talk about AI before, people are talking about agents now. If I had to draw parallels to IT architecture, you remember how cloud came first, and then microservices architecture, and then people started talking about service meshes -- providing an interoperability model between how these microservices might interact with each other. I see a similar pattern emerging here, where today one LLM is solving one problem, then another LLM is solving another problem, the third LLM is solving a third problem. Eventually, a complex problem could be solved when all these LLMs can communicate with each other.

I think that's how the agentic era is going to evolve -- I think it'll follow a similar pattern to microservices.

How has generative AI changed the search prompts you're seeing at Lowe's? Something like: Before, somebody would search for 'dishwasher,' and now it's 'red dishwasher that's quiet and fits in a small space.'

Sharma: Home improvement is actually a pretty complex space. But at the same time, this is where the fun and the value of technology can also come to life. I'll give you one example: So you just talked about when somebody is looking for a red dishwasher, which is quiet and can hold a certain volume -- or can support a family of four. It's absolutely the way customers are going.

I mean, think about it. Customers set the tone of what their expectations are, right? ChatGPT has a very high usage. That means customers are getting used to getting answers a certain way. They're setting the tone of what they expect. So it's our responsibility to leverage tech so we are able to answer questions the way the customer wants them to be answered.

What advice do you have for your peers who are incorporating generative AI and agentic AI into their e-commerce stacks?

Sharma: At Lowe's, we don't do technology for the sake of doing technology. We're trying to solve a problem for our customers, our own associates or something that our business needs. Our goal is to leverage technology to solve problems -- to achieve our goals and our strategy. There are so many levers that technology offers. Generative AI is the latest, it has the biggest buzz around it, and it's very powerful. So it can solve a lot of problems. Machine learning models are not going to go out of fashion quickly -- there are certain problems that are best solved using statistical and machine learning models.

You still have user experience design, which is so important for us to create the best possible user experiences. You have underlying cloud technologies that are here to stay. You have concepts like virtualization that allow you to scale without investing so much upfront.

So my thinking around this, with all these technological advancements, is to look at the problem that you're trying to solve. Look at all the possible levers that you have and pick the levers that work for the problem you're solving. Be focused on the outcomes and the key results. Have all these tools in the toolbox, but don't be fixated on the tools. Fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

What do you imagine Lowes.com and the app will look like in five years?

Sharma: Focusing on home improvement and the role of technology in home improvement, ultimately, physical and digital are coming together. Technological advancements to merge them are coming together now, and I think that trend will continue.

It's going to manifest in multiple ways. One could be augmented reality. We're testing Apple Vision in a few stores, testing how a customer might be inspired to visualize what their next kitchen might look like by changing each element and then visualizing how the whole looks as each part is changed -- the countertops, the backsplash, the cabinets, the hardware, the lighting. Your point of view is inside the kitchen, in that AR and VR setting.

The world is going to have more data. The amount of data we're capturing every day increases in multiples. The more data we have, the more LLMs we have, the more GPUs we have -- our ability to process that data, make data insightful and make decisions, is only going to increase. The level of intelligence that surrounds us will increase. All of this will combine for data-rich, personalized experiences and predictive commerce.

Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.