Lowe's AI Chief Named Executive of the Year
The 2026 award recognizes the retail deployment of AI tools designed to assist staff and customer interactions.
Updated on Sept. 22, 2026 in Artificial Intelligence
Live Poll
Do you trust that artificial intelligence tools in retail stores actually improve your shopping experience?
Time magazine named Seemantini Godbole, the chief information and AI officer at Lowe's, an Executive of the Year for 2026. This distinction follows her appointment at the home improvement retailer in January 2026.
Why it matters
The recognition highlights the integration of large-scale AI assistants in retail workflows to reduce friction in complex home improvement tasks. Lowe's has deployed these tools to support both customer-facing and associate-facing operations.
More than 300,000 Lowe's associates now utilize the Mylow Companion, an internal AI interface. This adoption represents a significant scale of deployment for enterprise-grade retail support software.
The players
Seemantini Godbole
The current chief information and AI officer at Lowe's recognized for her 2026 leadership in retail technology.
Lowe's
A major home improvement retailer that has integrated AI assistants like Mylow and Mylow Companion into its corporate technology stack.
The details
Mylow Companion operates as a multimodal assistant that processes inquiries through text, voice, and photo inputs. It provides store associates with product and project information to help them assist customers. The platform is part of a broader strategy alongside the customer-facing Mylow assistant to streamline home improvement guidance.
Timeline
January 2026: Seemantini Godbole joined Lowe's.
2026: Seemantini Godbole was named Executive of the Year.
The Tech Race
The adoption of the Mylow Companion AI assistant reflects a wider trend of retailers integrating multimodal interfaces to handle complex, project-based customer queries. This deployment marks a shift toward scaling specialized internal LLM-based tools to a workforce of over 300,000 people.
Associates at Lowe's locations now use Mylow Companion to resolve project questions that previously required manual lookup or expert consultation. Customers interacting with store staff will likely experience faster support as associates gain real-time access to product data via the tool.
The takeaway
The recognition of Godbole underscores the growing importance of AI-driven associate support systems in large retail operations. Industry analysts and observers should monitor further updates on the expansion of Mylow's multimodal capabilities in upcoming enterprise disclosures.
Further reading
For more on how major retailers are implementing large-scale language models, explore the latest Artificial Intelligence updates.
Source note: This article includes information reported by TIME.
Live Poll
Do you trust that artificial intelligence tools in retail stores actually improve your shopping experience?
