Case Study: Walmart automates AI data collection and saves months of developer time with Chef

Automating AI Data Collection and Storage, While Saving Months of Time Spent Rebuilding Applications

Intelligent Retail Lab (IRL) by Walmart is a technology incubator using computer vision, machine learning, and AI to improve in‑store experiences—tracking products on shelves to keep produce and meats fresh. The team faced a massive data challenge: gathering, analyzing, and storing terabits of sensor data across Google Cloud, Azure, and on‑prem environments, while developers spent weeks to months rebuilding OpenCV and other CV packages and needed near‑real‑time processing.

IRL deployed Chef Enterprise Automation Stack for infrastructure provisioning and Chef Habitat as a Linux process wrapper to standardize applications and dependencies, enabling consistent builds across cloud and bare‑metal environments. The automation eliminated repeated reconfiguration, saved months of developer time, provided the monitoring and control required for AI workloads, and let engineers focus on solving retail problems instead of fighting the platform.

Walmart

Jeff Moody

DevOps Manager