What: Walmart has built a tech platform that powers its last-mile delivery ecosystem.

Why it is important: The retailer has increased the number of digital orders coming from its stores by 170% in the last year, leading it to scale its automated market fulfillment centers, tap machine learning and test autonomous delivery.

Walmart’s retail tech that supports its fulfillment operations is built around its own marketplace and uses automation and machine learning to turn a large number of factors into unable data. The seamless communication across the entire delivery process allows the retailer to replenishment at a shorter cycle, gain close-to-real-time insights of inventory and ultimately react to customer demand. Thus, increasing the shopping experience for customers.

The next phase of Walmart’s store integration and evolution is adding more market fulfillment centers to stores. The retailer has also been testing drones and autonomous vehicles to fulfill order in the last mile.

Walmart steps up automated store distribution