Home Depot is killing the phone tree. The retailer announced this week that it’s replacing its traditional “press 1 for store hours, press 2 for returns” customer service phone system with an AI-powered voice agent that lets callers simply state what they need.
The agent — built on Google Gemini for Customer Experience and running on Google’s latest Gemini conversational AI audio models — was piloted at 50 stores before this announcement. The results were striking: the AI is roughly four times faster than the phone menu approach, and takes less than 10 seconds to understand why the customer is calling.
It can do more than route the call, too. The agent can build a digital shopping cart, initiate service requests, and resolve common inquiries from start to finish — without ever handing the call to a human associate. And when it does need to hand off, the transfer is described as quick.
The rollout is scheduled to expand to U.S. stores throughout the year.
How the New System Works
“Using customer service AI voice agents, we’re moving away from ‘please listen to these options’ and toward ‘how can I help?'” said Jordan Broggi, Home Depot’s EVP of customer experience and president of online. “AI does a tremendous job at recognizing customer intent and taking direct action to help complete a purchase or even start a service request. And of course, if they need to speak with an associate, we’ll quickly connect them.”
That framing — “how can I help” replacing “please listen to these options” — is a clean encapsulation of where the broader retail industry is heading on customer service. The decade-plus reign of the touch-tone phone menu, with its rigid scripts and frequent dead ends, is being replaced by something closer to how a human conversation actually works.
A Broader Industry Shift
Home Depot’s announcement doesn’t stand alone. It’s the latest move in a fast-developing AI customer-service buildout across the home improvement industry.
Lowe’s launched Mylow, an AI shopping assistant, in 2025. The company has shared that customers who use Mylow convert online at three times the rate of customers who don’t, and the tool fields more than a million customer questions per month. Ace Hardware has rolled out its own AI-powered assistant. Home Depot itself already has Magic Apron, an AI tool focused on giving customers project answers.
The pattern is clear: every major player in the home improvement space is investing in AI customer service tools, and the use cases are expanding from shopping guidance to product answers to, now, voice-based service routing.
For an industry historically built on personal expertise and in-person help, the technology shift is significant. It’s also moving fast.
What It Means
For hardware and home improvement retailers — at every scale — the trend has a few clear implications. A few angles:
- The customer service speed bar is rising. A 4x-faster phone experience at Home Depot quietly shifts what customers expect from every retailer. The wait that felt normal in 2024 starts to feel slow in 2026. Phone systems, in-store help, and online chat experiences will all be measured against the new pace.
- AI voice tools are increasingly accessible. The technology that powers Home Depot’s voice agent — Google’s Gemini conversational AI — is the same underlying tech that’s becoming available to smaller retailers through cooperative platforms, third-party SaaS providers, and the cooperatives themselves. The gap between what an enterprise rolls out and what an independent can adopt is narrower than it used to be.
- The human moments still matter. Broggi’s quote ends with an important note: when a customer needs an associate, they’ll “quickly connect them.” AI service isn’t replacing humans across the industry — it’s handling the routine and triaging to humans for the complicated. That’s a model independent retailers already use intuitively: the staff member at the counter handles the situation, full stop. The chains are catching up to what indie service has always done, just by routing through technology.
- Customer expectations carry across retailers. A homeowner who has a fast, frictionless phone experience with Home Depot tomorrow doesn’t compartmentalize that into “this is what Home Depot is good at.” They carry that expectation into the next store they call. The investment Home Depot is making lifts the floor for everyone — and retailers who haven’t started thinking about how their phone, chat, and counter experiences feel should consider it.
The Bigger Picture
The death of the phone menu isn’t really news on its own. What’s notable is what the technology behind it represents: AI is moving rapidly from “interesting tool” to “operational infrastructure” inside the home improvement industry. It’s running customer service. It’s giving shopping advice. It’s writing product copy. It’s helping with project guidance. It’s increasingly invisible — and increasingly load-bearing.
For retailers across every scale, the question isn’t whether AI will reshape how customers experience this industry. It’s how each retailer wants to participate in that shift on their own terms.
Source: Retail Customer Experience, June 2026.
