Home Depot Partners With Rilla to Deploy AI-Powered Team Coaching at Scale

The Home Depot announced a strategic partnership with Rilla, an AI-powered platform specializing in field team performance, to bring real-time coaching tools to its 470,000+ service and sales professionals across the country. The collaboration, announced January 13, 2026, shows Home Depot's plans to enhance frontline execution and customer experience at the world's largest home improvement retailer.

Rilla's platform addresses a crucial challenge in retail operations. The gap between performance standards and real-world execution. Traditional coaching methods rely on manual observation and periodic reviews which causes a struggle in scaling across thousands of locations.

Rilla's AI analyzes communication patterns and service delivery across teams, surfacing actionable insights that enable leaders to reinforce best practices, identify coaching opportunities, and drive consistent improvements in customer interactions without the friction of legacy approaches.

Rather than waiting for quarterly reviews or relying on spotty observations, managers gain real-time visibility into how service is delivered across their teams. The platform identifies communication patterns, tone, responsiveness, problem-solving approach, and customer engagement tactics that correlate with performance and customer satisfaction. This enables leaders to implement targeted coaching quickly, reinforcing winning behaviors before they fade from memory or disappear entirely through personnel turnover.

For The Home Depot, operating 2,353 retail stores plus over 800 branches across North America, the ability to scale personalized coaching across geographic and organizational boundaries is transformative. Consistency in customer experience has long been the holy grail of retail at scale.

A customer in Portland should receive the same caliber of attention as a customer in Miami. Rilla's technology makes that achievable by giving every store manager, regional leader, and district manager access to the same data-driven insights about what's working and what's not.

Sebastian Jimenez, CEO of Rilla, framed the partnership around this operational reality. "The Home Depot is a company known for its service excellence and operational scale," Jimenez said. "We're thrilled to partner with them to help equip their teams with tools that enhance performance and support the high standard of care they deliver to millions of customers."

AI Adoption in Retail

Home Depot has already deployed Blueprint Takeoffs, an AI tool for professional customers to generate faster, more accurate material lists and cost estimates. The Rilla partnership extends this playbook internally, applying AI to the human workflows that drive customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

The Home Depot's focus on "pros," professional renovators, remodelers, and builders represents a significant business segment where service expertise and personalized attention directly influence loyalty and lifetime value. These are high-intent customers making material purchasing decisions worth thousands of dollars.

The quality of advice, the speed of problem-solving, and the consistency of service matter enormously. Rilla's coaching platform directly supports frontline teams in delivering the expertise and attentiveness that professionals expect.

Rilla's rapid adoption among leading brands in home services, retail, and manufacturing signals growing confidence in AI-powered coaching as a category. The platform has moved beyond early adopters to mainstream enterprise adoption, suggesting that the technology delivers measurable ROI, likely through metrics like improved customer satisfaction scores, reduced employee turnover, and incremental sales performance from better customer conversations.

For Rilla, this partnership will likely accelerate customer acquisition across retail and home services sectors. For Home Depot, it signals their push towards AI solutions that directly impact frontline execution and customer experience.

Deploying a new coaching platform across 2,353 stores and 800+ branches requires careful change management, training, and integration with existing workflows and systems. Store managers, already managing complex inventory, staffing, and customer experience challenges, must adopt a new tool and develop proficiency with it. Frontline teams must trust that feedback surfaced by the platform is fair and constructive rather than surveillance.

The Home Depot's track record suggests capability here. The company has successfully deployed numerous technology initiatives across its massive footprint, from inventory systems to customer-facing mobile tools. Its commitment to frontline teams, 470,000+ employees, and consistent messaging about service excellence provide a cultural foundation for this kind of transformation.

While Home Depot dominates by store count and scale, competitors like Lowe's are investing heavily in their own technology initiatives. Lowe's Companies reported Q3 2025 net sales of $20.8B, with comparable sales growth of 0.4%, signaling steady execution amid softening demand.

Lowe's aggressively invests in AI-driven personalization and supply chain optimization, positioning itself as the technology-forward challenger. Target counters with consumer-facing AI tools like its holiday Gift Finder, while Amazon's cashierless stores and robotics redefine fulfillment benchmarks. The partnership with Rilla positions Home Depot to maintain service quality and operational consistency as a sustainable competitive advantage.