Closing the Gap: How New Tech Is Transforming Static Images into Storefronts

For years, the biggest hurdle in online retail has been the disconnect between inspiration and purchase. A shopper sees a beautifully designed living room in a product photo, but if they want the lamp in the corner rather than the sofa in the center, they are forced to abandon their cart and start a new search.

Somesh Rahul, a product lead at Walmart, has engineered a solution that eliminates this friction entirely.

Rahul is the architect behind "Shop the Background," a new feature rolling out for the Holiday 2025 season that allows customers to purchase items directly from lifestyle imagery. The concept marks a significant shift in how major retailers approach basket building. Instead of treating product photos as static displays, Rahul's team has turned them into interactive storefronts. Walmart News & Leadership

The Shift to Contextual Commerce

The feature arrives as the retail industry pivots toward "contextual commerce," a strategy focused on capturing sales at the exact moment of discovery. While competitors like Amazon have experimented with camera-based search tools like Lens Live or social-style feeds, Rahul chose a different path. He integrated discovery directly into the product detail page, the location where purchase intent is already highest.

"The core idea is simple. If you like what you see, you should be able to buy it without hunting or guesswork," Rahul explains. "We designed this to enable customers to quickly and confidently build a coherent look for their home."

The technology utilizes computer vision to identify accessories and furniture within "background" imagery—such as a rug under a coffee table or artwork behind a sofa—and instantly matches them to in-stock inventory. Early internal metrics indicate the strategy is working, showing a reduction in the number of taps required to assemble a room and an increase in the purchase of complementary items.

A Portfolio of Human-Centered Innovation

Shop the Background is part of a broader suite of AI-powered enhancements Rahul has championed to modernize the Walmart user experience. His work extends beyond visual commerce into accessibility and decision support.

Rahul also led the development of AI-generated audio summaries, a feature designed to synthesize complex product descriptions and reviews into brief audio clips. While valuable for shoppers on the go, the tool provides a critical service for visually impaired users who rely on screen readers, allowing them to grasp product details significantly faster. Modern Retail

This focus on inclusivity and precision is a defining characteristic of Rahul's product philosophy. He emphasizes that maintaining shopper trust requires rigorous validation standards, ensuring that AI suggestions provide exact matches rather than confusing look-alikes.

Reshaping the Retail Economics

The business implications of Rahul's work are substantial. By compressing the path from inspiration to purchase, these features directly address "attach rate," a key retail metric that measures the percentage of add-on items purchased alongside a primary product.

"The essential user experience win is two-fold: speed and confidence," Rahul notes. "You are shopping a style, not wrestling with a list of SKUs."

As the industry moves away from forced social commerce models, Rahul's strategy of enhancing the customer's existing attention appears to be the winning formula for the U.S. market. His team is now looking to expand these capabilities into new categories and deeper in-store integrations, potentially linking digital inspiration to physical aisle navigation.

Through these innovations, Rahul has established himself as a central figure in the evolution of digital retail infrastructure. His work at Walmart demonstrates that the future of shopping is not just about having the most products, but about creating the most intuitive pathways to find them.

"We have shipped several innovations with the same north star: low friction, high confidence," Rahul says. "This is merely our latest proof point."

About the Product Leader

Somesh Rahul is the product lead for Walmart's Shop the Background, a feature designed to make images and immersive scenes shoppable so customers can quickly create a coherent look or style at home. He has led multiple human-centered innovations at Walmart focused on reducing decision friction and raising shopper confidence across web and app journeys like AI-generated Audio Summaries, Virtual Makeup and Hair Color Try-on , and others.