Home Depot Rolls Out 125,000 hdPhones to Boost Associate Efficiency

More than 125,000 proprietary hdPhones hit Home Depot sales floors beginning June 2022, deployed at a pace of roughly 100 stores per week and built on a hardware partnership with Zebra Technologies, HPE, and Aruba that the company described as a retail first.

Home Depot said the deployment was the first time a major retailer had combined the latest generation of Zebra devices with Aruba Wi-Fi 6 coverage. The hardware spec was precise: a long-range barcode scanner capable of reading overhead and distant shelf tags, all-day battery life engineered to last a full shift, and Workforce Connect, which supports both text messaging and walkie-talkie voice communication across store interiors and parking lots.

Six months into the rollout, the platform got a significant upgrade. On January 12, 2023, Home Depot launched Sidekick, a proprietary in-store app running exclusively on the hdPhone. By that date, more than 99,000 devices had already been issued. Sidekick is powered by a cloud-enabled machine learning algorithm and uses computer vision to analyze shelf images, identifying which products need restocking, where overstock sits on overhead shelves, and in what order associates should work the floor. It launched at 600 stores and reached all 2,000-plus U.S. Home Depot locations by the end of 2023.

The tools arrived at a critical moment for in-store fulfillment. BOPIS orders at Home Depot grew 73% in the first quarter of 2021 alone, and nearly half of all Home Depot online orders are now picked up in store. The hdPhone's ability to surface BOPIS status in real time let associates confirm pickup readiness before walking out to a customer in the parking lot, cutting the kind of escalations that slow high-volume fulfillment shifts.

The hdPhone is the third generation of Home Depot's associate mobile device program. The original FIRST Phones, launched in 2010, let associates locate products, check inventory, and conduct mobile checkout. Android-based successors arrived around 2014-2015. The current platform added Wi-Fi 6 connectivity, computer vision integration, and machine-learning-driven applications that earlier devices had no capacity to run.

Home Depot's investment in associate-facing technology extends beyond hardware. The company's annual ICT spending reached an estimated $4.0 billion in 2024, and in 2022 it established Home Depot Ventures, a $150 million venture capital fund focused on businesses improving retail operations including supply chains, shelf availability, and hiring. The infrastructure built since 2022 is the platform on which every new associate-facing capability will run.