Could Walmart become a leader in the burgeoning agentic AI race?
After watching the retail company’s technology leaders discuss a host of new agents Wednesday at a New York City event, a yes might not be as farfetched as it might sound to some.
The retail giant unveiled its vision for how AI agents are going to overhaul how customers shop on its digital platforms; how corporate and store employees do their jobs; and how vendors and sellers track their merchandise performance. In some cases, this autonomous technology is doing so already.
“Walmart is all in on agents,” the company’s chief technology officer, Suresh Kumar, told reporters at the event. “Agents can make life simpler for every aspect of what we do at Walmart,” he added.
Despite its roots as a brick-and-mortar retailer, Walmart has more recently been at the forefront of online commerce. In embracing AI agents, however, the company is positioning itself ahead of even many digital companies.
Agents, to many in the tech industry, are the next evolution in the current AI boom, where artificial intelligence not only acts as an assistant, but can autonomously complete complex multistep actions with limited, or even no, human involvement. And for Walmart, the company’s leaders say it’s a natural next step in a technological transformation that has been underway inside the Arkansas-based retailer for the past few years. Kumar said he believes that Walmart holds a key advantage over many competitors in this space, considering the depth and breadth of data the company holds both because of its massive customer base, and when it comes to employee experiences as the world’s largest nongovernment employer.
He and other Walmart tech leaders showed off examples of four “super agents,” which essentially act as managers that rout tasks to each more specialized agent. For consumers, there’s Sparky, currently a generative AI digital assistant that can answer product questions and make suggestions, and which has been live in Walmart’s app for some time. In the future, the assistant will start to take actions. Namely, create an order of weekly essential products based on a customer’s shopping behavior, and place the order with essentially a thumbs-up from the customer. The agent will also eventually possess the capability to curate a multi-item order geared to an upcoming party or event—based on specifics such as theme, attendee size, and a shopper’s budget.
Other leaders showcased internal agent use cases that the company says will more efficiently accomplish mundane and repetitive tasks for store workers, corporate staff, Walmart software engineers, and brands and other companies that sell through Walmart’s physical and digital storefronts.
While some of these agentic use cases are live today, others are coming soon, company execs said. But they were intent on making one point clear.
“It’s not vaporware,” one executive said, accurately reading between the lines of one of this reporter’s questions.
Critically, many questions remain unanswered. What exact impact will this so-called agentic future—if brought to full fruition—have on employee headcount at the world’s largest nongovernment employer?
“We expect jobs to evolve, and we don’t know what that looks like yet,” Walmart exec Dave Glick told Fortune.
Will the revenue and employee productivity gains outweigh the intense costs of using AI at scale, especially for a company known on Wall Street for consistently generating profits?
And at a broader industry level, is Walmart willing to participate in a possible future where consumers trust shopping agents from companies like OpenAI or Perplexity to autonomously make purchase decisions for them? Walmart U.S. CTO Hari Vasudev told Fortune that the company is building the technological capabilities to do so, but that the ultimate decision will lie elsewhere in the company.
“I don’t want to mandate the business model; I want to be able to build it as open as I can,” he said. “Whether the business decides to do it with a particular AI operator or not will depend on the economics and the business model and the relationships.”
Are you a current or former Walmart employee with thoughts on this topic or a tip to share? Contact Jason Del Rey at jason.delrey@fortune.com, jasondelrey@protonmail.com, or through messaging apps Signal or WhatsApp at 917-655-4267. You can also message him on LinkedIn or at @delrey on X.
