Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) can be found at retailers for a range of use cases, from agentic AI for customer service to platform-level agentic commerce experiences for shoppers — and Walmart is no exception. It is actively working to deploy AI solutions that provide agents empowered to automate and carry out tasks on behalf of its workers, as well as its customers.
The Bentonville, Arkansas-based company is exploring agentic applications on multiple fronts. As it looks ahead, its chief technology officer has a few ideas about what Walmart will need to do to leverage agentic AI successfully. To realize those aspirations, Walmart is prioritizing specific needs while powering the new tools with its own data.
Walmart is No. 2 in the Top 2000. The database is Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of North America’s online retailers by annual web sales. The retailer is also No. 9 in the Global Online Marketplaces Database. That database contains Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of top online marketplaces by third-party gross merchandise value (GMV). Digital Commerce 360 projects Walmart’s online sales will reach $153.88 billion in 2025.
How Walmart is using agentic AI
So far, Walmart’s agentic AI efforts have focused on areas including internally facing tools, as well as customer support. The company’s approach has been surgical, wrote Hari Vasudev, the chief technology officer at Walmart. He laid out how the retailer’s agentic strategy is taking shape in a May 29 blog post.
“Extensive early testing proved that, for us, agents work best when deployed for highly specific tasks, to produce outputs that can then be stitched together to orchestrate and solve complex workflows,” Vasudev explained. “As a result, we are hyper-focused on solving for specific use cases tailored to the unique needs of our business, versus providers that are likely building for multiple potential use cases.”
Agentic AI for Walmart employees
Vasudev described some of the outcomes that Walmart is working to achieve with its agentic rollout.
“From merchant tools that automate a range of time-intensive tasks, particularly entry and analysis, to Trend-to-Product, which shortens the traditional production timeline for Walmart fashion by as much as 18 weeks, we are exploring agentic systems to further optimize activities across our ecosystem such as associate tasks in our stores, customer shopping journeys online and merchandize planning in our home office,” he assessed.
Customer support tasks
Meanwhile, Vasudev sees these new solutions as natural extensions of some chatbot and generative AI solutions that Walmart already has in place.
“In our Customer Support Assistant, agents are already routing, resolving and, increasingly, acting autonomously to automate the mundane and free associates to focus on more complex tasks,” Vasudev wrote. “Our GenAI-powered shopping assistant uses multi-agent orchestration, fallback handling and evolving voice/camera capabilities to support customers from discovery to purchase.”
What agentic commerce solutions need to get right
In addition, Walmart is working on personal shopping agents for finding products and executing purchases on behalf of human shoppers. In preparing the infrastructure necessary, Vasudev sees two key requisites for creating a desirable experience.
First, he believes customers should be able to adequately train the agents they use. In doing so, he thinks they should create feedback loops that help to shape the agents’ logic and capabilities.
“This involves providing specific query parameters — think budgetary limits, brand preferences, sizes, colors and even preferred store locations,” he explained. “Crucially, providing feedback to the agent over time will allow it to learn and adapt to individual needs.”
Moreover, he stressed the need for effective communication between shopper-facing agents and those that operate internally. The goal, he argued, should be to enable internal agents to validate what a shopper’s agent is trying to do. Then, they should be able to facilitate the desired outcome.
“We’re carefully evaluating which actions are best suited for autonomous agent execution and where human oversight and approval remain essential,” Vasudev stated. He described agentic AI as a field where Walmart is “invested in building the right foundation today” so that it can be where it needs to be to be in the future.
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