Walmart has made no secret of its artificial intelligence efforts, and the retail giant expanded upon that vision as it detailed the four “super agents” that it expects to play major roles.
Agentic AI at Walmart has so far included both customer-facing and internal, employee-facing solutions. Agentic AI is typically distinguished from other types of AI by its ability to execute tasks autonomously on behalf of its users.
The company explained how at least four of these agents will operate on the same day that it named a former Instacart executive to an AI leadership post.
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 the top 100 online marketplaces by third-party gross merchandise value (GMV). Digital Commerce 360 projects Walmart’s online sales will reach $153.88 billion in 2025.
What are Walmart’s four super agents?
Suresh Kumar, the global chief technology officer and chief development officer at Walmart, used the phrase super agents to describe Walmart’s distinct AI tools. He assessed their use cases in a LinkedIn post on July 24.
“At Walmart, it’s enhancing the way our customers shop and engage, how we run the business and how our partners work with us,” Kumar wrote. “We’ve been building agents — fast — for every aspect of the business.”
He said four super agents are at “the center” of efforts to make tasks easier for Walmart’s customers, associates and partners. Aspects of these agents had been discussed previously, but Kumar outlined them in the following terms:
- Sparky, a customer shopping agent already in use as part of the Walmart app, with upcoming features including agentic commerce functions, “reordering, seamless support and shopping that feels even more effortless.”
- Walmart’s associate agent, which centralizes access to resources such as schedules and sales data with the intent of saving time for Walmart workers.
- Marty, Walmart’s partner agent, which suppliers, sellers and advertisers can use to manage tasks associated with onboarding, orders and campaigns.
- Walmart’s developer agent, designed to shorten cycles for testing, building and launching software within the company.
What distinguishes super agents?
The super agents have the distinction of being supported individually by other agents, according to Kumar.
“Over the next year, the super agents will become a more visible part of the Walmart ecosystem, even as we continue building more specialized agents that live within them — like an agent for our People team, advanced customer care agents and more,” he said.
In addition, Kumar noted that Walmart’s AI would be used with other technologies. Those includes drones and real-time digital twins of Walmart facilities. The deployments would include outcomes such as predicting and preventing issues before they become problems.
“With geospatial data and insights from Flipkart, we plan to offer dynamic delivery windows to 95% of U.S. households by the end of this year,” he stated.
Daniel Danker’s new role at Walmart
Also on July 24, Doug McMillon, the president and CEO at Walmart, announced that the company had hired Daniel Danker. Upon joining Walmart, Danker will become executive vice president, AI acceleration, product and design. He comes to Walmart from Instacart, where he has been serving as chief product officer and head of online grocery for the delivery app.
“In this new global role Daniel will accelerate our AI transformation and lead all product management and design across the enterprise,” McMillon stated in a LinkedIn post.
Danker will report to Kumar, McMillon wrote.
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