Walmart unveiled plans to roll out a suite of AI-powered “super agents” designed to improve the shopping experience for customers and streamline its backend operations. The company believes that its four agents powered by agentic AI will soon be the primary way people engage with the retailer and serve as the entry point for every AI interaction that shoppers, employees, suppliers, sellers, and software developers have with Walmart.
Here are Walmart’s super agents:
- Sparky – currently assists customers with product search and discovery, and soon will be able to reorder items and help plan special shopping trips or events.
- Associate – will allow store workers and corporate staff to automate HR and inventory tasks like submitting an application for parental leave or providing sales data for a certain product or category.
- Marty – to streamline the onboarding process for sellers, suppliers, and advertisers, manage orders, and create ad campaigns.
- Developer – will be the platform on which all future AI tools will be tested, built, and launched.
Hari Vasudev, CTO of Walmart U.S., said during the virtual “Retail Rewired” innovation event:
“We expect that the search bar and the conventional way of searching for items will be replaced by this multimodal interface in Sparky. You could basically give it a very high level task saying, you know, I’ve just moved into a new apartment. I’m looking to furnish the entire apartment within this budget, this color scheme, and Sparky will come back and give you the entire selection that’ll help you meet exactly that need.”
Walmart’s chief technology officer, Suresh Kumar, said that the company chose to launch these super agents now because “customers are ready, they are using AI in pretty much everything they do.”
To aid with its AI product roadmap, Walmart hired former Instacart executive Daniel Danker as executive VP for AI acceleration, product and design, and created a new VP AI role that has yet to be filled.
Walmart declined to comment on whether the AI super agents would replace jobs, but it doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict the future on that one.
