July 25, 2025
5 min read
Jason Del Rey
Walmart is pioneering AI agents to transform shopping, employee tasks, and vendor management, positioning itself ahead in the AI revolution.
Could Walmart become a leader in the burgeoning agentic AI race?
After watching the retail company’s technology leaders discuss a host of new AI agents at a New York City event, the answer might be yes.
The retail giant unveiled its vision for how AI agents will overhaul how customers shop on its digital platforms, how corporate and store employees perform their jobs, and how vendors and sellers track merchandise performance. In some cases, this autonomous technology is already in use.
“Walmart is all in on agents,” said Suresh Kumar, the company’s chief technology officer. “Agents can make life simpler for every aspect of what we do at Walmart.”
Despite its roots as a brick-and-mortar retailer, Walmart has recently been at the forefront of online commerce. By embracing AI agents, the company is positioning itself ahead of many digital-first companies.
Agents represent the next evolution in the AI boom, where artificial intelligence not only assists but autonomously completes complex multistep actions with limited or no human involvement. For Walmart, this is a natural next step in a technological transformation underway for several years.
Kumar believes Walmart holds a key advantage over many competitors due to the depth and breadth of data it possesses, both from its massive customer base and its employee experiences as the world’s largest nongovernment employer.
Walmart’s tech leaders showcased four “super agents,” which act as managers routing tasks to more specialized agents:
- Sparky: A generative AI digital assistant live in Walmart’s app that answers product questions and makes suggestions. In the future, Sparky will autonomously create orders of weekly essentials based on shopping behavior and place orders with customer approval. It will also curate multi-item orders for events based on theme, attendee size, and budget.
- Internal agents designed to automate mundane and repetitive tasks for store workers, corporate staff, software engineers, and vendors selling through Walmart’s physical and digital storefronts. Some agentic use cases are live today, while others are coming soon. Walmart executives emphasized this is not vaporware but real technology being deployed. However, many questions remain:
- What impact will this agentic future have on employee headcount at the world’s largest nongovernment employer?
- Will revenue and productivity gains outweigh the costs of scaling AI?
- Is Walmart willing to participate in a future where consumers trust third-party shopping agents to make autonomous purchase decisions? Walmart U.S. CTO Hari Vasudev said the company is building the technological capabilities to enable such scenarios but that the ultimate business decisions will depend on economics, business models, and partnerships. “I don’t want to mandate the business model; I want to be able to build it as open as I can,” Vasudev said.
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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 via Signal or WhatsApp at 917-655-4267. You can also message him on LinkedIn or at @delrey on X.
Source: Walmart—yes, Walmart—says AI agents are its future by Jason Del Rey, published July 24, 2025.