Walmart Launches AI Super Agents to Boost Growth While Downplaying Job Losses

US retailer and the world’s largest retailer, Walmart, has announced plans to launch AI super agents to improve the customer shopping experience. According to Reuters, Walmart’s launch of AI super agents is the first step towards automating operations and making AI agents the primary mode of interaction between the retailer and customers.

Four Agents for Starters

Walmart’s AI-powered suite will include four agents designed for store employees, shoppers, sellers, suppliers, and software developers. The agentic AI bots will serve as the entry point for AI interactions that any of these groups have with the giant retailer. The company said that the AI super agents replace multiple AI tools and agents that Walmart has been using.

Walmart is leveraging the AI boom to power its e-commerce growth. The company is looking to grow online sales by up to 50% over the next five years. Last year, the retailer reported $648 billion in annual sales.

The company expects to attract more shoppers to its e-commerce platform by leveraging AI to streamline the shopping process. Walmart’s agentic AI is designed to help shoppers discover new products, speed up deliveries, and help with product returns. Walmart hopes to chip into Amazon’s market share over time. Amazon has already launched various AI-powered tools to support shoppers and sellers.

AI Uncertainty

Agentic AI requires minimal human intervention to complete specific tasks and make decisions, aspects that make it the next version of generative AI. Walmart is introducing AI-powered tools at a time when its short-term financial benefits from AI remain uncertain. Concerns over the impact of AI tools on jobs in the retail industry have also been raised.

One of Walmart’s gen-AI-powered agents Sparky, is already accessible to shoppers via an app developed by the retailer. The Agent helps customers to summarize product reviews, find product suggestions, or right products for items they own. According to Walmart’s Chief Tech Officer for the US Hari Vasudev, the retailer has enhanced the capabilities of Sparky significantly.

As a super agent, Sparky will have the ability to reorder items, schedule events, and use computer vision to generate product recipes using contents that shoppers have in their fridge, Vasudev said.

Associate Super Agent

Walmart plans to use AI super agents in multiple areas of its retail business. The e-commerce retailer is currently creating an associate super agent that it plans to launch in the coming months. Workers at the retail giant currently use different AI tools to manage queries. The associate super agent will enable corporate staff and workers at the retail giants to complete tasks like submitting parental leave applications or providing sales data for specific products or categories to store managers in real time. 

Walmart is designing another super agent, Marty, for suppliers, sellers, and advertisers. This AI agent will help the retailers manage orders, generate ad campaigns, and streamline its onboarding process. The giant e-commerce retailer is also designing a developer AI super agent on which all AI tools will be built, tested, and unveiled.

“Agents can help automate and simplify pretty much everything that we do,” Suresh Kumar, Chief Technology Officer at Walmart, said. According to Kumar, the retailer opted to unveil the superagents because “customers are ready, they are using AI in pretty much everything they do.”

Although the retail giant did not say whether its AI agents will replace existing jobs, it argued that the new tools will create more jobs. As Walmart downplays AI-related layoffs, employees in major tech companies have been affected by AI.

Last month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that AI agents will enable the e-commerce giant to cut its workforce in the coming few years. Microsoft, on the other hand, has said that AI will enhance productivity. The Windows maker has sacked thousands of workers. Search giant Google has also laid off hundreds of workers in recent months.