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Dive Brief:
Unifying its approach to the technology, Walmart launched a new companywide artificial intelligence framework centered around four “super agents” to support various business touchpoints, according to a blog post from Chief Technology Officer and Chief Development Officer Suresh Kumar shared with Retail Dive Thursday.
The mass retailer has quickly built AI agents across the business and is now implementing a streamlined approach, where several agents will support a larger super agent to minimize user confusion. The four super agents include: the customer-facing Sparky agent that launched in June; the partner agent Marty for suppliers, advertisers and sellers; a store-centric associate agent; and an agent for company tech developers.
Walmart will continue adding specialized subagents to the super agents over the next year, making them “a more visible part of the Walmart ecosystem,” per Kumar. The news coincides with the announcement Wednesday that Walmart tapped Instacart executive Daniel Danker as its executive vice president of AI acceleration, product and design.
Dive Insight:
With 900,000 associates already asking 3 million questions per week using the company’s conversational AI tool, Walmart is now aiming to consolidate its AI capabilities.
“Once we saw how quickly teams were adopting these agents and how helpful they were, we realized agents weren’t just useful, they were essential,” Kumar said in the blog post. “But we also recognized that multiple agents — even if each one is useful —can quickly become overwhelming and confusing. So we made a deliberate choice: to go beyond individual tools and build a unified, company-wide framework — one that ensures every new agent we roll out makes life simpler and easier for everyone: for customers, for associates and for our partners.”
The retailer also announced that it has created a new executive vice president of AI platforms position that will report to Kumar, which CEO Doug McMillon said in a LinkedIn post would help to increase productivity, speed and innovation.
Walmart launched its customer-facing agent Sparky just a few months after launching a merchant agent called Wally. Sparky currently helps customers learn more about reviews and provide purchase recommendations. In the future, Walmart said in a fact sheet, Sparky will support event planning, as well as “enable reordering, provide always-on support and deliver shopping experiences that feel effortless.”
The retailer’s associate super AI agent includes a subagent being rolled out specifically to assist with benefits-related questions, as well as a query subagent providing workforce data insights to leaders. A newly developed capability also enables Walmart teams “to build and share small, purpose-built AI tools — called nano agents — in as little as a week,” per the fact sheet.
Walmart’s Marty super agent is intended to unify fragmented systems and provide users with support to manage catalogs, speed up campaign setup and more.
Additionally, Walmart says AI is being used with a goal to make three-hour delivery to 95% of U.S. households possible by the end of this year. So far, the retailer says AI use has cut resolution times in customer support by up to 40%, minimized time needed for shift planning by team leads from 90 minutes to just 30 minutes and cut fashion production timelines by up to 18 weeks.
Target is also working to capitalize on trends at a quicker pace, using AI to monitor trends emerging from social media in order to highlight relevant products, per a company earnings call in March.
Walmart is also focused on digital twin technology, which has tracked HVAC, refrigeration and kitchen appliances across stores, reducing emergency maintenance by 30% and repair costs by nearly 20% in pilot cases.
The mass retailer announced its new AI approach just two days after touting the usage of AI for combating fraud in its marketplace. Walmart is using AI and real-time monitoring to review product listings for intellectual property infringement or other policy violations.