Walmart To Launch Four Advanced AI Agents For Customers And Employees

Walmart is set to launch four “super agents,” advanced AI systems with agentic capabilities, designed to serve different purposes and target audiences within its business network.

According to an exclusive report from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Walmart will announce this week its plan for its four specialized AI agents: one for customers, one for employees, one for engineers, and another one for suppliers and sellers.

Walmart had been developing dozens of AI agents over the past several months, but ultimately decided to focus on the four most relevant and useful for its operations.

“It became very clear that we could dramatically simplify,” said Suresh Kumar, Walmart’s chief technology officer and chief development officer, to WSJ. “If I have an agent that helps you with your payroll and I have a different agent that helps you with identifying merchandising trends, you shouldn’t have to remember that and switch between those two.”

Kumar explained that AI is already transforming the way Walmart operates and that building specialized tools presents a major opportunity to enhance experiences across its business network.

Each agent is at a different stage of development and will be released at different times. Sparky, customer-facing advanced AI agent, is already live, but the company plans to share updates and improvements soon. The supplier-focused agent, Marty, is expected to launch in the coming months and will include analytics on purchases and advertising campaign suggestions. The other two super agents—for employees and engineers—are slated for release next year.

Walmart will integrate these super agents with Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) program so that they can interact with other smaller agents, apps, and data sources.

According to Reuters, Walmart is betting on AI, aiming to support growth and manage up to 50% of its sales within the next five years.

Some of Walmart’s AI plans were previously accidentally revealed by Microsoft during a presentation at its Build conference, when AI security chief Neta Haiby unintentionally displayed internal Teams messages on the screen.