Walmart's AI Revolution: Transforming Retail with 'Super Agents' and Digital Twins

Walmart's latest AI innovations represent a shift for big retail

A Walmart store is shown in Oceanside, California, on May 15, 2025.Mike Blake | Reuters With fears about the strength of consumer spending running high due to tariffs, inflation and other economic pressures, retailers are working hard to sustain revenue growth. While some retailers are leaning into worker-led personalized experiences for shoppers, other retailers are focusing more on leveraging artificial intelligence to optimize the shopping experience. Walmart is one of those retailers, adding new "super agents" that aims to save time and effort for both workers and shoppers. At its recent Retail Rewired innovation event, Walmart highlighted the launch of four "super agents," which include Marty for sellers and suppliers, Sparky for shoppers, the Associate Agent and the Developer Agent. With agents performing capabilities in the realm of payroll, paid time off, merchandising and finding the right products for any event, Walmart is consolidating its powerful, time-saving tools for the sake of a streamlined experience for multiple points of interaction with the company. "Having a plethora of different agents can very quickly become confusing," Suresh Kumar, chief technology officer for Walmart Global, said at the event. The Associate Agent, for example, is "a single point of entry where any associate can find access to all of the agents we've built on the back end," explained David Glick, senior vice president for Enterprise Business Solutions at Walmart. "As you speak to it more, as you work with it more, it'll know more about you." The evolution comes alongside a broader shift for retail, an industry actively seeking to counteract cost concerns from consumers and the government, and Walmart isn't alone in its push toward all things AI. Amazon's Prime Day event over four days in July saw generative AI use jump 3,300% year over year, according to TechCrunch. Meanwhile, Google Cloud AI partnered with body care retailer Lush to visually identify projects without packaging, ultimately reducing the expense of training new hires. Walmart is also all-in on physical and spatial AI, specifically digital twins (a virtual copy of any physical object or space -- in Walmart's case, their stores and clubs). Using digital twin technology powered by spatial AI, Walmart can "detect, diagnose and remediate issues up to two weeks in advance," Brandon Ballard, group director for real estate at Walmart US, said at Retail Rewired. Using this technology comes with big savings, according to Ballard. "Last year, we cut all of our emergency alerts by 30% and we reduced our maintenance spend in refrigeration by 19% across Walmart US," he added. "At its core, retail is a physical business," said Alex de Vigan, CEO and founder of Nfinite, which generates large-scale visual data for training spatial and physical AI models. "We've seen retailers use digital twins to reduce setup time for new promotions, reallocate labor more efficiently, and improve robotic picking accuracy, small gains that add up quickly when margins are under stress," he said. While the impact of digital twins may not be outwardly visible to consumers in the same way, say, Walmart's Sparky agent is, its effects will be real. "Better stock accuracy, faster site updates and fewer order issues mean a smoother retail experience, even in a tighter economy," said de Vigan. Another innovation on the back end is Walmart's use of machine learning to better understand how long it will take to get a delivery order on a customer's doorsteps, effectively managing expectations while increasing efficiency. As for what consumers can see, Sparky is already helping shoppers generate baskets built on an intuitive understanding of their needs. Walmart is currently working on enabling the agent to take action on reordering products, ultimately reducing the mental load that shoppers deal with. For retailers, AI is one way to combat any slowdown in consumer spending, but we've yet to see how a fully integrated AI shopping experience -- both in person and online -- will shape our relationship with retail moving forward.

Walmart embraces agentic AI with major ML platform upgrade and developer 'super agent' - SiliconANGLE

Walmart embraces agentic AI with major ML platform upgrade and developer 'super agent' Walmart Inc. is giving its Element machine learning platform a major agentic upgrade and adding a "super agent" for software development to its growing portfolio of semi-autonomous software robots. The retail giant is using its Converge 2025 technology event to reinforce the message that it is all in on agents, the artificial intelligence worker bees that take actions and operate with minimal supervision. Element, its cross-cloud machine learning platform, is being refactored to orchestrate armies of agents. Wibey is the new super agent, designed to serve up the optimal tools to developers, resolve pipeline problems and generally enhance productivity. In an interview with SiliconANGLE, Sravana Karnati, Executive Vice President of Global Technology Platforms at Walmart, said agents are more than an upgrade. They are the key to reimagining how Walmart builds and scales intelligent systems. "We're entering a pivotal moment in the evolution of AI," he said. "The focus is shifting to building intelligent systems powered by agents that can operate independently with reasoning, memory, and context." Enhancements to Element support autonomous systems with memory, reasoning, and the ability to interact with multiple tools and application programming interfaces. The platform has been given a stateful architecture that enables it to track what agents do, say, and intend. This means agents can retain context -- not just for a single interaction, but across long-running workflows that span systems and services. Karnati said that's important for tasks like identifying and fixing code compliance gaps, validating fixes in test environments spun up on the fly and issuing the necessary pull requests. A plugin and tool-calling ecosystem allows agents to natively interact with external systems. Element supports standardized communication protocols, including the new Agent-to-Agent and Model Context Protocols, for coordination across agents and applications. API orchestration extends coordination across distributed environments. Walmart said these features combine to enable Element to function as a platform for managing the full lifecycle of intelligent agents -- from development and testing to deployment and monitoring. There are also observability tools that let teams track decision paths, reasoning steps, and performance metrics. Karnati said the changes enable Element to treat agents the same way it has historically handled ML models. Developers can register agents in an agent catalog, evaluate their behavior with built-in guardrails, and reuse them across multiple projects. Wibey is a centralized interface for interacting with Walmart's internal systems. It's the fifth in a growing portfolio of super agents targeted at customers, associates and partners. Super agents essentially coordinate the activities of task-specific agents, of which Walmart now has about 200, Karnati said. Built on top of Element, Wibey interprets user intent and routes commands to the appropriate tools, APIs, or agents. It provides a unified entry point for executing common tasks by software engineers, architects and product managers. Walmart has assembled a large arsenal of development tools over the years and sees Wibey as a way to organize and apply them. "Wibey isn't a dashboard or portal," said Karnati. "It's an invocation layer that understands developer goals and coordinates execution across Walmart's technology ecosystem." For example, Walmart has developed agents that can scan codebases for accessibility compliance issues, identify gaps, apply recommended fixes, and validate those changes in test environments. Another set of agents monitors third-party libraries for outdated or vulnerable versions and can propose upgrades, test compatibility, and create pull requests automatically. Wibey integrates with popular development tools such as command-line interfaces, Slack, and Visual Studio. It also supports decentralized development by enabling teams across Walmart to register and expose their own agents through shared protocols and contracts. Karnati said one of Wibey's core uses strengths is to generate tailored starter kits for software projects. Developers no longer have to search through internal portals for templates or services. Instead, they can use Wibey to generate a customized project framework based on a prompt and preexisting context, cutting down on time spent searching. "It used to be that developers would have to manually look up the right APIs or templates," Karnati said. "Wibey can develop a starter kit that is very specific to their project. They don't need to make a bunch of modifications. It is ready-made based on the questions they ask, and it knows the context in which they're operating." Karnati said the shift toward agentic systems is laying the groundwork for a new phase of AI adoption at Walmart, one that supports not only greater automation, but more intelligent and adaptive systems across all parts of the business. In software development, agents can handle tasks like debugging deployment pipelines or detecting and fixing infrastructure anomalies. Customer-facing agents are already being used to personalize interactions. The impact of agents like Wibey could exceed that of traditional generative AI tools, largely due to their reasoning capabilities and integration with core enterprise systems, Karnati said. "This isn't just about code generation," he said. "It's about building systems that can make decisions, carry out actions, and improve over time."