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.
Making digital twins of Walmart stores
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.
