In a corporate blog post, a Walmart executive pulled the curtain back on the company’s approach to AI agents and how to get the most out of them. Agents that are purpose-built for highly specific tasks, trained on internal data, provide the most value to the business and to Walmart’s retail customers, according to Walmart U.S. CTO Hari Vasudev.
“Extensive early testing proved that, for us, agents work best when deployed for highly specific tasks, to produce outputs that can then be stitched together to orchestrate and solve complex workflows,” said Vasudev. “We are hyper-focused on solving for specific use cases tailored to the unique needs of our business, versus providers that are likely building for multiple potential use cases.”
Vasudev said Walmart will use the findings from extensive research on agentic AI to build personal shopping agents, develop advertising and marketing strategies that will work with those agents and understand what the threshold for humans is in automation.