WSJ: Walmart Experiments with AI Agents

There was an interesting article today in the Wall Street Journal about Walmart’s journey with AI.

Walmart experimented early on with various AI agents for customer service, merchandising and one-off tasks.
Walmart’s CTO Suresh Kumar was quoted:

“It became very clear that we could dramatically simplify,” said Suresh Kumar, Walmart’s chief technology officer and chief development officer. “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.”

This is the question: Will agents matter at all? The founder of OpenAI is saying Text-to-action is not far off.

Regardless, kudos to a big organization adopting early. It will help them plan for future workflows and will force them to get their data setup in a way that future more advanced AI models can ingest data and interact.

See related: Lowes deploy’s AI to combat theft