Walmart doubles down on agentic AI with WIBEY

Walmart, the world’s largest retail company, has introduced a new agentic AI developer tool, WIBEY, for its software developers to build, deploy, and operate across various functions within the company.

The new tool will enable its workforce across the company to build solutions faster, while streamlining workflows and eliminating the need to navigate multiple systems. Explaining Walmart’s approach to agentic capabilities, Suresh Kumar, Global CTO and CDO, said that the company sees agents being used right from helping customers with shopping to internal use for better productivity and helping in listing the needs of sellers. “We look at technology in terms of ability to help serve our customers better, make life easier for our associates and make sellers and suppliers do business with us in a much more natural way,” Kumar said.  

Operating at a scale that serves over 250 million customers every week across more than 10,700 stores and 19 websites, Sravana Karnati, Executive Vice President of Global Technology Platforms, stated that the need for a super-agent for developers within the company to have access to the right expertise led to the creation of WIBEY. It acts both as a tool and as a platform to build other agents using agents. “It’s a single platform, a super-agent that allows you to build intelligent systems safely and distribute them, discover what exists within the system in a fast, context-aware way,” said Karnati.

Earlier in July, Walmart brought in Daniel Danker as the new Executive Vice President of AI Acceleration, Product, and Design, who was previously the Chief Product Officer and Head of Online Grocery at Instacart, to accelerate Walmart’s AI transformation across enterprise.

At the company’s second-quarter earnings call on August 21st, C. Douglas McMillon, President, Chief Executive Officer and Director of Walmart, said the company’s customer-facing assistant, Sparky app, will become smarter and more personalised with improvements and scaling. “The other super agents we’re building include one for associates that will bring everything into one place, from scheduling to sales data, one for our suppliers, sellers and advertisers that they will use to manage things like onboarding, orders, and campaigns,” McMillion said.

He also said that a developer agent built to scale innovation across the business by accelerating how the company tests, builds, and launches new products. “This is just the beginning of how we’ll deploy AI over time”, McMillon said.