We have heroes and then superheroes, models and then supermodels, and now rounding off the list, agents and then super agents.
Walmart global CTO and chief development officer Suresh Kumar said the discount store operator has been busy at work building agents at a rapid pace. However, the company recently had an epiphany: More agents can sometimes mean more problems.
“Multiple agents—even if each one is useful—can quickly become overwhelming and confusing,” Kumar wrote in a July 24 LinkedIn post.
The realization led Walmart to tinker its approach to agents. The result? Super agents. Kumar said the retail giant currently has four of the AI helpers whose name sounds as if they could exist in the DC Universe. They include:
- Associate agent: an agent to aid Walmart associates with tasks like scheduling and sales data
- Partner agent (Marty): an agent that assists Walmart’s suppliers, sellers, and advertisers with onboarding, orders, and campaigns
- Developer agent: an agent that assists developers with testing, building, and launching processes
- Sparky: a customer shopping agent that is currently available within the Walmart app
“Each super agent is supported by agents—some already in use, like an agent that helps associates navigate benefits and an agent that helps merchants analyze sales trends,” Kumar wrote. He added that the four super agents will become a “more visible part of the Walmart ecosystem” and that more specialized agents will “live” within them.
Walmart declined to comment at this time.
Three of the four super agents are designed for Walmart employees and partners, and then there’s Sparky. The super agent is consumer-facing, living in the company’s app. Desiree Gosby, Walmart’s SVP of tech strategy and emerging tech, wrote on Walmart’s corporate site: “Sparky helps customers search to find items, synthesize reviews, and offers insights to prepare for any occasion — from looking up current sporting events and finding the right jersey to planning celebrations and picking out the perfect toy.”
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Super strategy. Glenn Weinstein, CEO at Cloudsmith, told IT Brew that the heroic descriptor is the perfect way to describe Walmart’s new AI-assisted assistants.
“From a consumer or from an employee point of view, it’s making multiple AI-powered agents work together,” Weinstein said. He added from a technical perspective, Walmart is using shared languages to help agents replicate how humans complete tasks, and that Walmart’s debut of super agents sounds in-line with what he is seeing the rest of the tech industry doing with AI agents.
“[Walmart is] not doing something radical,” Weinstein said. “They’re doing something that everyone is sort of experimenting with right now, starting with the notion of having an agent, then building on that by exposing how that agent works through software APIs called [Model Context Protocol].”
Trendsetter? Sourabh Satish, co-founder and CTO of Pangea, said we should expect more companies to announce super agent–esque strategies down the line.
“As enterprises are launching these AI agents, there has been a realization that there’s going to be a sprawl of AI agents, and it’s going to be challenging for employees and users trying to use the right agent for the right purpose,” Satish said. “So, this is very much in-line with the expectation that there will be consolidation from a usability perspective.”