Fortune | FORTUNE 07月25日 02:39
Walmart–yes, Walmart–says AI agents are its future
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零售巨头沃尔玛正全面进军人工智能代理领域,旨在革新消费者购物体验、优化员工工作流程以及提升供应商的商品表现追踪。公司首席技术官表示,AI代理将简化沃尔玛的各项业务。沃尔玛凭借其庞大的客户数据和广泛的员工基础,在AI代理的发展上具有显著优势。文章介绍了沃尔玛的四个“超级代理”示例,包括面向消费者的“Sparky”智能助手,未来将能根据用户习惯自动下单,并为活动策划个性化购物清单。同时,AI代理也将承担内部重复性任务,提高效率。尽管部分应用已上线,但AI代理对员工数量、成本效益及未来商业模式的影响仍是关注焦点。

🌟 沃尔玛全面拥抱AI代理技术,旨在重塑其数字平台上的消费者购物体验、公司及门店员工的工作方式,以及供应商的商品表现追踪。公司表示“沃尔玛全力投入代理”。

🤖 AI代理被视为当前AI热潮的下一演进阶段,它们不仅能充当助手,更能自主完成复杂的多步骤任务,且所需人类干预极少。沃尔玛认为这是其近年来技术转型中的自然下一步。

🛍️ 沃尔玛展示了四种“超级代理”的应用,例如面向消费者的“Sparky”已能回答产品问题并提供建议,未来将能根据顾客购物习惯自动生成并下单周度必需品,甚至根据活动主题、规模和预算策划多品类订单。

💼 内部应用方面,AI代理将更高效地处理门店员工、公司职员、软件工程师以及通过沃尔玛销售商品的品牌和公司的日常重复性任务。

❓ 尽管沃尔玛在AI代理领域动作频频,但其对员工数量的影响、AI应用成本与收益的权衡,以及是否允许消费者信任外部AI代理做出购物决策等问题,仍有待解答。公司表示将构建开放的技术能力,但最终商业模式将取决于经济效益和合作关系。

The retail giant unveiled its vision for how AI agents are going to overhaul how customers shop on its digital platforms, how corporate and store employees do their jobs, and how vendors and sellers track their merchandise performance. In some cases, this autonomous technology is doing so already.

“Walmart is all in on agents,” the company’s chief technology officer Suresh Kumar told reporters at the event. “Agents can make life simpler for every aspect of what we do at Walmart,” he added.

Despite its roots as a brick and mortar retailer, Walmart has more recently been at the forefront of online commerce. In embracing AI agents however, the company is positioning itself ahead of even many digital companies.

Agents, to many in the tech industry, are the next evolution in the current AI boom, where artificial intelligence not only acts as an assistant, but can autonomously complete complex multi-step actions with limited, or even no, human involvement. And for Walmart, the company’s leaders say it’s a natural next step in a technological transformation that has been underway inside the Arkansas-based retailer for the last few years. Kumar said he believes that Walmart holds a key advantage over many competitors in this space, considering the depth and breadth of data the company holds both because of its massive customer base, and when it comes to employee experiences as the world’s largest non-government employer.

He and other Walmart tech leaders showed off examples of four ‘super agents,’ which essentially act as managers that rout tasks to each more specialized agent. For consumers, there’s Sparky, currently a gen AI digital assistant that can answer product questions and make suggestions, and which has been live in Walmart’s app for some time. In the future, the assistant will start to take actions. Namely, create an order of weekly essential products based on a customer’s shopping behavior, and place the order with essentially a thumbs up from the customer. The agent will also eventually possess the capability to curate a multi-item order geared to an upcoming party or event—based on specifics such as theme, attendee size, and a shopper’s budget.

Other leaders showcased internal agent use cases that the company says will more efficiently accomplish mundane and repetitive tasks, for store workers, corporate staff, Walmart software engineers, and brands and other companies that sell through Walmart’s physical and digital storefronts.

While some of these agentic use cases are live today, others are coming soon, company execs said. But they were intent on making one point clear.

“It’s not vaporware,” one executive said, accurately reading through the lines of one of this reporter’s questions.

Critically, many questions remain unanswered. What exact impact will this so-called agentic future—if brought to full fruition—have on employee headcount at the world’s largest non-government employer?

“We expect jobs to evolve and we don’t know what that looks like yet,” Walmart exec Dave Glick told Fortune.

Will the revenue and employee productivity gains outweigh the intense costs of using AI at scale, especially for a company known on Wall Street for consistently generating profits?

And at a broader industry level, is Walmart willing to participate in a possible future where consumers trust shopping agents from companies like OpenAI or Perplexity to autonomously make purchase decisions for them? Walmart US CTO Hari Vasudev told Fortune that the company is building the technological capabilities to do so, but that the ultimate decision will lie elsewhere in the company.

“I don’t want to mandate the business model; I want to be able to build it as open as I can,” he said. “Whether the business decides to do it with a particular AI operator or not will depend on the economics and the business model and the relationships.”

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沃尔玛 人工智能代理 AI零售 科技创新 未来购物
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