As new Walmart CEO John Furner prepares to take over from Doug McMillon in February, Furner can expect the retail giant’s artificial intelligence (AI) and agentic commerce strategies to come up frequently as he decides how to best put agents and machine learning to use.

“Every job we’ve got is going to change in some way — whether it’s getting the shopping carts off the parking lot, or the way our technologists work, or certainly the way leadership roles change,” McMillon said during a Harvard Business Review event in November, according to an Axios report from that day.

That statement came toward the end of a big year for Walmart’s AI endeavors, which already stretched across its operations from online and omnichannel shopping to how its employees work at stores and build internal tools to benefit the organization. In addition to developing its own AI and machine learning capabilities, the Bentonville, Arkansas-based company also works with OpenAI in key areas that factor into its plans for 2026.

How Walmart is using AI for its agents and ‘super agents’

Suresh Kumar, the global chief technology officer and chief development officer at Walmart, used the phrase “super agents” to describe how Walmart is using AI not just to enhance customer service and experience, but also to manage lesser AI agents in targeted areas with larger agents that operate at higher levels.

“We’ve been building agents — fast — for every aspect of the business,” he wrote in a July 2025 LinkedIn post.

Walmart gave those super agents their own names:

• Sparky, which is Walmart’s virtual assistant for shoppers.
• My Assistant, a tool that Walmart associates use for tasks ranging from scheduling meetings to engaging with data sets.
• Marty, which assists Walmart partners and will play an increasing role in advertising.
• WIBEY, a super agent designed to help Walmart developers.

In addition, Walmart created a generative AI-powered assistant named Wally, which it built to aid employees with merchandising tasks.

What is ChatGPT’s role in agentic commerce for Walmart?

At the beginning of the 2025 holiday shopping season, Walmart announced a major expansion of its work with OpenAI, which Walmart called “agentic commerce in action.” Previously, Walmart detailed that it would collaborate with OpenAI on certification and training through the Walmart Academy program. In the latest partnership, consumers can purchase Walmart products within OpenAI’s ChatGPT experience.

That functionality includes the use of ChatGPT’s “instant checkout” experience for completing purchases. Walmart followed early adopters Etsy and Shopify to begin making use of the option.

Walmart web sales by year

Internal AI resources

Even as a super agent, WIBEY was built on top of Element, which is Walmart’s proprietary machine learning platform. Designed to use Kubernetes, Walmart uses Element to support technology deployments across multiple cloud-based contexts, as well as for hardware-accelerated experiments and integrations with enterprise services.

“Element is purpose-built to support the full lifecycle of intelligent workflows, from experimentation to production at scale,” wrote Sravana Karnati, executive vice president of global technology platforms at Walmart Global Tech, in an August 2025 blog post. “Designed for distributed, scalable, and production-ready AI, Element simplifies infrastructure, accelerates development, and empowers teams to focus on delivering impact.”

The scope of these efforts speaks to multiple layers of technology that a company the size of Walmart is able to use, as well as the wide reach those systems have across its various divisions.

Walmart is No. 2 in the Top 2000. The database is Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of North America’s online retailers by their annual ecommerce sales.

It is also No. 8 in the Global Online Marketplaces. That database ranks the top such marketplaces by third-party gross merchandise value (GMV).

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