Walmart has hired a new executive to help it leverage artificial intelligence in its application of retail technology, according to a post the executive published on LinkedIn, discussing its agentic AI initiatives on the social media platform.
In his LinkedIn post, Daniel Danker, chief product officer at Instacart, wrote:
“Today, I’m delighted to share that I’ll be joining Walmart, heading up AI acceleration, product and design. Throughout my career, I’ve had the joy of using technology to improve people’s lives. When you bring digital and physical together, you create remarkable possibilities: to support job opportunities and career growth, connect families and communities and enrich everyday experiences.
That’s what makes Walmart so special. Few companies have embraced change and technology as boldly or as effectively. It’s a company that has transformed commerce multiple times by staying relentlessly focused on customers, members and associates. It’s people-led and tech-powered, grounded in local impact while operating at incredible scale. We’re on the eve of another transformation as AI enables us to reinvent commerce and serve customers and communities in entirely new ways. I’m excited and honored to help unlock this next chapter with Doug McMillon and the team.”
Walmart did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Danker’s post.
The Danker post connected with LinkedIn content from Suresh Kumar, Walmart global chief technology officer and chief development officer, who, in discussing retail technology, stated that Walmart is building AI-powered agents for application in every aspect of its business. The company is doing so to enhance the shopping and engagement experience for customers, as well as to improve its internal operations and make its work with business partners more effective. In making the case, Kumar expressed a belief in the power of agentic AI to transform not only Walmart but whole industries.
Walmart, he said, recognized that its teams quickly adopted agent-driven technology and began to view such development as essential. Yet the company recognized that having multiple agents helping with various tasks could prove confusing and counterproductive, given their separate protocols. In considering the developments, Walmart determined to maximize agent potential.
“So we made a deliberate choice,” Kumar said, “to go beyond individual tools and build a unified, company-wide framework, one that ensures every new agent we roll out makes life simpler and easier for everyone: for customers, for associates and our partners. At the center of this are four super agents, intelligent, intuitive entry points that are already beginning to reshape how people interact with Walmart.”
The four super agents are, he said:
- A customer shopping agent dubbed Sparky already lives in the company’s app and currently helps customers find what they need quickly and intuitively, and soon will provide advanced reordering, support, and shopping capabilities.
- An employee agent that unifies everything from schedules to sales to save time and let staffers focus on more productive activities.
- A partner agent, Marty, was designed to help suppliers, sellers and advertisers manage onboarding, orders and campaigns in one streamlined space.
- A developer agent, which acts to speed up how the company tests, builds and launches, supporting innovation at scale.
Sub agents support each of the super agents, as Kumar indicated, and some are already in use, such as a sub agent that helps workers navigate benefits and a sub agent that assists merchants in analyzing sales trends. Over the next year, the super agents will become a more visible part of the Walmart ecosystem, he maintained, even as the company continues building more specialized agents that act within them.
With all that, Kumar asserted that Walmart is just at the beginning of its agentic AI efforts.
“We’re combining AI with breakthrough tech like drones and real-time digital twins of our facilities to predict and prevent issues before they happen,” he said. “With geospatial data and insights from Flipkart, we plan to offer dynamic delivery windows to 95% of U.S. households by the end of this year. This is about more than better bots. It’s about building a smarter Walmart, one that sets new standards for speed, precision and service. We’re not just adopting the tools of the future, we’re shaping them, leading with them and putting them to work for our customers, our partners and one another.
