Key takeaways from Walmart Associates Week

Walmart is upbeat about using technology and is not afraid of getting it wrong.

“There’s a lot of optimism for what technology can do to help [front-line employees] become better associates, get more efficiency faster, have more tools that they can access,” John Furner, president and CEO, told a press pool during Walmart’s Associates Week in Bentonville, Arkansas, last week.

Around 1.3 million US Walmart associates now carry devices called “fresh touring agents” that guide them through their day, surfacing the best next action, showing store layouts, and helping them locate products faster. Still, company executives said the US retailer’s philosophy is still “people-led, powered by technology” multiple times throughout the week.

In July 2025, Walmart added three new AI agents to work behind the scenes with Walmart employees, supply chain partners (a chatbot called Marty), and developers to consolidate workflows, and drive operational efficiency and faster innovation across the company.

“I think it’s important to note that in terms of agentic commerce or agentic operations, any way you look at it, it’s early, and there’s a lot that we have to learn,” Furner said. “We have to figure out what works and what doesn’t, and some things that seem promising will work, and they’ll work as we expect, and there’ll be other things—just like the whole history of our company—that we will try that may not work the way we thought, or may not work at all.”

On inflation: Against the backdrop of rising gas prices, Walmart’s position is clear: It wants to hold the line on prices. “If we were to get into an inflationary period—which costs of energy likely could cause that, if it remains elevated—then…we’ll focus on ensuring that if we need to go up, we want to be the last one to go up,” Furner said.

Insert Sparky offline: In a session focused on AI agents, Daniel Danker, EVP of AI acceleration, product and design, said Walmart is using its super agent Sparky to serve customers, not just online but also in stores.

“I think that a lot of folks are directly associating AI with online ordering, and broadly speaking, 85% of shopping still happens in the store,” Danker said. “People love to shop and they like to go walk to the store…So when we are building Sparky, we’re not building with Sparky as our AI conversational shopping agent, we’re not building it for online; we’re building it for online and in store.”

Walmart shoppers spend 25% more when they use the retailer’s app in stores, Danker added: “So it has an impact on people’s shopping because it's able to serve their needs better than a purely offline experience. That’s why we’ve created all of this to work online and in-store.”

Vibecoding: Walmart has also built an internal live coding tool called Code Puppy that helps Walmart employees do their jobs better. Code Puppy can, for instance, help an employee assemble information that would otherwise be put together by sending emails out to other teams within Walmart. It's a tool that democratizes technology across functions like in merchandising, supply chain, and store managers.

“People have jobs,” Furner said. “They have lots of processes and tasks, and if these products they build can speed up some of the tasks, it just frees up time for them to go work on the more important things.”