From AI for analytics to agents for action

Balu Chaturvedula, senior VP and country head at Walmart Global Tech India, said large enterprises are moving past using AI only for analytics and are beginning to deploy agentic systems that can take action, forcing changes in business models, processes and talent strategies.Walmart, he said, has been using traditional AI for years, particularly in supply chain and decision systems, before shifting to generative AI and now accelerating into agentic AI. “Traditional AI systems give you a lot of analytics and you are able to act upon it. But now agents are actually able to act upon it without somebody intervening,” he said. Humans will set constraints, guardrails and configurations, while agents execute.Chaturvedula cited product cataloguing as a foundational retail problem where agentic AI is expanding what is operationally possible. “We’ve close to a billion product items, and with the work we’ve done over the past year, we are able to refresh everything to the highest level of accuracy with highly trustworthy content,” he said. He also said predictive models have shortened the apparel cycle – from identifying a trend to getting to store shelves – by 18 weeks.

In customer service, he said they are able to reduce 40% of the time that a manual agent takes to answer questions, allowing them to do more important things.On process and organisation change, Chaturvedula said speed is now the differentiator. “Intent only solves 50% of the problem. Speed complementing with intent is the 100% of the story,” he said, adding that companies will need multi-level talent transformation programmes, culture change and “psychological safety” to manage apprehensions.While employees are eager to learn tools, he argued that adoption is also a mindset shift, particularly in accepting machine-generated work. “We have trained humans to write new code, but not to fix existing code,” he said, adding that freshers often adapt faster. “They come with no baggage… they did tell me that ‘we write better prompts than your senior engineers’.”