Suresh Kumar

Walmart operates as the world’s largest retailer, with more than 11,000 stores as of its 2019 announcement. Suresh Kumar joined the company in July 2019, in a newly created role reporting directly to CEO Doug McMillon. He now leads Walmart’s consolidation of dozens of separate AI tools into four unified ‘super agents’: Sparky for customers, an Associate agent for employees, Marty for suppliers and sellers, and a developer-facing agent called WIBEY.

Before Walmart, Kumar spent more than a year at Google as VP and General Manager overseeing display, video, app ads, and analytics. Prior to that, he was Corporate Vice President of Cloud Infrastructure and Operations at Microsoft for roughly three and a half years, and before Microsoft he spent 15 years at Amazon, most recently as VP of Worldwide Retail Systems and Retail Services.

Kumar’s mandate covers Walmart’s technology and data strategy, with the US, Sam’s Club, and international CTOs reporting to him. The super-agent consolidation runs on Wallaby, a set of retail-specific large language models trained on Walmart’s own data. The underlying bet is that a single coherent AI framework, built once and reused across business units, scales more reliably than a growing pile of disconnected tools.

“The future enterprise will not simply use AI; intelligence will be built into every decision, workflow and system. The opportunity is to create organizations that are more adaptive, effective and responsive, while keeping trust and human judgment at the center. The real promise of AI is to help people make better decisions, solve harder problems and create greater value for those they serve,” Kumar said.