Walmart welcomes AI agents as Anthropic launches its own

U.S. shopping giant Walmart on Wednesday unveiled tools allowing artificial intelligence agents such as Meta's Muse to shop on behalf of its customers, taking the opposite approach to rival Amazon, which bars outside AI agents from its platform. AI agents are programs that can carry out multistep tasks on a user's behalf—such as searching for products, comparing prices and completing a purchase—rather than only answering questions as chatbots do. Tech companies including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Meta are investing heavily in agents, which much of the industry sees as the next phase of the AI boom that followed the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022.

First reported by Tech Xplore. This page is a short excerpt; the full text is theirs.