| Constellation Research

Infosys, Wipro say clients hitting pause on transformation projects

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

Infosys and Wipro say that enterprises are pulling back on large projects amid an uncertain economy and tariffs, but are still looking to artificial intelligence to cut costs and automate operations.

The results from the two Indian outsourcing giants aren't surprising given Accenture also cited uncertainty even those its quarter results were fine. Accenture has a large US government business.

Infosys reported fourth quarter revenue of $4.73 billion, up 4.8% from a year ago, with net income of $813 million. For fiscal 2025, Infosys reported net income of $3.16 billion on revenue of $19.28 billion, up 3.6% from a year ago.

The earnings from Infosys landed along with two acquisition announcements. Infosys said it would acquire Australian cybersecurity services company The Missing Link, and energy consulting company MRE Consulting. The company also said that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries would join its HIPUS joint venture in Japan.

But the issue for Infosys was its fiscal 2026 outlook, which projected flat revenue growth to 3% in constant currency.

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On a conference call, Infosys CEO Salil Parekh said customers are cutting back amid uncertainty. "The changes that we have seen in the economic environment impact has happened very recently and over a short span," he said.

CFO Jayesh Sanghrajka said financial services and manufacturing budgets were solid--especially with AI--but retail, auto and industrial manufacturing budgets were weak. "Recent challenges in terms of tariffs, market uncertainties and trade buyers are likely to lead to a subdued spend and delayed decision-making," said Sanghrajka. "Client budgets are expected to be tightened and there is increased caution. Decision cycles are getting stretched for discretionary spend and larger deals. Exiting FY '25, global uncertainties relating to tariffs and impact of debt on client sentiments and spend are taking center stage."

Sanghrajka noted that the company's outlook will be reassessed based on the economic environment.

Nevertheless, Infosys customers are upbeat about AI. Clients are "moving from a use case-based approach to an AI-led transformational approach with AI agents playing a critical role," said Parekh, who noted AI wins in financial services and manufacturing.

"Across geos, there is increased focus on AI cloud, asset modernization, cost takeout and investing in core tech capabilities," said Sanghrajka. Infosys has said that customers are seeing productivity gains ranging from 20% to 40%.

Parekh said the company is aligning around taking costs out for customers. "Learning from the past, we typically see that this sort of an environment will provide more cost takeout opportunities," he said. "Consolidation and automation lead. We have also pivoted our sales activities into focusing and building more proactive pitches to clients on that area."

Wipro

Wipro reported fourth quarter revenue of $2.63 billion, down 1.3% from a year ago, with profit of $420 million. For fiscal 2025, Wipro reported profit of $2.05 billion on revenue of $10.43 billion.

As for the outlook, Wipro projected second quarter revenue to be $2.5 billion to $2.58 billion, or down 3.5% to 1.5% sequentially.

On a conference call, CEO Srinivas Pallia said customers were pulling back on big projects. He said:

"The global industry environment remained uncertain for most of the year and the recent tariff announcements have only added to that. I have been speaking to clients across sectors to understand how things are playing out on the ground. Even though the underlying demand for tech reinvention remains strong, clients are approaching it more cautiously. In fact, they are focused on cost, speed and AI-led efficiency, and that's exactly where we are leading it."

Pallia added that AI is part of every deal conversation and the focus is productivity and efficiency. He added that clients are going to "take a more measured approach going forward, especially on large transformation programs and discretionary spending."

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According to Pallia, Wipro's fourth quarter started well, but sentiment gradually turned negative due to tariffs and their impact.

He explained:

"This has definitely impacted our revenue growth momentum across sectors and markets. We were doing a large SAP program, which was very critical for the client, and this was in the consumer sector. When the client heard about the tariff situation, they put the whole program on pause, not because they don't want to do the program, but they wanted to understand, get the certainties of the tariff situation."

In Europe, clients have also slowed down transformation projects. These customers are reassessing timelines and delaying projects.

Pallia was asked about the outlook for the full year and the Wipro CEO noted that visibility was murky.

"With the recent developments, especially the macroeconomic situation, the tariff situation, we are keeping a very close watch on how the situation is evolving and how our clients are responding," he said. "At this stage our quarter of guidance represents the best visibility we have and definitely we will share all the updates coming quarters as we get clarity on the situation."

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TSMC's Q1: Takeaways on tariffs, AI demand and alleged Intel partnership

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Taiwan Semiconductor reported strong first quarter results, but most of the questions on the earnings recall revolved around tariffs, global expansion and AI infrastructure demand.

The quarter was carried by high-performance computing. TSMC reported first quarter earnings of $2.12 per ADR on revenue of $25.53 billion, up 35.3% from a year ago, but down 5.1% from the fourth quarter.

TSMC projected second quarter revenue of $28.4 billion to $29.2 billion. The company didn't provide an outlook for the second half of its fiscal year. TSMC results are being closely watched given that it sits in the middle of AI processor manufacturing and faces a lot of economic uncertainty.

Here are the takeaways from CEO CC Wei and CFO Wendell Huang:

TSMC sees strong demand from AI infrastructure. In the second quarter, TSMC sees strong growth for its 3nm and 5nm technologies. TSMC expects revenue from AI accelerators to double in 2025 including GPUs, TPUs, ASICs and HPM controllers for AI training and inferencing in data centers.

Tariffs. "We understand there are uncertainties and risk from the potential impact of tariff policies. However, we have not seen any change in our customers behavior so far, therefore, we continue to expect our full year 2025 revenue to increase by close to mid-20s percent in US dollar terms," said Wei, who added that next few months may give a better picture of any tariff hit.

DeepSeek and other reasoning models are bullish for AI long-term demand. "The impact from AI reasoning models including DeepSeek will drive greater efficiency and lower the barrier to future AI development," said Wei. "this will lead to wider usage and greater adoption of AI models, which all require the use of silicon."

US and global expansion. TSMC's Arizona fab has entered high volume production and the construction of a second fab with 3nm technology is complete. TSMC has two more fabs on decks, an advanced packaging facility and R&D center planned.

Wei added that TSMC is building out facilities in Japan and Germany. "Geographic manufacturing flexibility is an important part of our value proposition to the customers," said CFO Wendell Huang. "We are already discussing this with our major customers, and the progress is so far so good."

Wei said TSMC's 4-year growth forecast for AI includes geopolitical risks but is mindful of potential impacts and end-market demand.

Sorry Intel. TSMC and Intel were reportedly in talks for a joint venture for chip manufacturing, but Wei shot that down. "I would also like to mention that TSMC is not engaged in any discussion with other companies regarding any joint venture technology licensing or technology transfer," said Wei.

Pulling forward of demand due to tariffs? Wei said TSMC hasn't seen changes in customer behavior and there doesn't appear to be purchasing ahead of tariffs.

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OpenAI launches o3 reasoning model, o4-mini as it aims for 'more agentic ChatGPT'

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

OpenAI released its o3 and o4-mini models that can reason and use ChatGPT's multimodal tools. The release of its latest models are designed to tackle multi-faceted questions more effectively, a step toward a more agentic ChatGPT."

Ultimately, OpenAI is planning to roll up its models to enable ChatGPT to complete tasks for you. OpenAI is billing its latest models as "the smartest models we've released to date."

The launches come just days after OpenAI launched ChatGPT 4.1. Perhaps the biggest takeaway (aside from OpenAI's model naming conventions are confusing) is that ChatGPT will be more agentic and ultimately abstract the various models underneath.

Latest LLM news:

According to OpenAI, o3 is its most powerful reasoning model and excels at coding, math, science and visual perception. OpenAI's o4-mini is a smaller model that's optimized for fast reasoning at a lower cost.

Here's what you need to know about the latest release:

The new models can integrate images into their chain of thought and can handle whiteboard photos, textbook diagrams and sketches.
OpenAI o3 has equal latency and cost with OpenAI o1 with higher performance.
Both models can deploy tools through reinforcement learning when there's something it doesn't know.
ChatGPT Plus, Pro and Team users will see o3, o4-mini, and o4-mini-high in the model selector to replace o1, o3?mini, and o3?mini?high.
Enterprise and education accounts get access in a week.
OpenAI o3-pro will be released next.

Separately, OpenAI announced Codex CLI, which is a lightweight coding agent that can run from terminals. It works on the computer and id designed for o3 and o4-mini with support coming for GPT-4.1.

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Docusign launches AI contract agents

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Docusign launched AI contract agents, which will analyze agreements, highlight risks and surface issues that usually require human intervention.

The AI contract agents will be part of Docusign's Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) platform. Docusign's AI contract agents highlight how the early versions of agentic AI are aimed a processes that are a real headache for enterprises. Contract management, procurement and customer support are all focus areas for AI agents.

Docusign's AI agents also highlight how the company is expanding beyond its e-signature services. DocuSign said its IAM platform is powered by Iris, an AI engine that leverages the company's knowhow in contracts and agreements. Iris can use the right models for specific use cases revolving around contract needs.

According to Docusign, the first AI contract agents will be available by the end of 2025 and focus on procurement and sales workflows. Docusign's AIM platform is focused on sales, procurement, HR and legal.

The company has added the following to its AIM platform:

Agreement Prep, to create contracts via templates.
Agreement Desk, a collaboration tool for sales, procurement and legal teams.
AI-Assisted Review, to summarize contracts, compliance gaps and risks.
Workspaces, which bring together teams on multi-step agreements.
Identity verification via CLEAR.
Obligation management tools for tracking contractual commitments, renewals and other deadlines.

Allan Thygesen, CEO of Docusign, said the company's plan is to lean into IAM and build an ecosystem around it. He said on Docusign's fourth quarter earnings call:

"At the end of the year, we launched department-level deployments to enterprise customers while also opening up IAM availability globally. The initial launch delivered Docusign Navigator, our intelligent agreement repository; Docusign Maestro, our automated workflow builder; and the Docusign App Center, where ISV partners deliver third-party apps to customers."

The company initially launched IAM to SMB and midmarket customers in June and then expanded into large enterprises in December. For fiscal 2026, Docusign is targeting annual revenue of $3.13 billion and $3.14 billion.

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Nvidia to eat $5.5 billion in H20 inventory over new US export rules

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Nvidia illustrates the difficulty operating as US government rules, tariffs and other policies change almost daily.

In an SEC filing, Nvidia said it will take a first quarter charge of $5.5 billion due to new export rules on its H20 chips to China. Nvidia sold its H20 chips into China because its more powerful GPUs and accelerators were banned.

China vs. US AI war: Fact, fiction or missing the point?

According to Nvidia, the US government informed the company April 9 that its H20 chips would require a license to be sold in China for the "indefinite future." As result, Nvidia will take a first quarter charge of about $5.5 billion associated with "H20 products for inventory, purchase commitments, and related reserves."

That news came two days after Nvidia said its Blackwell chip production will start in Arizona at TSMC's chip plant. Nvidia said it is also building supercomputing manufacturing plans with Foxconn in Houston and with Wistron in Dallas.

Nvidia said the plan is to ramp production at both Texas plants in the next 12 to 15 months.

The GPU giant's whiplash is a microcosm of what other enterprises are facing. Tariffs are on, off, and on again with exceptions sometimes within the same day.

See:

Despite the charge, Nvidia demand looks strong. Enterprises have said despite uncertainty they are proceeding with AI projects. Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser summed up the consensus among CEOs. She said Citigroup is protecting necessary investments in our businesses as well as our transformation." "We shall not allow the uncertainty to distract us from executing our strategy and improving our returns," she said.

More Nvidia:

Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller said:

"These export restrictions are actually good news for enterprises located in North America, Europe and other geographies, as it may make more Nvidia chips available. The question is always - will Nvidia become a victim of the Osbourne effect, but with on premises demand being alive and well, there will be a number of CxOs who will be more than happy to get these H20 chips. Nvidia may well come out with a little bruise from this situation."

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Anthropic Claude Research integrates with Google Workspace

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Anthropic said its Claude large language model (LLM) will integrate with Google Workspace to add enterprise documents for its Research feature for Max, Team and Enterprise customers.

The company's Claude model has had an enterprise spin and vision that revolves around making its LLM a work partner. With its Google Workspace integration, Claude will be able to add internal documents such as email, calendar and docs.

According to Anthropic, Research is in early beta, web search is available in the US and Workspace integration is available in beta.

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Anthropic said in a blog post:

"With Research, Claude can search across both your internal work context and the web to help you make decisions and take action faster than before."

Claude will also provide inline citations to verify sources. Anthropic is betting that integration with Google Workspace will enable Claude to handle more marketing, sales, engineering and education use cases.

A few thoughts on Claude's integration with Google Workspace.

The integration between Claude Research and Google Workspace will enable more bakeoffs between Anthropic and Google Cloud's Gemini models.
Google Workspace is likely just the first Anthropic partner. Expect more partnerships with the likes of Box and other content repositories.
Anthropic is building a set of tools around Claude and ultimately could become more of a work collaboration platform.

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Cohere rolls out Embed 4, an enterprise multimodal search model

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Cohere launched Embed 4, a multimodal embedding model that beefs up enterprise search and retrieval for AI apps.

According to Cohere, Embed 4 can quickly search unstructured data including PDF reports, presentation slide and other documents with text, images, tables and diagrams.

The launch is a fast follow-up to Command A, a model designed to minimize compute resources while delivering strong performance.

Embed 4 also can generate embeddings for documents up to 128K tokens or about 200 pages. The model is also multilingual with more than 100 languages.

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If you zoom out a bit, Cohere's moves with Embed 4 highlight a broader product strategy that revolves around enterprise use cases. For instance, Cohere said Embed 4 is "optimized with domain-specific understanding of data from regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, and manufacturing."

Cohere in January launched North, an AI platform designed for streamlining work. Cohere is also developing a version of North for banking.

The company also noted that Embed 4 can be deployed in virtual private clouds or on-premise environments. Cohere's game plan is to address enterprise retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which will be critical to deploying AI agents.

Cohere noted that Embed 4 can search unstructured documents where they reside and represent them in a unified vector. Embed 4 is available on Cohere, Microsoft Azure AI Foundry and Amazon SageMaker for virtual private cloud and on-premises deployments.

With Embed 4, Cohere is addressing multiple areas of the model stack including retrieval as well as prompt augmentation with Rerank and generation with Command A models.

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Bank of America's AI investments boost digital engagement, customer satisfaction

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Bank of America is infusing AI throughout its primary units--consumer banking, global wealth and investment management and global banking and markets--and plans to spend $4 billion on new projects as its digital engagement gained throughout 2024.

The company outlined how its AI and machine learning tools, which are headlined by its Erica virtual assistant that launched in 2018, are gaining traction for multiple use cases.

Bank of America CTO and CIO Aditya Bhasan said "our use of AI at scale enables us to further enhance our capabilities, improve employee productivity and client service and drive business growth."

The bank has an annual technology budget of $13 billion and $4 billion of that sum is allocated to new AI projects in 2025. Bank of America has more than 1,200 AI and machine learning patents.

Key projects include:

Erica for Employees was launched in 2020 and expanded in 2023 for use cases in health benefits, payroll, tax forms and HR use cases. Erica for Employees is used by 90% of workers and has reduced calls into the IT service desk by 50%.
Bank of America said Erica for Employees will use generative AI to cover more topics.
Ask Merrill and Ask Merrill takes the technology for Erica and uses it for curate information and data and client experiences.
The Academy is an AI driving training platform for coaching with conversation simulators. Employees completed more than 1 million simulations in 2024 to practice client conversations.
AI is also being used for coding assistance, client meeting prep, optimizing call centers and research.

What sticks out for Bank of America's use cases for AI is that much of the projects are aimed at experience and driving revenue growth. The employee efficiency angle to AI was added later--partially due to the benefits of generative AI.

These efforts have enabled Bank of America to grow revenue and efficiency as well as digital interactions, which can offer better experiences at lower costs.

Bank of America, like many financial services firms, reported strong first quarter results. The company reported first quarter earnings of $7.4 billion, or 90 cents a share, on revenue of $27.4 billion, up 6% from a year ago. Bank of America added consumer and global wealth and private bank accounts of 250,000 and 7,200, respectively. Average deposits grew for the seventh consecutive quarter to nearly $2 trillion.

Going forward, here are some of the trends to watch.

Consumer Banking

Can Bank of America boost its digital enabled sales and to what level? In the first quarter, digital sales were 65% of the total in consumer banking.
Can Erica interactions largely replace human interactions?

"Digital adoption and engagement continued to improve, and customer experience scores rose to record levels, illustrating the appreciation of enhanced capabilities from these investments," said CFO Alastair Borthwick.

Global Wealth and Investment Management

Digital adoption reaches 87% of global wealth relationships. Can that tally get to nearly 100% as customers age out?

Global Banking

Digital engagement is lower for the global banking unit and may provide upside in the future.

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As tech navigates volatility, here's what the big finance CEOs say about the economy

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Corporations and consumers are trying to navigate economic uncertainty and many are hitting the brakes amid tariffs, declining sentiment and volatility that's curbing long-term bets.

Those are some of the takeaways from a series of big financial earnings. These results are lead-ins to what tech giants will be talking about in the weeks ahead as they deliver first quarter results. See: After volatile first quarter, these 10 questions loom over enterprise technology, CxOs

Here's a look

A challenged economy

Morgan Stanley CEO Ted Pick said the current period of volatility, tariffs and whipsaw policies reflect the end of globalization and it's an adjustment.

"We've been talking for the last three years about the end of the end of history, which is to say the end of an extended period of political and economic alignment toward globalization. History now resumes," said Pick. "And with that comes an adjustment period where the outlook is necessarily less predictable. The stock, bond and currency markets are exhibiting the kind of overnight and intraday volatility that reflect rapidly changing probability assessments of different policy outcomes."

"The simple truth today is that we do not yet know where trade policy will settle nor do we know the actual transmission effects on the real economy," said Pick.

Blackrock CEO Laurence Fink said the market volatility can impact consumers as well as enterprises. "The market downturn impacts millions of ordinary people's retirement savings. Their investments for a child college education and tuition or steps they're taking to have more financial stability. We're in a period of geopolitical and economic activity, but we have seen this before. When there are big pivots in the world, big structural changes in the market, like the financial crisis, like, the European debt crisis or COVID or the surging inflation in 2022," said Fink.

Fink added that Blackrock's clients aren't capitulating, but they are raising cash. It's also possible that the US, which represents 75% of the world's capital markets, will become more like 50% as Europe invests in its economies."

Wells Fargo CEO Charles Scharf said: "Our current expectation that we will face continued volatility and uncertainty, and are prepared for a slower economic environment in 2025, but the actual outcome will be dependent on the results and timing of policy changes," he said.

The Bank of New York Mellon (BNY) CEO Robin Vince said the year started out with optimism about the economy in 2025, but quickly went south. "We have now seen a rapid and significant reversal of sentiment, driven by uncertainty about trade and fiscal policies, which added to existing tail risks, including a variety of geopolitical tensions and conflicts," said Vince. "I think you have to be a little bit pessimistic here about how the economy is going to evolve over the course of the next six to nine months."

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said markets are likely to remain volatile:

"We are entering the second quarter with a markedly different operating environment than earlier this year. Our economists' expectation for growth in the US has fallen meaningfully from over 2% to 0.5%. The prospect of a recession has increased with growing indications that economic activity is slowing down around the world.

Our clients, including corporate CEOs and institutional investors are concerned by the significant near-term and longer-term uncertainty that has constrained their ability to make important decisions. This uncertainty around the path forward and fears over the potentially escalating effects of the trade war have created material risks to the US and global economy."

Enterprise and consumer spending uncertain

JPMorgan Chase CFO Jeremy Barnam said it's unclear where consumer spending goes. "Thing to check is the spending data. The main thing that we see there is what would appear to be a certain amount of front-loading of spending ahead of people expecting price increases from tariffs," said Barnam.

On the corporate side, Barnam said clients have been reacting to tariff policy changes. "At the margin that shifts their focus away from more strategic priorities with obvious implications for the investment banking pipeline outlook towards more short-term work, optimizing supply chains and trying to figure out how they're going to respond to the current environment," he said.

Barnam added that smaller businesses are going to struggle, and the hit to large enterprises will depend on sector and how exposed they are to tariffs. "There's certainly a bit of wait-and-see attitude," said Barnam. "It's hard to make long-term decisions right now."

Morgan Stanley's Pick said something similar and companies are putting off strategic decisions until there's more clarity about the economy.

So long, earnings guidance

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said companies will likely table earnings guidance due to the uncertainty. Dimon said:

"I don't usually pay that much attention to anecdotes, but this time I am. I think you're going to hear a thousand companies report and they're not going to tell you what their guidance is. My guess is, a lot will remove it," said Dimon. "They're going to tell you what they think the uncertainty might do to their customers, their base, their earnings, their costs, their tariffs. It's different for every company."

And earnings estimates will be cut. Dimon noted that analysts have reduced earnings growth estimates for the S&P 500 by 5% from 10% already. "My guess is that'll be 0% and negative 5% probably the next month," said Dimon.

M&A and IPOs may freeze

Dimon said M&A is going into wait-and-see mode and for mid-market companies deal will stop as companies adjust to the new reality.

Pick said there's a lot of nuance in the current M&A market. "Some clients are naturally going to pause, and others are a go. There are financial sponsors buying and selling as we speak, Honeywell, Warburg Pincus, buyer. Clearlake, Dun & Bradstreet. There are sponsors buying and selling assets," said Pick, who added that deals will still happen but occur amid uncertainty that needs to be priced in.

As for IPOs, there's a parade of companies that could go public but that may move out "a quarter or two," said Pick. However, these IPOs and M&A deals aren't being paused not deleted. Pick said once the markets are stable, deals will pick up.

"Stability will be more important than valuation. Most of these transactions are of comparative value. It's a question of what your longer-term priorities are with respect to things that matter to you in the C-suite around supply chain, energy, technology and sizing against the sector. With the IPO calendar there were folks that came right as that window briefly shut. The window ought to reopen and potentially reopen for periods of time that will allow for a lot of the new parade of companies to come through."

"In investment banking, the volatile backdrop led to more muted activity relative to the levels we had expected coming into the year," said Solomon.

Investments in AI will continue

Fink said Blackrock has expanded its AI infrastructure effort with xAI and Nvidia joining as partners. Fink said the fund has attracted "significant capital interest." "The partnership will meet the expected target of $30 billion in capital from investors, asset owners and corporations," said Fink. "And over time, we believe this can unlock over $100 billion in investment potential, including debt financing of these infrastructure projects."

Blackrock noted the volatility and uncertainty in the markets, but noted that " the mega forces like artificial intelligence, surging demand for global infrastructure and an ongoing evolution of debt financing presents transformative investment opportunities." Fink added: "Build outs of data centers and energy, the need for power grids in semiconductor plants and other infrastructure are beginning and are going to be growing dramatically over the coming years."

Even as the role of the US globally is re-evaluated the broad AI trend continues. "Eighty days ago, everyone talked about U.S. supremacy, the vitality of the United States. That is not a conversation that is happening now, but the macro forces of AI of infrastructure is just as strong today as it was 80 days ago," said Fink.

With Blackrock's Fink focusing on the macro picture for AI investment, Vince noted BNY is like many enterprises investing in the technology for efficiencies. BNY as deployed more than 40 AI tools into production, with many more in the building and testing phase and training complete for 80% of its workforce. The company also inked a deal with OpenAI to advance use cases.

"Collectively, we expect these to drive productivity gains, improved risk management and to provide meaningful leverage to our people in the future," said Vince. "We strongly believe that by empowering our people with AI to do what we do better every day, we will harness great benefits over the coming years."

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A look at Walmart’s platform approach to data, AI, optimization

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Walmart's move to common platforms that work across various functions, divisions and stores is enabling a data and AI flywheel that is paying off nicely in an uncertain economy.

To Walmart CTO Suresh Kumar said these platforms enable the retail giant to leverage data for customer experience, inventory flows and automaton. At Walmart's investor meeting, the company laid out a bevy of projects that leverage generative and agentic AI. Walmart also maintained its first quarter outlook.

At a high-level Walmart detailed the following:

Sparky, an AI shopping assistant.
Trend-to-Product, a tool to speed up fashion design.
Just Go AI Checkout, a computer vision checkout system that will be rolled out to all Sam's Club locations.
Wally, an AI assistant for merchants that will evolve into an inventory AI agent.

Kumar said Walmart has a unique advantage given it serves more consumers across more physical and digital touch points.

"Walmart has got a great advantage because we serve customers in more ways than anybody else, so that means that we have many more places where we can understand both the customer and their intent. Ultimately, it's all about how effectively we can take the data, and then the models can work on the data," said Kumar. "Walmart has got a better advantage than just about anybody else, just given the fact that it's not just only about online, it's about how we saw our customers inside the store, the services, put it all together, you have a much better view from a customer perspective of what they want as well as what is the context."

Kumar also noted that Walmart has had a long history investing in AI and automation to orchestrate inventory flows, but generative AI ensures every associate has the right tools. "We believe that going forward, customer experience is going to become more personalized and contextual," said Kumar.

Internally, the focus for Walmart is on inventory and using AI to be a better predictor of demand.

The impact of leveraging platforms is clear to Walmart CEO Doug McMillon. He said:

"What Suresh and the team have done to create commonality enables us to optimize. And we weren't able to optimize before. We were by nature sub-optimizing. And when you layer AI into this entire equation, you think about improvements in forecasting and other areas, it gets really exciting to think about what's possible in the future to do a better job of predicting demand, matching it with supply and taking out all of the costs and other friction that goes along with imperfect freight flow."

Breaking down silos with horizontal platforms

Walmart executives during the investor day session repeatedly referred to platforms that use AI for multiple use cases. Consider:

Sam's Club CEO Chris Nicholas said the unit is leveraging Walmart's broader platforms including the fulfillment network and tech stack to expand. Using AI, Sam's Club has already eliminate 100 million tasks for associates.
Tom Ward, Chief Operating Officer at Sam's Club, said his team is building a seamless connection from supply chain to club to e-commerce business to last mile delivery. "These platforms were and continue to be transformational in the speed and quality of service our members and customers receive," said Ward.
These platforms pay off across Walmart units. "Because we're a part of Walmart, we do not have the same fixed cost burden or the long development lead time that we would have as a stand-alone operator. We are using the same tech platforms a the Walmart commerce platforms for our e-commerce app. We're utilizing the Spark driver network for deliveries, including for Express," said Ward. "We are merging supply chains with Walmart U.S. And that will help us enable two day shipping nationwide for most items over time, even in places where we don't have clubs, which means that not all members will have to live near a physical club."

John Furner, CEO and President of Walmart US, said the platform approach give the company real-time visibility into what's happening from store to supply chain. Walmart can leverage AI and data to respond to trends quickly.

Here’s a look at Walmart’s key AI projects across the company.

Data to Decisions Future of Work Matrix Commerce Next-Generation Customer Experience Innovation & Product-led Growth Tech Optimization Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Supply Chain Automation Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software IoT Blockchain ERP Leadership Collaboration M&A AI GenerativeAI ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Analytics Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Supply Chain Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief AI Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Product Officer

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