Walmart has taken another step in the direction of offering its own shopper bot by incorporating an Ask Sparky button in its mobile app. Sparky, a genAI assistant, will respond to natural language queries by discovering products, making recommendations, synthesizing reviews and explaining product features. Down the road, Walmart envisions adding agentic AI capabilities, including re-ordering household supplies and booking services.

“Chuck it” doesn’t strike us as the most positive response to a data problem, but Amperity didn’t ask our opinion before naming their new AI agent “Chuck Data”. The new tool is intended to help remove coding bottlenecks in customer data engineering by having an AI agent do the heavy lifting based on natural language prompts. Chuck will call Amperity functions to resolve identities, tag PII and provide assistance using a LLM of choice.

It barely feels like news when industry giants add AI features, since that’s what they’re expected to do. But lots of people use their products, so their announcements are probably of higher interest than most. With that in mind, let’s note that Adobe has just announced general availability of agents for audience creation, journey orchestration, experimentation, journey insights, website optimization and agent support.