AI in Broadline Retail

Rakuten France runs 80+ Custom Agents in Notion, most built by employees outside its four-person AI team. AI Lead Sidney Golstein wrote shared operating procedures and a meta-agent, the Rakuten Agent Builder, that turns a plain-language description into a working agent in 10 to 20 minutes, plus an Agent Registry, run logs and an improver agent that proposes fixes. Some product teams cut backlog health issues by 50%.

Rakuten rebuilt its development workflows around Anthropic's Claude Code, cutting average time to market for new features from 24 working days to 5. One engineer had Claude Code implement a method in the 12.5M-line vLLM library in a seven-hour autonomous run with 99.9% numerical accuracy.

Walmart deployed AI-powered tools across its 1.5 million US store associates in June 2025, including real-time translation in 44 languages for multilingual conversations, and an AI task-management tool reducing shift-planning time from 90 to 30 minutes.

JD.com said more than 70,000 merchants now use its AI digital human hosts for e-commerce livestreams, which it made free to all merchants in December 2025. A digital host now costs one-tenth as much as a human one, and livestreams hosted by digital humans generated tens of billions of yuan in gross merchandise volume in 2025, JD.com said.

JD.com has activated its JoyAI product line for the 2025 11.11 shopping festival, including Jingxiaozhi 5.0 customer service AI, JoyMarketing outbound AI, and Digital Human 4.0 for live commerce. The deployment delivers quantifiable results: 28% reduction in human handoff rate, 37% lift in pre-sale conversion, 31% efficiency gain, 98% complex question accuracy, and 30% conversion lift from digital human anchors. JD also offers the tools to small and medium merchants at up to 70% discount, lowering the barrier to enterprise-grade AI for the festival surge.

Shopify Agentic Commerce: Agentic Storefronts enabling millions of merchants to sell across ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Google Search AI Mode via Shopify Admin. Universal Commerce Protocol with Google, 15x AI-driven order growth in 2025.

Shopify Winter Edition 2026 (The Renaissance Edition) introduced agentic commerce capabilities, allowing AI agents (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot) to read store inventory, pricing, and logic via structured data APIs using Shopify Magic Sidekick.

JD.com released an AI agent for government and enterprise procurement, built on its Joy AI model and embedded in JD Huicai, Enterprise Purchase and Internal Purchase. In launch week it reportedly served over 100,000 purchasers and 40,000 enterprises across more than 40 procurement scenarios, with JD citing faster order handling, lower costs and better compliance detection.