Walmart Inc said on Monday it has dropped its plans to use roving robots to scan shelves and keep track of inventory, squashing the world's largest retailer's years-long efforts to automate the task.

The world’s largest retailer seeks to build on its AI-enabled culture and business results by embracing ‘a unified, agentic AI framework that reimagines how our business operates,’ its US CTO says.

This aggressive push is a direct challenge to competitors, most notably Costco, and shows that Walmart is not just keeping up with the e-commerce wave—it’s trying to lead it. While many retailers are ...