Walmart is about to let software do your grocery run. Starting next month, shoppers will be able to connect their own AI agent to the retailer’s website and have it buy things on their behalf.
The move puts Walmart on the opposite side of the fence from Amazon. Amazon has blocked Perplexity’s shopping agent and Meta’s Muse AI assistant. Walmart is rolling out a welcome mat, with a rulebook attached.
How it works
The setup is built around human oversight. Customers will be able to approve and review purchases their agent makes, and they can set spending limits on what it is allowed to buy.
Walmart has also published terms that any agent must follow to operate on its site. The central principle is simple.
“Agents must not take actions beyond what the shopper intends.”
The rules also bar agents from changing a customer’s payment method.
Why Walmart is going the other way
The company introduced its Sparky assistant in June 2025. That same year, it launched a four-super-agent framework designed to bring AI deeper into how people shop with the company.
Walmart has also spread Sparky beyond its own properties. The chatbot is embedded within ChatGPT, and an integration with Google Gemini is in the works. The retailer counts OpenAI, Google and Meta among its AI partners.
Walmart’s e-commerce sales rose 24% year over year in Q2 2026. That marked its 10th consecutive quarter of growth above 20%.
Sparky itself appears to be moving the needle. Users of the assistant see 40% higher average order values, along with 57% improved conversion rates on visual searches.
A Bank of America note dated October 20, 2026 pointed to Walmart’s ecosystem integrations, including Sparky and its partnerships with OpenAI, Google and Meta, as a source of strategic advantage in what the industry now calls agentic commerce.
Amazon’s walled garden
Amazon has taken a much more defensive posture. By blocking agents from Perplexity and Meta, it has effectively told third-party AI tools that its storefront is not open for automated browsing and buying.
When a person shops on Amazon directly, Amazon controls the whole experience: the search results, the sponsored listings, the recommendations and the upsells. An outside AI agent breaks that loop. It can skip the ads, ignore the suggested add-ons and go straight to the item a customer asked for. For a company with a large advertising business tied to its shopping pages, that is not a small concern.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Diego Almada Lopez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.