Walmart and Google announced a coordinated push to embed AI agents into shopping workflows, moving product discovery and checkout into conversational interfaces.
Walmart signed distinct partnerships with two major AI platforms to reach shoppers across different agent ecosystems. The OpenAI deal announced on Oct. 14, 2025 enabled purchases inside ChatGPT, while a Jan. 12, 2026 collaboration links Walmart’s catalog to Google’s Gemini and Search AI Mode.
Together these tie Walmart’s assortment to two high‑reach conversational layers, a strategy intended to reduce friction and capture purchase intent where users are already interacting with AI.
Executives framed the tie-ups as complementary bets rather than exclusive alliances. Walmart expects to expand its footprint into conversational commerce; Google positions Gemini as a transactional touchpoint beyond search. McKinsey and Morgan Stanley forecasts cited by Walmart’s advisers underline the scale at stake: agentic commerce could account for hundreds of billions to trillions in global retail flows by 2030, with Morgan Stanley estimating $190–$385 billion in U.S. e‑commerce spending routed to AI agents.
‘Sparky will be the primary vehicle for discovery, shopping, and for managing everything from reorders to returns,’ said Doug McMillon, Walmart president and CEO, on an earnings call in August 2025, summarizing the retailer’s intent to own the native customer experience even as it partners externally.
The companies frame the move as a shift from reactive search to proactive, agent-led commerce that personalizes and automates routine buying decisions.
Operational rollout and market implications
Walmart is coupling external integrations with a wide internal AI program designed to defend its cost and convenience leadership.
These operational moves are designed to lower fulfillment costs and make agent-driven recommendations consistently favor Walmart’s value proposition. Competitors—Amazon with its own assistants and Target with curated discovery—are pushing different strengths, so Walmart’s multi‑pronged approach seeks to avoid being disintermediated by any single AI platform.
Projections in the source material frame the upside and the risk: agentic commerce can drive large-scale efficiency and lifetime‑value gains, but success hinges on consumer adoption, data and privacy management, and the technical reliability of agents.
Investors and product teams will watch two practical tests of the thesis: the rollout of personalized homepages, scheduled for completion by the end of 2026, and the planned drone delivery expansion to 270 stores by 2027.
Those deployments will show whether agentic interfaces convert intent into repeatable, lower‑cost sales and validate whether shoppers will entrust AI agents with routine purchasing decisions.
