Walmart Opens Its Doors to Outside AI Shopping Agents, Just Not Your Credit Card

Walmart is expanding its agentic-AI strategy on two fronts: Agent Profiles, a dedicated AI-agent identity inside a customer's account expected to launch within about a month, and Agent Gateway, a beta platform letting outside companies and developers plug their own AI shopping agents into Walmart, built on the open Model Context Protocol. Updated terms for those agents bar them from ever receiving a customer's payment-card information, and shoppers can require approval before every purchase or set a spending limit and let the agent run.

The move puts Walmart in sharp contrast with Amazon, which has worked to keep outside agents, including ones from Perplexity and Meta, off its own platform. Walmart, by comparison, was already an early integrator with OpenAI's ChatGPT and partnered with Google's Gemini earlier this year, on top of its homegrown Sparky assistant. "It's really not just about technology for technology's sake," Walmart U.S. EVP of e-commerce and marketing Tracy Poulliot said at a recent industry event, framing the push around customer value rather than novelty.

Letting a stranger's AI shop your store sounds like a risk until you remember the alternative is fighting every AI company for control of a checkout flow nobody fully trusts yet. Walmart is betting that being the easy platform to build on now beats being the gatekeeper everyone routes around later.

Source: Retail Dive

Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →