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Walmart Is Preparing to Welcome Its Next Customer: The AI Shopping Agent
Isabelle Bousquette
5–6 minutes
Updated May 15, 2025 8:01 am ET
Walmart is preparing for sweeping changes in the way consumers shop, investigating how to make products appealing not just to human consumers, but also to the AI agents that will one day shop on their behalf.
AI bots, able to perform tasks autonomously, have the potential to transform online shopping, completely bypassing traditional online search and promotional tricks aimed at attracting human beings.
“It will be different,” said Walmart U.S. Chief Technology Officer Hari Vasudev. “Advertising will have to evolve.”
Already AI has already changed the way consumers research products on search engines, with results now serving up AI-generated summaries. But the idea of shopping agents operating without human intervention is another thing entirely.
At some point in the future, shoppers will deploy an agent, like OpenAI’s Operator, and tell it they want to restock on groceries or buy a new flat-screen TV. Operator will then scan the internet and surface relevant products based on what it knows about the user’s preferences. Ultimately, agents will even be able to complete the purchase, including payment.
It’s a step change that will force retailers to rethink the way they advertise, describe their products online and even price them, said Robert Hetu, vice president analyst for retail at market research and consulting firm Gartner. And retailers risk losing control of the direct customer relationship if the checkout process moves from their own website to that of the third-party agent, like Operator or others to come.
Walmart is building its own shopping agents that customers can access on its app and website. These agents will be able to execute basic repetitive tasks like re-ordering weekly groceries, and also fill a shopping basket in response to prompts like “I want to plan a unicorn-themed party for my daughter,” Vasudev said.
In its first-quarter earnings, Walmart reported a 22% jump in its e-commerce business.
But the company is also anticipating that consumers might instead use third-party shopping agents developed by tech companies, and is preparing for that scenario.
Looking ahead, Vasudev foresees the establishment of an industry protocol that enables those third-party shopping agents to communicate with retailers’ own agents, he said, handing over product recommendations from the retailer’s website based on user preferences. Some of these agent-to-agent protocols are already being developed, but they’re not yet ready.
Third-party agents could also scan the retailers’ websites without interacting with the store’s agents, similar to the way a human in-store shopper might not necessarily ask a sales clerk for help finding given items in the store, Vasudev said.
Still, when third-party agents are used, retailers are to some extent at the mercy of their algorithms.
A user could specifically tell its agent to shop at Walmart, or tell its agent to just find the lowest price on a certain item, Vasudev said. But some of the nuances of what customers get shown will also come from the agents themselves.
For instance, one factor Open AI’s Operator uses is how prominently a page is ranked in web searches. Highly ranked pages, including paid ads and sponsored posts on search, can make content more likely to appear on Operator, the company said, noting that the model still heavily considers a user’s prompt and prior behavior and preferences.
Even then, the way a bot shops is fundamentally different from the way a human shops, meaning retailers should think carefully about the way they display products on their sites, said Gartner’s Hetu. For one, agents may be less likely to be attracted to images or visuals designed to elicit an emotional response.
Retailers may also have to make split-second decisions on pricing and when to offer agents discounts versus letting them nab the same option cheaper elsewhere in an instant, Hetu said.
To be sure, a nominal amount of shopping today is already being done by agents, which still have a lot of room to grow, Hetu said. At present, over 80% of shopping still happens in bricks-and-mortar stores rather than via any digital channel, he said.
“This is going to take time to transform,” he said.
Write to Isabelle Bousquette at isabelle.bousquette@wsj.com
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Appeared in the May 19, 2025, print edition as 'Walmart Plans for New Kind Of Customer: AI Shoppers'.
