AI is turning shopping from store- and app-centric journeys into agent-led experiences, where intelligent assistants handle discovery, comparison, and checkout across billions of SKUs. Walmart is leaning into this shift.
Key Takeaways
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Walmart’s agentic approach is “open” and partnership-led: Walmart positions itself to show up within third-party AI environments, enabling an intelligent handoff in which external agents route shoppers into a Walmart-powered experience rather than forcing discovery to start in Walmart’s own app.
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Walmart is trying to turn groceries into an agentic flywheel: The strategy leans on frequent grocery trips, payments/rewards (One Pay), and replenishment behaviors to make routine purchasing more automatic and, over time, expand basket size beyond food.
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Agentic commerce shifts power to whoever owns certainty and relationships: As agents compress research and decision-making, the decisive advantage shifts to what happens after “buy”—fulfillment, returns, trust, and personalization—raising the stakes for retailers who risk becoming invisible behind AI agents.
