Walmart Opens Shelves to AI Shopping Agents

Walmart is opening its digital shelves to AI shopping agents. On Wednesday, the retail giant introduced a pair of tools that let autonomous assistants shop on behalf of customers, search products, and complete real transactions — while keeping the shopper firmly in control of the wallet. The move marks one of the largest mainstream endorsements yet of agentic commerce, and it sharpens the contrast with rival Amazon, which has taken the opposite stance on third-party agents.

Agent Profiles and the Walmart Agent Gateway

The announcement has two parts. First, Walmart said it will roll out "Agent Profiles" next month, a system that lets shoppers authorize individual AI agents to act for them. Customers can track agent purchases separately from their own orders, set spending limits, or require approval for every single transaction, according to Reuters reporting republished by The Hindu BusinessLine.

Second, the company launched the "Walmart Agent Gateway," a platform that allows AI assistants such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and Meta's Muse to connect directly with Walmart and Sam's Club systems to search products and complete purchases. Instead of scraping a website or driving a browser like an unauthorised guest, agents get a front door — and a leash.

The combination matters because it answers the question every retailer has been asking: how do you let an agent spend money without letting it run wild? Walmart's answer is per-agent identities with per-agent limits, plus an official integration path that keeps agents inside the company's own rails.

The guardrails: no card data, revocable access

Walmart stressed that customers remain in control. Agents will be barred from accessing payment card data, and agents that violate company rules can be blocked, according to the Reuters report. Customers will be able to monitor everything their agents buy and revoke an agent's access at any time.

The tools will be available to all Walmart account holders and will not require a Walmart+ membership — a sign the company wants mass adoption rather than a premium experiment. By separating agent purchases from personal orders, Walmart also gives shoppers a clean audit trail, which is exactly the kind of transparency the financial industry has been demanding. Major U.S. banks have recently taken a hard line against unauthorized AI agents inside customer accounts, with executives at JPMorganChase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Charles Schwab all drawing boundaries around what agents may touch. Walmart's model — explicit authorization plus revocable, audited access — is the permissioned alternative to that crackdown.

Mizuho analyst David Bellinger said in a note that the tools instilled confidence in the "experimental" shopping process of agentic purchases, adding that "the momentum and buy-in from top management teams seems to be making this into a real thing," according to the Reuters report.

Walmart vs. Amazon: two visions of agent commerce

The announcement lands in the middle of a split among retail giants. As PYMNTS reported, Amazon has sought to limit third-party AI shopping agents' access to its platform, while its enterprise business is moving in a different direction — with PwC using Amazon's Quick platform to put agents to work assessing technology investments and reducing sales teams' administrative tasks.

The two approaches reflect different sides of the same challenge: giving AI permission to act while keeping people in control. Walmart is betting that authorized, audited agents spending money directly will win shoppers over. Amazon is betting that tighter control of its marketplace keeps quality up while agents prove themselves on the enterprise side first.

Which vision wins will shape the emerging infrastructure of agent commerce. Mastercard has already launched a dedicated payment rail for machine buyers, and Anthropic's Agentic AI Foundation donations of agent skills are standardizing how agents behave. Walmart's Gateway adds a retailer-side protocol to that stack: the store itself now speaks agent.

Why this matters beyond retail

Walmart operates 8,500 stores-adjacent touchpoints through its brands and one of the world's largest e-commerce footprints, so a native agent channel there is a proving ground at planetary scale. If Agent Profiles work — if shoppers trust an agent to do the weekly grocery run inside a spending limit, and revoke it when it buys the wrong brand of coffee — the pattern will propagate to every other merchant category.

The timing also matters. Agentic commerce has spent two years as a demo phenomenon: impressive videos, thin production deployments. A rollout to every Walmart account holder, no premium tier required, with named assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini in the launch material, pushes the idea from conference keynote to checkout line. The experiment is no longer whether agents can shop. It is whether shoppers want them to — and whether the guardrails hold when millions of agents start clicking "buy."

Sources

Reuters via The Hindu BusinessLine: "Walmart launches AI tools to let agents shop and complete purchases"

PYMNTS: "Walmart and Amazon Expand AI Agents' Roles in Shopping and Work"