The largest US retailer will soon allow AI agents to shop across its website.
New plans announced on Wednesday detail how Walmart will embrace agentic technologies, allowing you to set up personal AI agents to shop on its main website and at Sam’s Club. This is in stark contrast to rival retailer Amazon, which bans third-party agentic tools, such as Meta’s Muse and Perplexity’s shopping agent.
Coming in November, Walmart is introducing a new tool called Agent Profiles to help customers authorize purchases made through their accounts. It will keep purchases made by your agent separate from your own shopping, helping you keep track of what your AI has purchased.
The Agent Profiles tool lets you decide how you want to approve purchases and set a spending limit to prevent the AI from exceeding a desired amount. Purchase approval is enabled for all shopping by default.
Walmart is also bringing new backend technologies, such as its new Agent Gateway. It’s a newly designed, AI-friendly interface for the website that works differently from what you see when you shop, giving agents “a faster, more reliable way to shop” using model text protocol.
The tools also let Walmart suggest product ideas directly to an agent, without sharing any purchase history with your AI. Walmart says, “For example, if a customer tends to buy sourdough bread or a particular brand of milk, Walmart will help the agent find those usual items for the customer without sharing the customer’s broader shopping history.”
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Alongside all this, Walmart is updating its terms and conditions for the use of AI agents, including new rules such as prohibiting agents from changing payment card information, ensuring they access only the information needed for the task at hand, and revising its privacy policy. All agent tech must comply with these new rules or face a ban from the retailer’s website.
An exact launch date for agentic shopping is unclear, but expect to see new options in your Walmart account by the end of November.
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