Walmart announced a new framework that lets AI agents shop Walmart and Sam’s Club, while giving customers control over what the agents can buy, how much they can spend, and what data they can see. CEO John Furner unveiled it last Wednesday at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco.
It comes in three parts:
- Agent Profiles: Each AI agent a customer uses gets its own profile inside their Walmart account, so its purchases show up separately from the customer’s own orders or from other agents’ orders. Customers can either approve every agent purchase one by one or let the agent buy on its own under a spending limit, such as $50, $100, or $200, which Walmart compares to adding an authorized user to your credit card.
- Walmart Agent Gateway: An MCP server that lets agents search inventory and place orders directly instead of having to click and scroll through Walmart.com like a primitive two-eyed human. It can also help an agent find your usual choice of sourdough bread, brand of milk, or other shopping preferences without handing over your entire purchase history. It might even recommend a comfy chair for the corner of your bedroom so you can watch while it pleasures your wife.
- Rules for AI agents: Agents can’t act beyond what the shopper intended, can’t see payment card information or change payment methods, and can only access the information needed for the task. Walmart says that rule-breaking agents will be blocked, but it hasn’t said how it’ll know when an agent crosses the line, especially on something as ambiguous as “acting beyond what the shopper intended.”
Here’s what else we know:
- Agent Profiles launch within the next month. The Agent Gateway is still being built and will start as a beta for companies and developers.
- It’s free for every Walmart account holder, with no Walmart+ membership required.
- Walmart’s normal returns process applies even when an agent screws up an order.
- Walmart may require additional approvals, even for purchases under an agent’s spending limit. I like that better-safe-than-sorry approach to permissions.
- Agents see the same prices as human shoppers. Walmart says, “We price products, not people,” and I guess that extends to agents in this context, which is good, because my agent is rich and spends frivolously.
- Walmart already has conversational commerce integrations with Meta’s Muse, ChatGPT, and Gemini, but it hasn’t said which agents will be approved for the Gateway or how it will decide.
Walmart’s approach to agent acceptance sits somewhere between Amazon’s and Shopify’s.
Amazon took the closed route. Last month it cut off Meta’s Muse from Amazon.com, saying Meta never told it Muse would be shopping its store and that the agent doesn’t identify itself while browsing. Amazon also sued Perplexity last year over its Comet browser’s shopping agent, and that legal battle is still ongoing after a court refused Amazon’s request to ban the tool in August. Amazon would rather shoppers use its own agent, Alexa for Shopping.
Shopify went the other way. Two weeks ago it let any AI agent shop its catalog and check out with Shop Pay, with no partnership or registration required. Agents just have to identify themselves with a profile URL.
Here’s how Shopify and Walmart differ:
- Shopify lets any agent in, while Walmart only lets in “approved” agents. I’m going to guess that Shopify changes its tune on this one eventually.
- Shopify agents can search more than a billion products across Shopify’s merchant base and even buy from non-Shopify stores using a single-use Shop Pay card. Walmart’s Gateway covers only Walmart and Sam’s Club.
- Shopify agents can read a shopper’s past orders to learn their sizes and preferences, while Walmart deliberately keeps purchase history away from the agent, just providing insights instead.
- Shopify agents pay in one of two ways: through Shop Pay’s stored wallet at Shopify stores, or with a single-use card number limited to one checkout at non-Shopify stores. Walmart agents never handle payment credentials at all, because Walmart simply charges the card saved in your account.
- Shopify already lets agent developers earn a 0.3% commission through Promoted Placements. Walmart hasn’t announced any way to pay agents or to sell them ad placements, yet. Given that Walmart runs an affiliate program, this is likely coming.
- Both solutions default to requiring approval for every purchase and both offer spending limits, but Walmart’s separate Agent Profiles give shoppers a cleaner record of what each agent bought.
Walmart is betting that shoppers want agents, but not ones they can’t control. Shopify is betting on open access. Amazon is betting that if it keeps its gates shut, you’ll just use its agent instead, and to be fair, you probably will.
