What happens when the store starts giving you shopping advice?
Not search results. Advice.
You tell Walmart, “I need a laptop for college,” and instead of dumping 2,000 products onto your screen, its AI tries to narrow the whole mess down for you. It can compare products, pull together reviews, suggest options and help turn a vague idea into an actual shopping list.
Sounds convenient.
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It also gives Walmart something every retailer wants desperately: more control over the moment when you decide what to buy.
That is where Sparky, Walmart's AI shopping assistant, gets interesting.
Walmart launched Sparky to help customers discover products, compare options, synthesize reviews and plan purchases. The company has been steadily adding more capabilities, pushing Sparky beyond a simple chatbot and toward something much closer to an AI shopping agent.
And Walmart is rolling this out at a particularly interesting time.
Its advertising business is becoming much more important.
Walmart's global advertising business grew 38% in its latest quarter, while Walmart Connect in the U.S. grew 43% excluding VIZIO. The company says its commerce-media business now reaches more than 150 million weekly customers in the U.S. across stores, e-commerce, marketplaces, membership and connected TV.
Put those two things together and you get a very interesting problem.
AI wants to tell you what to buy. Advertisers want their products to be the ones AI tells you to buy. And Walmart owns the customer, the inventory, the checkout and the advertising platform.
That little AI assistant suddenly looks like a much bigger business.