Can Walmart’s AI bet close the gap with Amazon?

As computer scientist Alan Kay famously said, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Kay was probably not thinking about online shopping powered by AI, but Walmart and Amazon appear to be applying the idea as they try to build the future of online shopping with AI.

The two companies started building out their businesses from contrasting positions. Amazon built its identity as a tech company that sells almost everything online, while Walmart’s roots were firmly based in operating as a big-box retailer across physical stores.

Last year, Walmart started integrating new technologies like generative AI into its e-commerce plan as part of a larger reset. Now, with AI embedded into new channels, platforms, and touchpoints at Walmart, the “everyday low price” retailer is steadily positioning itself as a formidable tech rival to Amazon.

Over the past decade, Walmart has transformed from a brick-and-mortar giant into an omnichannel force under outgoing CEO Doug McMillon’s leadership. When McMillon took over in 2014, Walmart’s digital capabilities lagged significantly behind Amazon’s, but McMillon rebuilt the company into one of the world’s largest omnichannel retailers.

More recently, Walmart rolled out Sparky, its generative AI shopping assistant, that offers product recommendations, summarizes reviews, and handles a range of other shopping needs. Walmart’s SVP of tech strategy and emerging tech, Desiree Gosby, wrote in a company blog post that “Sparky is more than a feature—it’s a foundation for what’s next.”

As the rollout of AI continues, the next chapter of Amazon vs. Walmart will presumably write itself. And an oft-mentioned buzzword in retail circles, “personalization,” could determine whether Walmart has better functioning AI tools than Amazon, or vice versa. But if there’s one burning question on every retail geek’s mind, it might be this: Can Walmart’s agentic AI strategy help it catch up with Amazon?

Both companies will need to make strong advancements in their personalization quotient to keep customers invested—in other words, go beyond generic product recommendations to understand individual shopping patterns and preferences. Within e-commerce, AI and agentic AI represent an opportunity for Walmart to recraft its digital transformation, one that it was slow to catch onto roughly 12 years ago, experts told Retail Brew.

Entering the chat: ChatGPT’s late 2022 launch triggered a scramble to get AI strategies in place among retailers. Amazon responded first, rolling out its Rufus shopping assistant, which offers recommendations and answers shoppers’ questions, in early 2024, while Walmart followed about a year later with its own AI-powered tools. Both retailers recognized that consumer behavior was shifting toward conversational commerce.

However, Walmart has opened its doors to third-party collaborations, including ChatGPT with the announcement of its instant checkout feature, while Amazon is still in wait-and-watch mode and it remains to be seen if ChatGPT can topple both Amazon and Walmart’s cart.

All about recommendations: Scot Wingo, CEO of Refibuy, an AI startup focused on solving problems for retailers using advanced AI frameworks, said that ChatGPT’s debut has forced every retailer to get into the AI race: “Rufus wouldn’t exist if ChatGPT didn’t start doing this, and Walmart wouldn’t be so focused on it. They see it as a threat. They’re reacting.”

According to Wingo, the race to find the best product for shoppers will determine which of the two companies wins in AI.

“You need to know the most context about somebody—their demographic, purchase history, all this type of stuff,” he said, “and you need to be able to map it to a giant database.”

If tech giants like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are on one side of the AI shopping equation, retailers like Walmart and Amazon control the other side, Wingo added.

Walmart’s AI era: What Walmart Co-Founder Sam Walton did as a retail innovator to shake up big-box stores with everyday low prices, Walmart’s current leadership, led by McMillon and incoming CEO John Furner, is doing with AI innovation and new integrations like ChatGPT, Wingo said.

“They’re really being very aggressive,” Wingo said, “which is great to see from a company that got caught a little bit behind the eight ball due to e-commerce.”

In July, Walmart added three new AI assistants, which it calls “super agents,” to work behind-the-scenes with Walmart employees, supply chain partners (a chatbot called Marty), and developers to consolidate workflows, drive operational efficiency and faster innovation across the company.

Jason Goldberg, chief commerce strategy officer and Publicis Groupe, said Walmart is moving faster on AI than almost anyone expected.

“The early initiatives, the launching of the four super agents, the hiring of C-level agentic employees, the launching of Sparky—I think they’ve been a very fast mover and early adopter and embracer of all of these new shopping modalities,” Goldberg said.

“This is a very clear signal to me that now they’re watching these new, disruptive innovations and taking them quite seriously,” Wingo said.

Amine Allouah, partner and co-founder of MyCustomAI, which helps businesses craft their own AI models across retail and e-commerce, agreed. “Walmart’s willingness to adopt AI early positions it well for future gains,” he told Retail Brew via email.

Amazon’s closed AI wall: Amazon, by contrast, insists on building internally. And that’s one key difference between Walmart’s and Amazon’s AI strategies—Amazon is not letting third-party agents, including Perplexity and ChatGPT, shop or scrape data from its marketplace.

Amazon may have started rolling out agents before Walmart, but the Seattle tech giant has kept more of a wait-and-see approach toward AI—though that seems to be changing.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently softened his stance and said Amazon is open to future AI partnerships with third parties. However, analysts interpreted Jassy’s comments as Amazon losing momentum.

“It’s an early indication Amazon has slowed down,” Wingo said. “They’re not really a Day One company anymore, and Walmart’s speeding up.”

Amazon’s AI arena: Amazon recently announced that Rufus has been used by 250 million customers in 2025, and that users are 60% more likely to convert when using the chatbot. The dollar value of Rufus’s impact came in at $10 billion in incremental annualized sales during Amazon’s latest earnings call.

In March, Amazon formed an agentic AI unit. The following month, it dropped another agentic AI feature, “Buy for Me,” in beta, to let shoppers discover and purchase select products from other brands’ sites. “Agentic systems offer possibilities that extend far beyond today’s chatbots and will drive efficiency like we haven’t seen before,” Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of AWS agentic AI at Amazon, wrote in a LinkedIn post.

But in terms of overall execution, Walmart seems to be making all the right moves, Goldberg said: “When you look at big companies that are financially successful in that large swaths of America rely on and shop at, I think it’s hard to find an example of a retailer that’s further ahead in AI than Walmart.”