What does Walmart’s agentic AI partnership with Google mean for online shopping?

Walmart is embedding its core online shopping experience for Walmart and Sam’s Club customers directly into Google’s AI chatbot Gemini. The move isn’t about product search getting better, but Walmart making Google its primary customer interface in a world of agent-assisted shopping.

By joining forces with Google, Walmart is essentially changing how it interacts with customers and with its associates. Linking with Gemini is the company’s most recent step toward a more personalized shopping experience.

“We’re at this point rewriting the retail playbook, which is exciting, and we’re trying to close the gap between ‘I want it’ and ‘I have,’” John Furner, incoming CEO of Walmart, said during a keynote address with Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai on Sunday at NRF.

“Customers will soon be able to experience everything they love about Walmart directly in the Gemini app,” Pichai said in a press statement.

“Gemini will automatically put [Walmart’s] assortment, our prices [to] help customers understand what’s available,” Furner said during the address. “And then pairing the intelligence of Gemini with our catalog or assortment—the experience possibilities, the pricing—it’s just going to be great fulfillment for customers.”

Plus, customers can link their Google and Walmart accounts so Gemini and Walmart share shopping history, enabling both these companies to take further action.

In a separate panel at NRF, Walmart’s EVP and CTO Hari Vasudev pointed out that Walmart’s AI transformation isn’t new. The retailer has used AI across its enterprise business, from using predictive AI for search, personalization, and demand forecasting, to adding generative AI models and building super agents.

In October 2025, Walmart announced it was enabling customers to shop directly with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. “The experience that we have announced with ChatGPT is really focused on single-item purchase,” Vasudev said. However, with Gemini, customers get the ability to “complete the shopping journey in a very timely way,” Vasudev added.

By working with both OpenAI and Google, Walmart isn’t picking sides just yet. There’s plenty of hype around agentic commerce, but it’s still an open question whether shoppers will actually buy through chatbots and which one they’ll trust.

“The idea is that we believe by taking that hybrid approach, what you’re able to do very effectively is ultimately serve the customer the best,” Vasudev said.

Ultimately, Furner said, “we think the future is very personalized. It’ll be very convenient, and it’ll be high speed.”