Image Courtesy of Walmart
At NRF's Big Show, John Furner, Walmart’s incoming CEO, and Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, unveiled a new agent-led commerce partnership that embeds Walmart and Sam’s Club shopping directly into Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot, in a move that turns the chatbot into a shopping assistant capable of guiding transactions from start to finish.
"For years, online shopping has been about key words, filters, drop-down menus and scrolling through multiple pages until you find what you want," Pichai said. "Now you can type exactly what you're looking for, including really specific details and words. And AI can do the hard work narrowing it down to what you're most interested in buying. This is what's already happening."
The system offers:
- Smart recommendations: If a user asks what they need for a specific activity, Gemini analyzes the inventories across Walmart and Sam’s Club and suggests the ideal items. Last year, Gemini added Shopping Graph -- featuring over 50 billion product listings with more than 2 billion of those listings -- to augment suggestions.
- Deep personalization: Customers who link their Google and Walmart accounts will receive suggestions and offers based on their previous purchase history and loyalty status.
- Cart integration: Products selected in the chat can be combined with existing shopping carts at Walmart or Sam's Club.
The partnership is supported by Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), Google’s just-released AI commerce framework developed in cooperation with major retail players including Walmart, Shopify, Etsy, and Target. Enabling AI agents to interact directly with retailers’ commerce systems, UCP allows retailers to personalize messages, loyalty prompts, and offers within AI‑driven conversations while retaining control over the customer relationship.
Said Pichai, “I think about it like a conversational and knowledgeable sales associate. You can ask it questions and it'll give proactive recommendations.”
Walmart's Furner Speaks About the Future of Agent-Led Commerce
Furner discussed other AI agents Walmart already has, including its "Sparky" agent that helps customers shop. He also discussed other AI tools supporting store associates and suppliers. He believes agent-led commerce will reinvent shopping similar to how search reframed e-commerce. He said, “We’re rewriting the retail playbook, which is exciting, and we're trying to close the gap between I want it and I have it.”
As an example of the Gemini-enhanced shopping tool, he noted that a customer planning a fishing trip to Arkansas could ask Gemini for help, and the system would factor in weather conditions, locale, past purchases, and items already in the Walmart app cart to build a complete shopping solution — with gear and food delivered to a hotel upon arrival.
“These kinds of experiences we think will be great for our customers,” Furner said. “We know their time is precious, and our purpose to save people money and live better has a big element of helping people save time.”
In October, Walmart struck a similar deal with rival AI platform, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, with Perplexity, Amazon, Microsoft and Anthropic also promising AI-driven models to replace traditional search.