Walmart wants your next shopping assistant to be someone else's AI. On Wednesday the retailer introduced two new tools that let AI agents shop and complete transactions on behalf of customers, per Reuters.
The first is Agent Profiles, rolling out next month. Shoppers can authorize individual AI agents, track the agent's purchases separately from their own orders, set a spending limit — or require approval on every transaction — and revoke an agent's access at any time. The second is the Walmart Agent Gateway, a platform that lets assistants like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and Meta's Muse plug directly into Walmart and Sam's Club systems to search products and check out. Agents never touch payment card data, and Walmart says they can be cut off for breaking the rules. All of it is available to any Walmart account holder, no Walmart+ membership required.
The strategy is deliberate, and it has a target. Amazon has spent the year limiting third-party AI shopping agents' access to its platform — presumably so commerce flows through its own agentic experiences instead. Walmart is betting the opposite way: that being the open shelf where every assistant can transact is worth more than being the gatekeeper.
It's also the clearest sign yet that agentic commerce is assembling itself in public. Shopify opened its catalog to any AI shopping agent earlier this month, and Tether just put $15 million into Mural's agent-payment rails. The pattern is three layers: authorization (Walmart's profiles), payment (Mural and its ilk), and merchant access. Walmart just claimed two of the three.
The honest question is whether anyone will actually hand their cart to a bot. Walmart's trust layer — separate tracking, hard spending caps, instant revocation — reads like a company that knows exactly why shoppers hesitate. What to watch next: whether agents generate real, measurable GMV, and what the first big dispute looks like when an agent buys the wrong thing and the retailer, not the bot-maker, gets the complaint. Amex published an entire framework for exactly that failure mode last week. The bots are coming to checkout; the chargeback industry is about to get very interesting.
— via Reuters