The Supply Side: Walmart’s Sparky shopping agent drives more sales
Walmart executives are optimistic about the company’s AI-powered shopping agent known as Sparky. Even though agentic commerce — where AI agents and not humans shop for and make purchases for a person — is still in its early stages, the early reading indicates Sparky could be a game-changer for the retailer.
Walmart first unveiled Sparky in June 2025 as a generative AI-powered shopping assistant trained with retail-specific large language models available at the time. Over the past year, Sparky has become more intuitive, according to Walmart. The retailer announced in March an integration with the ChatGPT platform to allow for an experience that included taking users from product discovery, linking loyalty and providing instant payment.
“Shopping can start anywhere now, whether that’s Walmart or a question in ChatGPT,” Daniel Danker, executive vice president of AI acceleration, product and design at Walmart, said in March. “Our approach is simple: wherever it begins, customers still get the same personalized Walmart experience, including our assortment, value and speed. With Sparky, we’re bringing our trusted experience into more places.”
Sparky was also a topic of discussion during the retailer’s first-quarter earnings call and its recent shareholder week activities.
Walmart CEO John Furner said in April that app users who interact with the Sparky AI agent spend approximately 35% more than those who do not. Furner said the tool helps customers find what they need, understand their lifestyle preferences, and represents the company’s evolution into “intent-driven commerce.”
The retail giant also said about half of all Walmart app users have interacted with Sparky. Furner said when the AI builds a basket, Walmart fulfills it through fast delivery or pickup, turning AI engagement into “immediate physical outcomes.”
“We can now serve customer needs that previous technologies could not meet, making shopping easier and more personalized to expand the range of shopping occasions and interactions we have with our customers and members,” Furner said. “Sparky is making this possible.”
He said Sparky is becoming more useful by the day, as customers use Sparky in stores and automatically reorder items they have on repeat. Sparky also speaks Spanish. David Guggina, CEO of Walmart U.S., said on June 9 at the Oppenheimer Consumer Growth and E-Commerce Conference that Sparky offers a combination of the value of convenience and real-world execution at scale.
“We are connecting Walmart’s in-store and online data with agentic e-commerce,” he said. “We connect AI-driven shopping directly to our omni-channel fulfillment network, and that includes our stores, our fulfillment centers, our forward-deployed inventory and all the delivery capabilities with our final-mile network. We are seeing customers respond to those capabilities. Our weekly active users increased by over 110% quarter-over-quarter.”
In Walmart’s first quarter, which ended April 30, the Sparky-attributed value of goods sold increased by 150%, according to Guggina. He said Sparky continued to build bigger baskets, which are 35% larger than those of non-Sparky users.
“What’s also encouraging, and I think this speaks to changing consumer behavior, is that early on Sparky customers were using the assistant to look for specific items, often general merchandise,” Guggina said. “They were looking for a particular item, and they’d ask a lot of questions about that item to learn more about it. They are still doing that today, but as we have rolled out capabilities like replenishment and meal planning, Sparky is now aware that you’re in a store and can help you find items in the store.”
He said customers are not only purchasing general merchandise but also using it for consumables and food. This use for replenishing consumables has helped the units sold via Sparky increase four times year over year, Guggina said.
“I want to emphasize it is still very early in this space, but we’re excited about the opportunity ahead of Sparky and us,” Guggina said. “The capabilities that we’ve introduced in our ecosystem, and even outside of our ecosystem, through Sparky, are resonating with customers.”
Danker recently said there has been a shift from asking AI shopping agents to help with search and choosing ingredients for a shopping list to now describing a problem and having the agent provide solutions.
“That’s a pretty major shift in what people shop for, and they keep coming back to Walmart,” he said. “There is also the misconception about where AI is most helpful. I think a lot of folks are directly associating AI with online ordering, and broadly speaking, 85% of shopping still happens at the store. People love to shop and engage with the products. So when we were building Sparky, it was not just about being an AI conversational shopping agent; we’re building it for online and in-store.”
He said AI is built around data, and it thrives when it has more data to work with. For instance, if AI is only able to see the 15% of shopping that happens online, there is a huge blind spot.
“When Sparky is aware of online and in-store orders, it can actually recommend replenishment of items as they are needed,” Danker said. “If Sparky is on autopilot, then it will automatically restock the pantry and fridge. This is not theoretical; it’s actually happening. About 40% of our Sam’s Club members use Scan and Go inside the club. Millions of people are also using the Walmart app when they are shopping inside stores. We know it makes a difference when customers use their mobile apps in stores. They spend 25% on those shopping occasions.”
When asked what the store of the future might look like in 10 years, he said it would be as much digital as it is physical today, as the lines blur between the digital and physical experiences. Danker described how in-store inventory might be customized to the shopper for each store, focusing on their product preferences and when they might shop next. He said the Walmart app has distinct shopping experiences, one based on scrolling and the other based on chatting, and those experiences will become more seamless in the future.
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