Walmart isn’t the only big name in online retail whose relationship with agentic commerce — and OpenAI’s ChatGPT — is changing.
Already in March, OpenAI has communicated that it is rethinking its strategy for checkout in agentic commerce experiences. Meanwhile, Shopify has detailed its own new approach for using ChatGPT within the flow toward checkout for merchants using Shopify ecommerce sites.
Meanwhile, Walmart’s use of ChatGPT, which — like Shopify’s previous approach — included ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout feature, also appears to be at a crossroads.
Daniel Danker, who arrived at Walmart in 2025 following time at Instacart, now serves as the retailer’s executive vice president of AI acceleration, product and design. Under his watch, the company is paying more attention to how Walmart’s AI assistant Sparky works with ChatGPT. And he believes this approach to agentic commerce could grow Walmart’s total volume of online sales.
Walmart is No. 2 in the Top 2000. The database is Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of North America’s online retailers by their annual ecommerce sales.
It is also No. 8 in the Global Online Marketplaces. That database ranks the top such marketplaces by third-party gross merchandise value (GMV).
What Walmart’s Sparky AI assistant does within ChatGPT
Speaking to an audience at Morgan Stanley’s Technology Media and Telecom Conference in March, Danker addressed one of the biggest questions for Walmart (and other retailers) about agentic commerce right now: Is it additive as a growth driver, or is it merely a replacement for other channels as a means of buying the same things? In Danker’s view, agentic commerce can do both in different scenarios, and he cited purchases associated with Sparky use in ChatGPT as an example of additive activity.
Danker noted that Walmart “recently launched Sparky inside of ChatGPT,” and since then, it has been watching what shoppers do.
“We started noticing what are people buying there,” he explained. “And one version of this story could have gone the direction that they just buy the same things that they’re buying inside of the Walmart app.”
However, this was not the case.
“So top two items that people are buying from Walmart on ChatGPT: vitamin supplements and protein supplements,” he said.
Danker assessed that these purchases were coming from prompts that did not necessarily begin with language associated with direct purchase intent.
“It’s not a prompt that starts from the place of commerce,” he stated. “It’s a prompt that probably began with, I just started taking GLP-1s. What do I need to know?”
In that context, he framed associated purchases as the results of broader inquiries that led to product suggestions.
What agentic commerce means at Walmart
Nevertheless, Danker also sees value in agentic commerce that may not be additive, as long it is solving a problem. In Walmart’s case, he brought up recurring purchases, such as groceries, that have the potential to be automated.
“I think a lot of people equate agentic commerce with robotic commerce,” Danker said. “This idea that you’ve somehow handed the wheel to a computer that will now shop on your behalf.”
In that context, he said that what agentic commerce has to offer is not entirely new.
“We’ve always had the ability for customers to put certain items on subscription or repeat order,” he explained. “And this is just a more sophisticated version of that. It’s the next version of it, if you will.”
However, he sees a distinction between what he terms “robotic commerce” versus “agentic commerce,” which in his words means “that one AI agent and another AI agent might be working together to complete a task.”
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