AI Shopping Assistants Move From Experiment to Revenue Engine
Retail AI agents have shifted from novelty chatbots to core growth drivers, ushering in a new era of agentic commerce. Instead of waiting for shoppers to search and click through static pages, AI shopping assistants proactively guide discovery, answer questions, and assemble baskets tailored to a customer’s needs. The stakes are high: consulting forecasts suggest that a substantial share of online commerce could be mediated by AI agents within the decade, representing trillions in transaction volume. That prospect is reshaping strategies at the largest platforms, which are racing to own the underlying technologies and distribution. For retailers, the promise is clear: higher conversion, larger baskets, and richer first-party data, paired with faster, more precise fulfillment decisions. The emerging challenge is choosing whether to build proprietary AI capabilities or lean on platforms that now offer agentic tools as turnkey services.
Walmart’s Sparky Shows the Sales Impact of Retail AI Agents
Walmart’s Sparky agent illustrates how retail AI agents can translate directly into AI-driven sales growth. Leadership says the company is becoming “AI native,” pointing to Sparky’s expanding role across its ecommerce site, mobile app, and physical stores. Weekly active users of Sparky more than doubled in the last quarter, while Walmart reports a 40% increase this year in the agent’s intelligence and response quality. That improved experience is driving revenue metrics: customers who shop with Sparky post an average order value about 35% higher than non-users, and units purchased through the agent have more than quadrupled versus the prior fiscal quarter. Sparky now supports use cases beyond general merchandise discovery, including personalized replenishment, meal planning, automatic reorders, and support for Spanish-speaking shoppers. Together, these capabilities make the assistant more useful for everyday essentials, deepening engagement while quietly lifting both basket size and purchase frequency.
Beyond the Cart: AI for Supply Chain and Advertising Optimization
The rise of AI shopping assistants is intertwined with a quieter but equally important shift: the use of AI agents in supply chain and advertising. Walmart is applying AI to inventory positioning and fulfillment decisions, using real-time data to decide where products should sit and how orders should ship. Those optimizations help ensure that agent-driven promises—such as fast delivery or specific item availability—are operationally realistic, reinforcing customer trust. At the same time, Walmart is infusing AI into its advertising tools, enabling brands to dynamically adjust creative mixes and extend their reach across surfaces, including its recently acquired Vizio connected TV platform. That strategy underpins robust advertising revenue growth, which the company cites as a key driver of ecommerce performance. Taken together, these AI layers show that agentic commerce is not just about conversational interfaces, but about end-to-end decision automation from media to last mile.
Amazon Turns Agentic Shopping into a Cloud Product
Amazon is taking a different route, commercializing its agentic commerce capabilities through Amazon Web Services. The AWS Agentic Shopping Assistant is built on the same technology that powers Alexa for Shopping on Amazon’s own marketplace, a system the company says generated nearly USD 12 billion (approx. RM55.2 billion) in incremental sales last year. Now, that technology is being packaged so external retailers can deploy AI shopping assistants on their own sites in roughly 60 days. These assistants converse with shoppers, answer detailed product questions, and recommend items tuned to each retailer’s inventory and brand voice, while retailers maintain control over data, catalogs, and business rules. Early adopters include fashion brands such as Kate Spade, whose parent company used the tool to launch an AI gift concierge that collects information about the occasion, recipient, and style, then curates relevant products through natural conversation.
The Next Phase of Agentic Commerce Competition
These moves signal a new competitive phase in agentic commerce, where the battle is not just for shoppers, but for the AI layer mediating every step of the journey. Walmart is prioritizing deep, vertically integrated AI across shopping, logistics, and media, steering customers through Sparky while optimizing how goods move and ads perform. Amazon, by contrast, is positioning AWS as an infrastructure provider for AI shopping assistants, betting that many retailers will choose to plug into its proven stack rather than build their own from scratch. Both paths aim at the same outcome: AI agents that reliably increase average order value, boost unit sales, and reduce friction from discovery to delivery. As more retailers experiment with AI shopping assistants, the winners will likely be those who combine conversational interfaces with robust back-end intelligence and clear data governance, turning experimentation into durable competitive advantage.
