What: Walmart's U.S. CEO David Guggina said AI, led by the Sparky shopping assistant, is lifting store execution, delivery speed, order values and conversion, with the savings reinvested in prices and customer experience.

Why it is important: Walmart is showing that AI savings can fund prices and service, and that an in-house assistant can sit alongside third-party agents without either taking the customer relationship.

Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Global Consumer and Retail Conference, Walmart U.S. President and CEO David Guggina said AI is reshaping both the company and its customer value proposition. Walmart has used physical AI in its supply chain for over seven years, and ambient automation now supports store execution and faster delivery.

E-commerce sales grew 24% year over year in Q2, the 10th consecutive quarter above 20%. Guggina attributed much of this to AI-driven efficiencies, with the savings reinvested in competitive pricing and customer experience.

Sparky, Walmart's AI shopping assistant, is driving 40% higher average order values. Weekly engagement grew 60% quarter over quarter, and its new visual search lifted conversion by 57% compared with text search. Guggina suggested Sparky could extend to Walmart's Vizio and Onn electronics, helping users shop and navigate apps on the TV.

Walmart also welcomes third-party agents such as ChatGPT and Gemini, which mostly deep link customers to its site with strong conversion. Many of these shoppers are new or returning and show a very high organic repeat rate. Amazon, by contrast, has blocked agents from Meta, Perplexity, OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft.

IADS Notes: Sparky's commercial impact has grown through the year. Walmart app users who engage with its AI shopping tools build baskets 35% larger than non-users (Modern Retail, February 2026), and by the first quarter of fiscal 2027 the assistant was credited with lifting average order values by 35%, alongside 26% e-commerce growth and delivery to 60% of US households within 30 minutes (Inside Retail, May 2026). Walmart has also set public limits on the assistant, pledging that Sparky will not hide cheaper options or set prices from personal data (Retail Week, September 2026). Its current approach to external agents follows a reversal: Walmart suspended its Instant Checkout integration with ChatGPT after conversion came in roughly three times lower than on its own site, even though the feed brought in twice as many new customers (Journal du Net, September 2026). That experience explains the preference Guggina now describes for deep links back to Walmart's site. Amazon's block of Meta's Muse, which Gap and Sephora have integrated, points to the underlying contest over who owns discovery, recommendations and the customer relationship (Inside Retail, October 2026).

AI is reshaping Walmart U.S., with Sparky leading the charge