Walmart just made its biggest bet yet on letting AI do your shopping for you. The retailer announced a partnership with Google to embed Walmart and Sam’s Club product discovery directly into Google’s Gemini AI chatbot, creating a pipeline where an AI agent can recommend products, build your cart, and handle checkout without you ever opening a browser tab.
The announcement came at the National Retail Federation conference in New York, with Walmart’s incoming CEO John Furner and Google CEO Sundar Pichai jointly presenting the vision. The underlying infrastructure is Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP, an open standard built specifically for what the industry is calling “agentic commerce.”
From keyword search to autonomous shopping agents
Walmart’s proprietary AI assistant, called Sparky, will be embedded across multiple platforms as part of the integration. The system leverages data-driven insights into customer behavior to deliver personalized recommendations, essentially turning Gemini into a shopping concierge that happens to have Walmart’s entire inventory at its fingertips.
Google’s UCP supports payment rails including Google Pay and PayPal, and the ecosystem already includes other major retailers like Shopify and Wayfair.
