How Walmart uses AI

Since November 2025, Walmart made about 200,000 products available directly inside ChatGPT through OpenAI's Instant Checkout, letting shoppers give OpenAI their shipping and payment details and place an order without leaving the chat. Daniel Danker, Walmart's EVP for design and product, told WIRED in March 2026 that conversion for purchases completed inside the chat ran at roughly one third of the rate for the same products when ChatGPT instead routed the shopper to walmart.com to check out, and he called that standalone experience inside the chat "unsatisfying". Walmart is instead embedding its own Sparky assistant inside ChatGPT, where shoppers log into Walmart and order with the payment and delivery details already saved there.

Walmart Global Tech describes how Walmart's supply chain systems use AI and forecasting models, drawing on signals such as historical sales, seasonality, local demand and weather, to decide which products are needed and where to position them across stores and fulfillment centers before customers order. Walmart says it combines AI foresight with human expertise to refine its demand forecasting, and once an order is placed the Walmart Fulfillment Engine takes over. Walmart gives no forecasting accuracy or inventory figures.

Walmart associates in the United States have used a conversational AI assistant in the Walmart associate app for about five years to ask where products are located, check their schedule and look up how to do tasks. On 24 June 2025 Walmart said the assistant has more than 900,000 weekly users and handles over 3 million queries per day, and announced a generative AI upgrade that turns long process guides into step by step instructions, for example how to process a return without a receipt. In the same announcement Walmart described a real time translation tool for associates and customers in 44 languages. Walmart gives no accuracy or time saving figure for the assistant itself.

Walmart launched Sparky in June 2025 as an "Ask Sparky" button in its app across all categories. Sparky answers product questions, compares options, synthesizes reviews and recommends products for an occasion, and Walmart describes a roadmap toward reordering, service booking and multimodal input. It joins Walmart's earlier generative AI features for search, review summaries, product descriptions and comparisons. No outcome figures were published on the launch page.

Walmart built an AI driven route optimization system for its own trucks and trailers. It maps multi stop journeys against delivery windows, packs trailers, and plans backhauls so trailers return loaded. In March 2024 Walmart said it avoided 94 million pounds of CO2 by removing 30 million unnecessary miles and routing around 110,000 inefficient paths, and that it won the 2023 Franz Edelman Award for deploying the technology at scale. The same release announced that Walmart Commerce Technologies would offer the software to other businesses as a service. The release gives mileage and emissions figures but no cost, time or service level result.

Walmart uses several large language models to extract product attributes such as color, size and material from item descriptions and images and to create or improve catalog data. One model extracts the values and a second model, tuned on human validated labels, checks them; values for attributes above an accuracy threshold go into the catalog, and the rest are checked by the quality model, with specialists validating samples. Walmart's chief executive told investors in August 2024 that the work covered more than 850 million pieces of catalog data, and estimated that without generative AI the same work would have needed nearly 100 times the current headcount to finish in the same time.

Walmart uses a chatbot from Pactum to negotiate payment terms and price discounts with tail end suppliers, where buyers lack time to negotiate and around 20% of suppliers had signed standard terms that are often not negotiated. The HBR article describing it is co written by two sourcing leaders at Walmart International and two University of Arkansas professors.

Walmart decides the acceptable negotiation trade offs and the bot negotiates and closes agreements within them; the article advises starting in indirect spend categories with pre approved suppliers and scaling by geography, category and use case. The authors report that, so far, the chatbot has closed agreements with 68% of suppliers approached. Pactum, the vendor, reports a 3% average gain across negotiations while extending payment terms by an average of 35 days.

The first is a supplier agreement rate and the second a commercial gain on negotiated terms; neither measures how much of the process runs without human touch or what procurement costs to run.