Latest / Retail Media Breakfast Club / Walmart Reveals AI Roadmap That Points To A World Without Search Bars
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- Walmart Reveals AI Roadmap That Points To A World Without Search Bars === [00:00:00] Walmart executives predict that traditional search boxes will become obsolete as the retailer rolls out. Sparky ~and AI shopping agent designed to handle everything from routine grocery orders to complex purchase.~ [00:00:09] An AI shopping agent designed to handle everything from routine grocery orders to [00:00:15] complex purchase research. The prediction came as part of Walmart's ~July 20, ~July 24 announcement of the next chapter of AI at Walmart, a comprehensive four-part agentic [00:00:30] AI framework that includes Sparky for customers. [00:00:33] Marty for suppliers and advertisers, an associate agent for employees, and a developer agent for building systems. ~I'm gonna recap an article that I shared. ~I'm gonna recap an article [00:00:45] that I wrote for forbes.com that was published on July 24, and share some of the highlights from this announcement with you. [00:00:53] Let's jump in. [00:00:54] Good morning and welcome to the Retail Media Breakfast Club. I'm your host, Kerry Masters, [00:01:00] and every weekday at 6:00 AM Eastern, I bring you candid and real discussions in the world of retail, media and marketplaces in just 10 minutes. So bring your own cup of coffee and we'll get smarter about retail media [00:01:15] together. [00:01:15] So the CTO of Walmart, ~us, ~Hari Sev said, during this event, we expect that the search bar and the conventional way of searching for items will be replaced by this [00:01:30] multimodal interface in Sparky and. [00:01:34] this is a pretty bold claim, right? We have used search bars on the web for decades now. It's just the way that [00:01:45] consumer behavior evolved. But just remember before search engines. the web was a directory and it was less about search and it was more about curation from ~the ~[00:02:00] yahoo.com and whatnot. So the search bar ~has been, ~was new at the time, and I really think, ~you know, a lot, ~a lot of people are saying that they don't see the search bar going away. [00:02:11] ~Why? Why would you as assume. ~Why would you assume that things are going to change so dramatically in the [00:02:15] future? And I think it's important to point out, 'cause this came up in the comments when I initially shared this article, that Walmart's not saying, Hey, we're gonna get rid of the search bar next month because consumer behavior doesn't change that quickly.[00:02:30] [00:02:30] But what to me is most striking and what comes through in this post is that Walmart's. Access to hundreds of millions of shoppers every week is a [00:02:45] huge signal and catalyst for consumer behavior. And while it may be true that if you're listening to this podcast, you might over index on AI usage compared to the general population, [00:03:00] but it's the general population who are walking into Walmart stores, possibly also using the app. [00:03:06] And. They're starting to be exposed to what an AI assistant can do. And if Walmart is out there [00:03:15] championing this type of way to search and discover and buy products, then it's going to start infiltrating, ~um, ~this modality into the behaviors of the general population. [00:03:30] So ~that's a little pre, ~that's a little aside from me, [00:03:32] but coming back to what I wrote here, Sparky, the AI assistant from Walmart isn't new, and it wasn't super new when it first launched. It was a pretty late mover in the AI shopping [00:03:45] space. Amazon brought out Rufuss many months before Sparky, but. The latest announcements from Walmart reveal ambitious plans that extend far beyond the current [00:04:00] capabilities, which is essentially like a chat bot. [00:04:03] ~It's, it's pretty simple. ~Executives from Walmart at this briefing said that Sparky usage has increased dramatically since that feature was added to a prime position in the app. Walmart envisions Sparky [00:04:15] evolving into a truly autonomous shopping agent that can do things like create weekly grocery baskets, analyze photos of customers' pantries to suggest recipes and guide complex purchase decisions. [00:04:29] [00:04:30] Rather than making customers breakdown needs into searchable keywords, AI will be able to understand high level goals and orchestrate the necessary action to fulfill them. [00:04:40] Now this is all amongst a backdrop of a lot of ~Ag ~agentic [00:04:45] AI upgrades that Walmart has made. I didn't cover them all in this post, but there's some really impressive things that Walmart has done recently in, in so far as improving how their stores operate, improving how their associates. [00:05:00] Interface with the, the company and all the inventory and the store environment. [00:05:08] ~Um, ~they have rapidly sped up the time to deliver grocery orders, which I, as a [00:05:15] user I have noticed as well. It's pretty amazing. And so I want to be clear that this consumer facing Sparky AI assisted ~is, ~is overall a pretty small part of what they unveiled, ~but uh,~ [00:05:28] but the reason why I got [00:05:30] excited about it is two reasons. One, like I mentioned, just the touch points that Walmart has with a very large population. The possibility of sort of starting to change consumer behavior just through their [00:05:45] reach. And secondly is that they are pursuing a very different ecosystem approach compared to Amazon and that is [00:05:55] amazon is building a walled garden in their [00:06:00] proprietary AI tools. They don't allow external AI agents to crawl their website or complete any tasks on amazon.com, and instead they are building up. Rufuss, they're building up [00:06:15] Alexa. Plus there's a lot more that ~I, ~I wanna dig into on that topic. But they're containing, um, in a very typical Amazon way. [00:06:25] They're containing their new technology to, within the ecosystem [00:06:30] they want everyone to use. Alexa Plus, rather than use Open AI's agent to go and buy stuff on amazon.com, Walmart is taking a open ecosystem [00:06:45] bet. And so the CTO of Walmart, [00:06:48] Hari Sev said during this briefing. From the perspective of the technology and the product stack, we're certainly building Sparky to be capable of interacting with [00:07:00] both other agents as well as humans at the other end. So this is significant to me. I really believe that shoppers are increasingly turning to their own [00:07:15] personal AI assistance. [00:07:16] For help interacting with retailers and information and other sort of service providers rather than wanting to necessarily use a dedicated AI [00:07:30] assistant in other walled gardens. So I'm [00:07:33] when chat GBT understands so much about. Me and my preferences and what I'm interested in and my budget and ~you know, ~[00:07:45] what, ~how, how much ~flexibility I have in my budget across different categories. That's where I'm going to be doing more of my research. That's where I'm going to want to get help identifying what is the best, ~you know, ~new dish [00:08:00] washing machine for me. [00:08:01] ~What um. ~What should I add to my cart for my weekly grocery shop knowing that I am gluten-free and ~you know, ~have whatever dietary preferences. So [00:08:11] that seems like a much more realistic use case than [00:08:15] consumers using AI assistance and chatbots on all these different retailer websites where they really have no context of who you are and what you like. [00:08:26] So going back to my article, rather than forcing customers into [00:08:30] platform specific AI experiences. Walmart appears to be preparing for a world where multiple AI assistants coordinate on behalf of consumers. Sparky could evolve from a shopping assistant into the foundation for agent to agent commerce, where your [00:08:45] personal AI assistant negotiates with Walmart systems to complete purchases, compare prices or managed subscriptions [00:08:53] And even further out into the future. Walmart also says it's positioning for multimodal interactions that [00:09:00] extend beyond text-based conversations. So think about interacting with AI through voice, which we're starting to get more used to images, video, all in ways that mirror natural human [00:09:15] shopping behavior. [00:09:16] so wrapping up here, the wide ranging nature of Walmart's AI transformation is a signal. To the entire retail industry. Beyond using AI on a piecemeal basis to improve existing processes, [00:09:30] this retail giant is rebuilding its core systems around AI agents. If successful, this approach could force every major retailer to develop similar capabilities or risk having their interfaces appear [00:09:45] antiquated as we become more exposed to chat interfaces. [00:09:48] Many consumers may start to reject search bars. Consumers will also come to rely on the delivery speed that Walmart has been able to deploy to customers with 70% of [00:10:00] baskets delivered in one hour or less when express delivery is selected and for brands that implications are equally significant. Success in an agent mediated shopping world may depend more on data quality [00:10:15] and algorithmic optimization than traditional marketing tactics. [00:10:19] As I noted in my earliest Sparky analysis from a couple of months ago, AI shoppers don't scroll. So if you're not optimized for ai, you're invisible. [00:10:30] I'm gonna wrap it up there. I'll link up to my original post for Forbes in the show notes if you wanna check that out. [00:10:37] Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next week.