AI-led shopping experiences are driving higher add-to-cart rates and repeat purchases at Walmart, as the retailer moves from search and recommendations towards agentic commerce, said Balu Chaturvedula, SVP & Country Head, Walmart Global Tech.
“Walmart grew with traditional AI and has adopted GenAI and agentic AI. Traditional search is task-driven. AI changes the experience based on intent. We have different levels of super-agent experiences for different personas. With super agents like Sparky coming into the equation, we saw that the customer add-to-cart rate has gone up significantly, and repeat buys have grown. This is the new phase of retail shopping. It is purpose-driven engineering, where technology blends with what a customer does and enhances their persona. This is an example of how retail adoption of AI is going,” he explained.
He noted that the company has grown its capabilities: ownership, maturity models, and awareness.
“Walmart is in a new phase: we are a people-led, tech-powered organization,” he said.
However, technology adoption is a secondary metric for the retailer, with the top four things in any retail ecosystem being assortment, pricing, convenience, and trust. AI, or any other technology, only amplifies this journey, he added.
Walmart’s AI journey has four phases: answering, recommending, acting with supervision, and acting autonomously. It has moved beyond traditional search and personalisation to generating customer carts with consent, while autonomous AI is still at an early stage and will require strong governance, access controls, logging, monitoring and observability.
Delivery timelines have evolved from a week to the same day. Meeting these expectations raises supply-chain costs, making Walmart’s Omni strategy key to scaling faster delivery economically.
“For roughly 90 per cent of America’s population, there is a Walmart within a 10 mile radius. Traditionally, we expected customers to shop in store and then found that last-mile delivery and pickup were becoming a big value proposition; we could look at the store as a node that does both. The front of the store serves the customers who walk in, while the back can serve orders from the nearby geographical area. That’s how we converted 4,500-plus stores into 4,500 supply chain nodes,” Chaturvedula shared.
Walmart’s network velocity has increased significantly, with more than 90 per cent of the US population now able to receive orders in under an hour. The retailer has also expanded into drone delivery, recently completing its millionth drone delivery.
“All of this is one of the reasons customers come back to us, shopping repeatedly. We are seeing how people’s patterns and customer behaviors are changing where convenience is concerned. It’s a huge value proposition for the customers who shop with us,” he noted.
Walmart’s GCC in India evolved from a partnership model to local ownership and eventually a global, value-driven model. India’s talent density and retail expertise led to greater business and technology sponsorship for local ownership, including supply-chain control towers in Bengaluru. This was not about operating in isolation, but enabling teams in India to support Walmart’s US and international markets as one global talent organisation.
“As Omni came together for Walmart, we realized we can have leaders independent of geography and based on the capabilities they can build, managing teams across geographies. Most of my two levels of leadership have global roles in India, which means they manage teams in the US and vice versa. We are becoming more location-independent, which has changed the face of the organization.”
Published on September 30, 2026
