Walmart opens website to third-party AI shopping agents, unlike Amazon

Walmart to let AI shopping agents browse online stores. In contrast to Amazon's current decision to block 3rd-party AI shopping agents, Walmart is opening up its website and Sam's Club for them to shop. The impact here is to provide an additional way for users to shop with AI shopping assistants for routine purchases. This means that for users who are already using AI automated shopping tools, they'll have a major retailer on their side for those workflows.

Walmart introduces Agent Profiles and MCP backend for AI shopping

To handle all this AI automation, Walmart is rolling out 'Agent Profiles' in November. This will require users to authorize purchases and spending limits before an AI shopping agent can do anything. So, this ensures that shoppers are in control of what their AI agents can buy. It will prevent rogue overspending or unauthorized purchases.

For these AI shopping agents to function, there's a new 'Agent Gateway' backend, which uses the Model Context Protocol (MCP). It's designed to provide a faster and more reliable shopping experience for AI software using this protocol. Walmart's updating their Terms of Service to put some limitations on how AI shopping agents can operate. In particular, no payment changes and no unnecessary user info access.

So the goal here is that AI should be able to suggest items based on your shopping history, without revealing your full shopping history. It's a balance between user convenience and privacy protection. This is primarily being rolled out for the US market, as the main region for this initial launch. It's setting the bar for safe integration of AI with retail.

So Walmart is setting up a system where AI shopping agents can do transactions with strict oversight by the user. This is being kicked off with Agent Profiles launching in November. They're using the MCP protocol to make it technically compatible with different AI models. This becomes the precedent for major retailers managing AI shopping agents.