What Walmart’s new rules for AI shopping agents mean for brands, retail media and measurement.
By Doug Chavez, EVP, Global Retail Channel Strategy, Mars United Commerce
Walmart just published its operating rules for AI agents shopping on a customer’s behalf. Most of the media coverage will focus on consumer controls but there is a bigger story for brands sitting underneath them.
There are three parts to Walmart’s plan. Agent Profiles give each third-party agent its own identity inside a customer’s account, with spending limits and approval rules. The Walmart Agent Gateway lets agents transact directly over Model Context Protocol (MCP, the open standard that lets agents talk with other systems) instead of clicking through the Walmart.com built for humans. And new terms spell out what agents can and can’t do, with non-compliant agents getting blocked.
Earlier this year, I spoke at The Athena Group and wrote about how The Shelf is Becoming an API. Walmart just shipped it. Here are five implications for agency commerce practitioners and brand leaders.
Intent is being disintermediated, not fragmented: The shopper’s request now passes through an agent before it reaches Walmart. But look closely at the design. Walmart retains the purchase history. The agent gets the customer’s “usuals” without seeing the full basket. Walmart has positioned itself as the system of record for intent and the agent as a guest. Every other retailer is likely to make that same move or face being disintermediated.
The “usuals” feature matters most for CPG: If an agent reorders the favorite cookies and the milk by default, brand choice moves upstream. The first purchase becomes the whole game, because the repeat order may never see a shelf, a search result, or an ad. Physical availability now means shelf, search, and agent. Most brand plans still fund only the first two.
Retail media now has a pricing problem: An agent calling an API doesn’t scroll past a sponsored tile. Walmart Connect will need to find a way to monetize agent traffic. Until it does, visibility comes from what the agent reads: product data, content, ratings, availability. That is AEO for retail, and it’s no longer optional for brands — most of which are still early in developing a POV and plans.
Measurement has a new line item: Agent purchases will sit in their own profile, separate from the customer’s. That’s the clearest separation of agent-driven sales I’ve seen from a major retailer. Brands should be asking for that cut in their retailer data now. As I’ve said often this year at industry events, “You cannot govern what you cannot measure,” and you can’t plan for a channel you can’t see.
Trust is the real product: Same price for agents and humans. No card data is shared with the agent. Walmart’s returns policy covers agent mistakes. Walmart is underwriting the risk of delegation, and that is what can move agent shopping from novelty to trusted partner and create habitual adoption. Retailers need shoppers to adopt early and en masse.
The Takeaway
Agentic commerce is no longer a 2028 experiment. Walmart just published the operating terms. The question for every brand is whether its content, data, and media plan are prepared to be read by a machine shopping on someone else’s behalf.
No single tactic wins an agent. The pace of AI is moving at warp speed, which means teams and brands need to operate with a mindset of “Orchestration beats optimization.” The brands that connect product data, retail media, and measurement into one system will own the next default. That’s the work we’re doing with clients at Mars United today.
About the Author
Doug Chavez is EVP, Global Retail Channel Strategy at Mars United Commerce, where he leads connected commerce for the global OneMars business. With more than two decades of experience across agencies, platforms, and brands, he specializes in translating retail media complexity into integrated strategies that drive measurable growth at scale.
To continue the conversation, contact Doug at [email protected].
