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10 minutes of expert insights every weekday. Your morning ritual for staying ahead in retail media.
Walmart Turns Its Shelf Into An API
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[00:00:00] Kiri Masters: Happy Monday and welcome back to Retail Media Breakfast Club. I'm your host, Kiri Masters, and today I'm actually going to be sharing an op-ed by Doug Chavez, who is the EVP of Global Retail Channel [00:00:15] Strategy at the agency Mars United Commerce. And Doug wrote this piece last week for the Mars United blog after Walmart announced how it plans to let AI agents shop on [00:00:30] customers' behalf and the rules that these agents have to follow.
[00:00:33] What was great about Doug's piece is that he actually kinda set this all back up back in August before this was even a glimmer in Walmart's eye, or at least before their announcement. And [00:00:45] in that piece, Doug pushed back on this pervasive idea that the shopping journey is splintering across more and more places.
[00:00:52] Instead, he proposed that a small number of AI assistants are sort of knitting [00:01:00] together all of these decisions that we used to make across 10 open tabs, and they're actually consolidating all of that
[00:01:08] And I appreciate that point of view because it actually runs counter to what we're hearing a lot about, which is fragmentation [00:01:15] of the customer journey. He's arguing for coming consolidation, which I think is a really interesting concept.
[00:01:24] So I will be back after reading this op-ed in its entirety from [00:01:30] Doug,
[00:01:30] Reproduced here with permission by U- Mars United Commerce. Let's jump in
[00:01:35]
[00:01:36] Kiri Masters: Walmart just published its operating rules for AI agents shopping on a customer's behalf. Most of the media [00:01:45] 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.
[00:01:55] The first is agent profiles, Which give each third-party [00:02:00] agent its own identity inside a customer's account with spending limits and approval rules. Part two is the Walmart agent gateway, which lets agents transact directly through model context [00:02:15] protocol instead of clicking through the walmart.com website that is built for humans.
[00:02:21] And finally, new terms which spell out what agents can and can't do, with non-compliant agents getting [00:02:30] blocked. Earlier this year, Doug says he 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 [00:02:45] leaders.
[00:02:45] Number one, 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 [00:03:00] purchase history. The agent gets the customer's usuals without seeing the full basket. Walmart has positioned itself as a system of record for intent and the agent as a guest.
[00:03:13] Every other retailer is [00:03:15] likely to make that same move or face being disintermediated. Number two, the usuals feature matters the most for CPG. If an agent reorders the favorite cookies and milk by default, [00:03:30] 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.
[00:03:41] Physical availability now means shelf, search, [00:03:45] and agent. Most brand plans still fund only the first two. Number three, 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 [00:04:00] a way to monetize agent traffic. Until it does, visibility comes from what the agent reads, product data, content, ratings, availability.
[00:04:10] That is AEO for retail, and it's no longer optional for brands, [00:04:15] most of which are still early in developing a POV and plans. Number four, measurement has a new line item. Agent purchases will sit on their own profile, separate from the customer's. That's the clearest [00:04:30] separation of agent-driven sales I've seen from a major retailer.
[00:04:34] Brands should be asking for that cut in their retailer data now. As I've often said this year at industry events, you cannot govern what you cannot measure, and you can't [00:04:45] plan for a channel you can't see. And finally, number five, trust is the real product. Same price for agents and humans.
[00:04:54] No card data is shared with the agent. Walmart's returns [00:05:00] 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 [00:05:15] adopt early and en masse. The takeaway.
[00:05:19] Agentic commerce is no longer a twenty twenty-eight experiment. Walmart just published the operating terms, and the question for every brand is whether its content, data, [00:05:30] and media plan are prepared to be read by a machine shopping on someone's behalf. No single tactic wins an agent. The pace of AI is moving at warp speed, which means teams and brands [00:05:45] 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.
[00:05:57] That's the work we're doing with clients at Mars [00:06:00] United today. And that piece was originally published on the Mars United Commerce blog on October 27, 2026. Are manual [00:06:15] processes slowing down your RMN momentum? With GrowthLoop's composable commerce media solution, retail media and ad teams can build and launch precise audiences in minutes, [00:06:30] activate across DSPs and ad platforms, and deliver transparent ROI reporting that drives advertiser revenue.
[00:06:40] learn how retail media leaders at Costco, Fanatics, and [00:06:45] goPuff use GrowthLoop to deliver stronger results for their brand partners fast. Visit go.growthloop.com/breakfast. That's [00:07:00] go.growthloop.com/breakfast So back to me, back to Kiri. This is me now. Um, I agree with what most of what, uh, Doug lays out here, especially the piece about the usuals. [00:07:15] But there's, uh, three things that I wanna add here.
[00:07:17] The first is that Walmart's Agent Gateway is still a beta, so we're looking at a future plan rather than something that is being used by shoppers today. Second, Doug says [00:07:30] an agent calling an API doesn't scroll past a sponsored tile. That is true, but if we look a little closer at how the gateway works, Walmart says that agents, uh, outside agents connect through Sparky, which is its shopping [00:07:45] assistant.
[00:07:45] And Sparky, of course, has been running ads for some time. So when someone's personal AI agent shops Walmart through the gateway, it's talking to an assistant that already has ads in it. Now, [00:08:00] will those sponsored placements shape what Sparky passes back to the outside agent? I don't know, and we haven't seen Walmart say anything about this either way, to my knowledge.
[00:08:14] So if you [00:08:15] have some more information on that, I'd love to hear from you. But there's already a precedent being set for ads that are written for machines. This is uncanny valley kind of stuff, but since July, Time, [00:08:30] as in Time Magazine, has been serving sponsored brand FAQs in stripped-down versions of its pages that only AI crawlers can see.
[00:08:41] And so these sponsored brand FAQs [00:08:45] are being sold to advertisers, including Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute. They have actually bought this ad format from Time. [00:09:00] The ads are labeled as sponsored, but the weird and unsettling part of it is the idea that bots see a different page than what humans see.
[00:09:13] so that is- kind [00:09:15] of sits a little bit funny for I think for most people. Um, so a publisher that is feeding brand facts to chatbots is different from a retailer that is [00:09:30] nudging an agent at checkout. Between Sparky and Time, I wouldn't bet on retail media's pricing problem staying unsolved for long.
[00:09:38] I think that this is something that I have shared in the past, is that the formats might change, the [00:09:45] economics might change, I have a feeling thousands of smart people that work in this industry are going to figure out new formats and places for ads to run. I have covered a number of them [00:10:00] on this, uh, podcast and on my blog.
[00:10:03] There's going to be another one I'm going to be profiling this week, so stay tuned for that. All right, and then thirdly, Doug expects other retailers to follow Walmart's lead. Well, [00:10:15] maybe, but its biggest competitor, Amazon, is heading very much in the opposite direction. Amazon is playing Whac-A-Mole with outside agents, shutting down anyone that tries to, uh, get [00:10:30] past the, the welcome mat.
[00:10:33] And, you know, my view, I think it's funny, this, uh, theory from the top brass at Amazon, specifically Andy Jassy's [00:10:45] comments that horizontal agents won't be effective at shopping. People will prefer retail agents, and I think it's interesting they're kind of trying to turn that theory into reality by just shutting all of them down.
[00:10:58] So [00:11:00] they're crafting their own reality with, uh, the approach here. So for now, brands that are selling on both Amazon and Walmart are dealing with two very different versions of [00:11:15] repurchasing and One approach where everything stays inside Amazon's walls, nice and safe, only what Alexa is able to have a hand in, and one where Walmart will hand, uh, t- to whichever agent [00:11:30] the shopper picks.
[00:11:31] So I have, uh, written and spoken extensively on this topic. I have a couple of blog posts that I'll link up to in the show notes here. One is Rufus Remembers Me: What Happens When Amazon's Assistant Knows That You [00:11:45] Always Buy Tide, for example. And then, uh, Agentic Shopping Poses an Existential Threat for Retail Media.
[00:11:52] I have a couple of different essays on that topic. and indeed how the existential
[00:11:59] [00:12:00] Outcomes will be driven by the different philosophies that retailers have about whether they should fling open the doors and welcome the bots in or shut all of them down like Amazon is. Well, that is it for [00:12:15] today. Thank you to Doug Chavez and the Mars United Commerce team for allowing me to republish Doug's essay.
[00:12:25] Thank you so much for listening, and I'll catch you tomorrow
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