Inc. Magazine
Walmart’s AI shopping assistant ‘Sparky’ has coaxed users to buy more, spending 35% extra per order, possibly showing where retail may be headed next.
Walmart Just Revealed Some Fascinating Numbers About Its AI Shopping Agent, and This Key Trend Mattered Most
Author: Bill Murphy Jr.
Something is happening inside the Walmart app, and it showed up in this week’s earnings call.
Walmart’s AI shopping agent—a feature called Sparky, accessible through a small smiley-face button in the app—saw its weekly active users more than double from last quarter.
Units purchased through Sparky grew more than four times.
Customers who use it are spending 35-percent more per order than customers who don’t.
Those are percentages, not raw numbers, and Walmart hasn’t disclosed how many people are using Sparky week-to-week.
But the company said in its previous earnings call in February that roughly half of all Walmart app users have interacted with Sparky at least once, which suggests that even at the conservative end, Walmart has succeeded, to some degree, in changing how people shop.
“Helping us evolve”
Some quick background here on how Walmart’s leadership transition reflects what the company either expected to happen here or caused to happen. Doug McMillon, who ran Walmart for more than a decade, stepped down in February. He made a point of saying publicly, in a Harvard Business Review exit interview, that his successor, John Furner, is “wired to execute” on the company’s tech agenda “better than I ever could.”
Furner became CEO on February 1, and on his two earnings calls since then he’s talked about Sparky, describing its role in “agentic commerce” and crediting it with helping Walmart become, in his words, “AI-native.”
“Sparky is essentially helping us evolve from traditional search to intent-driven commerce,” said David Guggina, the new CEO of Walmart U.S., on the same call.
Guggina is 40. Before joining Walmart seven years ago, he spent nine years at Amazon in fulfillment and customer service operations.
He has no traditional retail background, which is a departure from every Walmart U.S. CEO before him. His entire career has been logistics, e-commerce, and supply chain—the scaffolding of how things get to you, as opposed to the merchandising art of leading you to buy.
The three-generation succession—McMillon to Furner to Guggina waiting in the wings—essentially shows a company making a deliberate bet that the next era of retail requires a different kind of leader at every level.
“Let the younger guys do this”
I mention all of that because there’s a Wall Street Journal piece from April about how some older workers have been reacting to artificial intelligence—an article that, to use a horrible AI cliché intentionally, I’ve been “sitting with” for a little while.
It documented how experienced professionals—people who navigated desktop publishing in the 1980s, the internet in the 1990s, and the smartphone era in the 2000s—are now looking at AI and deciding, to heck with this. They are retiring rather than spending yet another chapter of their careers adapting to yet another new technological upheaval.
“Your battery doesn’t hold a charge as long as it used to,” a 68-year-old content strategist at a cancer research institute who took early retirement last year told the Journal.
“I’ll let the younger guys do this,” said a 65-year-old software consultant who’d spent 40 years in IT and retired after his firm was acquired and he found himself working 40 hours and studying another 20 to keep up with new tools.
The share of Americans over 55 in the workforce has slipped to 37.2 percent, the lowest number in more than 20 years.
Economists point to home equity and stock market gains as part of the explanation, but it appears that for a meaningful subset, the AI moment is a deciding factor—not a financial one, but a motivational one.
An early sorting period
The Walmart numbers and the Wall Street Journal story suggest we’re in an early sorting period.
Some people and companies are leaning into AI tools aggressively enough that the behavior is already showing up in sales data—almost regardless of whether the tools themselves drove the behavior or the leaning-in did.
Others are making a rational, considered decision that they just don’t want to be a part of it.
Others still probably have no choice: Whatever qualms anyone has about AI, without the financial security to opt out, they’ll probably have to adapt.
What seems much harder to sustain is the assumption that the tools will stay optional long enough that you don’t have to decide.
Walmart’s bet, embedded in every Sparky statistic and every leadership appointment, is that intent-driven commerce is where things are going.
Not for the first time, I think people running smaller companies can learn a lot just by watching what the bigger, endless-resource ones do, and stealing the smartest decisions.
Got to run. I’ve got some vibe coding to do.
Credits: TCA, LLC.