Walmart is officially leaning into the emerging era of agentic commerce. The retail giant announced on Wednesday that it is launching its own proprietary Agent Gateway designed to securely manage transactions, alongside a suite of new features tailored specifically for customers utilizing autonomous artificial intelligence agents. This strategic move sharply differentiates Walmart from its chief rivals in the digital marketplace. Just recently, top competitor Amazon made headlines by actively blocking AI agents from executing purchases on behalf of online shoppers, joining a wave of online businesses, travel platforms, and booking sites that have responded to the growing consumer adoption of AI by locking automated tools out of their websites completely.
Rather than shutting the door on automated shopping assistants, Walmart is aggressively preparing for a retail landscape where AI agents become a mainstream consumer utility. Speaking at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday, Walmart President and CEO John Furner detailed the company’s forward-looking strategy. Furner explained that the new technology is built to support seamless agentic shopping across both Walmart’s core retail platform and its popular discount warehouse subsidiary, Sam’s Club.
This ambitious push builds upon prior moves by the retailer. Walmart had previously announced a high-profile partnership with Meta to integrate with Muse, one of the leading AI agents in the current ecosystem. Additionally, the company already maintains active integrations with popular third-party AI applications including ChatGPT and Gemini. The introduction of the Agent Gateway and accompanying governance tools represents the next logical phase in Walmart’s technological evolution, bridging the gap between independent AI systems and enterprise-level retail infrastructure.
At the technical core of this rollout is Walmart’s new Agent Gateway, functioning as the company’s proprietary Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. Created originally by Anthropic, the Model Context Protocol is an open standard designed to help AI models securely connect to external data sources, software tools, and digital workflows. Through Walmart’s MCP server, approved AI agents are granted authorized access to search across Walmart’s vast online inventory in real-time and execute transactions smoothly on behalf of the human user who prompted them.
Crucially, the retail giant has engineered the Agent Gateway with consumer privacy and data security in mind. Walmart stated that the system is designed to help customers shop for their routine brands, household essentials, and favorite items without requiring them to share their sensitive personal information or complete purchase histories directly with the third-party AI agents they employ.
To further manage the complexities of automated purchasing, Walmart has developed dedicated technology designed to clearly differentiate purchases initiated by an autonomous agent from those made directly by a human customer through traditional browsing. This technological distinction is paired with robust administrative controls that return a high degree of oversight to the shopper.
Beginning next month, Walmart is rolling out a feature called Agent Profiles. This functionality will allow customers to authorize every individual AI agent they use by creating a dedicated profile within their main Walmart account. Through these profiles, shoppers can easily view and track an agent’s purchases completely separate from their personal transaction history. Furthermore, customers retain ultimate financial authority over the system. Shoppers can configure their profiles to require manual approval for every single transaction attempted by an agent, or they can choose to authorize transactions automatically within a predefined spending limit of their own choosing.
Walmart draws a direct comparison between these new digital controls and traditional financial management tools, likening the setup to adding an authorized user to a credit card account. In a credit card scenario, secondary transactions are clearly identified on the billing statement, and the primary account holder maintains the ability to cap the user’s spending.
Creating an Agent Profile is designed to be a straightforward process that occurs organically the first time a customer uses a specific agent to shop via the Walmart Agent Gateway. To initiate the workflow, a user authorizes and links the Agent Profile directly to their existing Walmart account, after which they can configure their preferred governance controls and spending caps. Customers retain full flexibility, as an Agent Profile can be deleted at any time. Walmart has confirmed that agent support is available to all standard account holders, meaning that a paid Walmart+ membership is not a prerequisite to utilize agentic commerce features on the platform.
Alongside these structural and technical safeguards, Walmart is introducing a specialized set of terms and conditions explicitly governing AI agents. These terms outline the operational boundaries for autonomous tools, detailing precisely how they must behave and defining the exact rights they possess to execute transactions on the retailer’s digital storefronts.
One of the most notable consumer-friendly provisions within these terms is the application of Walmart’s standard returns policy to agent-driven transactions. This includes scenarios where an AI agent fails to execute a task as intended or purchases an incorrect item due to a misunderstanding. By extending traditional return protections to automated shopping errors, Walmart is effectively removing a major psychological barrier for consumers. This policy could successfully sway shoppers who might otherwise have been hesitant to act as early testers of agentic commerce, alleviating fears that they might end up stuck with unwanted goods due to a misbehaving algorithm.
To maintain platform integrity and protect its user base, Walmart’s terms impose strict operational boundaries. The company mandates that agents cannot take actions that exceed the explicit intent of the human shopper, are entirely barred from accessing the customer’s underlying payment information, and are restricted to retrieving only the specific data necessary to complete the assigned task. Walmart has made it clear that any AI agent found to be non-compliant with these mandatory terms of service will have its access revoked and will be permanently blocked from interacting with Walmart’s digital infrastructure.
