Walmart

Walmart is the largest retailer in the world by revenue across its US, international, and Sam's Club segments as of FY2025. Founded in 1962 by Sam Walton in Bentonville, Arkansas, the company went public on NYSE as WMT in 1972. Walmart operates over 10,500 stores globally across 19 countries and serves approximately 270 million customers weekly. The company is the largest US private-sector employer with over 1.6 million US workers (and 2.1 million globally). Walmart is also the largest US grocery retailer by volume — grocery accounts for ~$300 billion of US revenue.

The company's product portfolio spans the Walmart-banner stores (Supercenter, Neighborhood Market), Sam's Club warehouse-club format, Walmart International (Mexico via Walmex, Chile, China, Canada, India via PhonePe and Flipkart), and Walmart Connect (the rapidly-growing retail-media advertising business). Walmart.com and the Walmart+ subscription program have aggressively expanded online presence — combined US e-commerce revenue exceeds $90 billion annually. The Walmart Health clinic initiative was wound down in 2024 after expansion challenges.

Walmart's AI strategy is among the most ambitious in retail. Sparky (the company's associate-and-customer-facing AI assistant, built in partnership with Anthropic and OpenAI) is deployed across 1.6 million associates and the Walmart app. Walmart Connect uses AI heavily for ad targeting and attribution. Symbotic-supplied warehouse robotics are being rolled out across 42 regional distribution centers — Walmart's investment in Symbotic represents one of the largest single AI and robotics commitments in retail. Last-mile delivery uses an internal fleet plus Spark Driver gig contractors with AI dispatch. Generative AI is being applied to merchandising (assortment optimization), product description generation, and the Walmart Connect ad-tech platform. The company has publicly committed to AI as a productivity multiplier rather than an employee-replacement strategy.

On AI shopping agents, Walmart has taken the opposite line from Amazon, which blocks them. In October 2026 it announced an Agent Gateway, a Model Context Protocol server through which approved agents can search its inventory and buy on a customer's behalf at Walmart and Sam's Club. Agent Profiles, rolling out from November, give each agent its own place in the customer's account, keep its purchases separate, and require approval for every order by default or allow a spending limit the customer sets. Walmart says the gateway can find a shopper's usual items without handing the agent their purchase history, and that it will block agents that act beyond what the shopper intends or change a payment method. It had already partnered with Meta's Muse agent and integrates with ChatGPT and Gemini.