Walmart wants in on the AI advertising boom.
The retailer announced that it is running ads within Sparky, its AI shopping agent, after testing the first ads within the tool last fall.
Sparky is an AI shopping assistant within Walmart’s mobile app. Shoppers can ask Sparky questions and prompts to find products, and Sparky analyzes products and reviews to recommend products available at Walmart.
Ads within Sparky appear as a sponsored prompt when shoppers ask the tool questions for product recommendations. In a survey of Walmart customers, Walmart reports that 81% of shoppers have used Sparky to look up product availability and details about a product before purchasing. Search is the most popular use case for Sparky, according to Walmart.
“We know it’s an interesting new surface, and we want to be there and experiment in that new surface—even though it’s early days,” Khurrum Malik, VP of business and product marketing for Walmart Connect, told ADWEEK. Walmart Connect is Walmart’s advertising arm.
Walmart’s Sparky directly competes with Amazon’s gen AI agent Rufus, which began running ads in 2024.
In addition to Sparky, Walmart inked a deal with OpenAI last year that allows people to shop from ChatGPT.
Malik said one way Walmart is hoping to differentiate itself from competitors is with its scale. Walmart has 150 million weekly shoppers across 4,600 stores and online.
“If you think about our advertisers, they want simplicity, they want automation, so agentic experiences help there,” Malik said.
Gen AI-driven ads
In July, Walmart announced an AI assistant called Marty, which helps Walmart’s suppliers and advertisers manage retail operations as well as advertising.
Now, Walmart is rolling out a beta program within Marty that manages sponsored search campaigns. Marty analyzes sponsored search campaigns to offer advertisers campaign recommendations on things such as bidding and keywords. Marty also spits out reports about the performance of campaigns, including share of voice, a metric that tracks an advertisers’ market share relative to competitors.
