AI agents will get their own Walmart profiles with spending caps

Walmart will allow shoppers to have a separate profile for each AI shopping agent in their account, including spending limits and purchase approvals.

Amazon took the opposite approach, blocking Meta’s Muse agent.

Customers approve each order or set limits like $50 or $200

The feature, dubbed Agent Profiles, is coming next month. In a corporate blog post, Walmart said that an agent shopping for a customer today signs in with that customer’s own account, so human and machine purchases appear together with no split.

Agent Profiles distinguish them. Each agent’s purchases show up on their own line, and shoppers can require sign-off on each order, or allow the agent to purchase within a spending limit they establish.

Walmart’s examples set the bar at $50, $100 or $200. Approval is the default.

Walmart can ask for more approvals for buys within an agent’s spending limit.

Walmart said the setup is analogous to adding an authorized user on a credit card. The agent gets a way to pay, the customer sets the limit and the profile can be turned off at any time.

A profile is automatically created when a customer shops through an agent for the first time on the Walmart Agent Gateway. The customer connects it by signing into a Walmart account.

Any Walmart account will do, no Walmart+ membership necessary.

The gateway is a new server built on model context protocol, or MCP, an open standard that Anthropic created to permit AI agents to connect to outside tools and data. Now agents shop Walmart through a website built for people, which Walmart calls slow and error-prone.

The gateway furnishes agents with a direct route into the catalog and checkout. It’s coming out in beta for businesses and developers.

It can also point an agent towards a customer’s go-to items, say, sourdough bread or a specific brand of milk, without showing the person’s entire purchase history.

Walmart is also dictating terms to agents. Payment-card data never hits agents, who are unable to add or modify payment methods, and can only access data pertinent to the task at hand.

Agents who break the terms are banned from the Walmart site. Even when an agent doesn’t act as intended, the returns process of Walmart applies.

Furner pitched the plan at Masters of Scale in San Francisco

Muse was blocked from Amazon’s store less than two weeks after its launch, with Amazon citing customer security and user experience. Walmart has already signed on as a Muse shopping connector, Meta announced at its Connect event in September, Cryptopolitan reported.

Walmart also has integrations with ChatGPT, Gemini and others. Walmart President and CEO John Furner shared the plan at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco.

Amazon is protecting a closed ecosystem and may be worried about agents eating into its ad business, said GlobalData Retail analyst Neil Saunders. If outside agents are playing a much bigger role in discovery and purchasing, the calculus could shift, he added.

Just 16% of shoppers say they feel comfortable with an AI assistant finding and purchasing products for them.

Amazon has Alexa for Shopping, and Walmart has Sparky, which saw a 60% growth quarter over quarter, Walmart U.S. CEO David Guggina said at a Goldman Sachs conference in September.

Walmart is facing accusations from Lindsay Owens, CEO of Groundwork Collaborative, of using AI to alter prices based on shopper behavior. Walmart called the claims misleading and inaccurate.

“We price products, not people, so the prices that an AI agent sees are the same prices that a human would see on Walmart.com,” Walmart said in its blog post.

Mastercard reportedly used an AI agent this week to pay two vendors nine times from one approved budget, according to Cryptopolitan. Its Agent Pay for Machines engine allows agents to pay for services as prescribed by a human.