Walmart opens its store to AI shopping agents: what it means for India

The News

Walmart plans to open its US website to AI shopping agents next month, making it one of the first major retailers to formally let software buy on a customer's behalf. Shoppers will link an agent to a new "Agent Profiles" section, where every agent purchase needs the customer's approval by default. Customers can instead hand the agent a spending ceiling, for example up to $100, and switch it off whenever they like.

Agent orders will appear in a separate history from the customer's own orders. Sam's Club will get the same set-up.

Behind the scenes, Walmart has built an "Agent Gateway", now in beta, that plugs agents in through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard for connecting AI assistants to outside services. The retailer has also published conduct terms: an agent may not act beyond what the shopper intends, may not alter the customer's payment method, and may only see the data its task requires. Agents that break those terms will be blocked.

Why It Matters

The move puts Walmart on the opposite side of the fence from Amazon, which has blocked Perplexity's shopping agent and Meta's Muse AI assistant. The two largest US retailers are now running a live experiment in whether "agentic commerce" grows sales or simply hands the customer relationship to a third-party chatbot.

Walmart's design choice is telling. Rather than letting agents scrape and click through web pages, it routes them through a controlled MCP gateway that hides the shopper's broader purchase history. In effect, the retailer keeps the data and the loyalty while letting the agent do the legwork.

There is a useful precedent. Amazon's Dash buttons, launched in 2015, promised one-press automated reordering but were retired in 2019 after shoppers proved wary of purchases they did not actively oversee. Walmart's default of approval-for-everything, plus optional budget caps, reads like a lesson learned from that episode.

Indian Angle

The most direct link is Flipkart, in which Walmart is the majority shareholder, and PhonePe, the UPI app that sits in the same group. If the Agent Gateway model works in the US, Flipkart is the obvious candidate to adopt it in India, where it competes head-on with Amazon India.

Payments are where India diverges sharply. The RBI requires an additional factor of authentication for most card-not-present and UPI transactions, and recurring e-mandates above set thresholds need fresh customer approval. A US-style "spend up to $100 without asking" setting would have to be squared with those rules, likely through UPI Autopay or pre-approved mandates rather than silent card charges.

On data, the gateway's principle of giving agents only the minimum information mirrors the purpose-limitation and data-minimisation duties in the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. Indian platforms that let third-party agents in will also need to answer the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020, which put grievance and disclosure duties on marketplaces, raising a fresh question: who is liable when an authorised agent buys the wrong item?

FAQ

When can shoppers start using AI agents on Walmart?

Walmart says agent shopping opens next month on its US website and on Sam's Club. The underlying Agent Gateway is already in beta for developers. Walmart has not announced any timeline for markets outside the US, and nothing has been said about Flipkart adopting a similar system in India.

Will an AI agent be able to spend my money without asking?

Not by default. Every purchase an agent makes requires the customer's approval unless the customer chooses to set a budget, such as up to $100, within which the agent can buy on its own. Customers can review agent orders separately and disable the agent at any time.

How is this different from Amazon's approach?

Amazon has blocked outside shopping agents, including Perplexity's agent and Meta's Muse AI assistant. Walmart is admitting them, but only through its own gateway and under published rules, and it says it will block any agent that oversteps what the shopper intended.

Could this work the same way in India?

Not without changes. RBI rules on additional authentication and e-mandates mean unattended agent spending would need to run through approved channels such as UPI Autopay. Data handling would also have to meet the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.

This story was reported by The Verge. Read the full original coverage at The Verge.