• Walmart is rolling out two new tools to help third-party AI agents shop on behalf of customers.
• The company says the tools give people more control of their bots, and help bots be more accurate.
• Walmart's move contrasts with Amazon's approach, after it blocked Meta's agent Muse from its site.

Walmart wants your bot to shop.

The retail giant said Wednesday that it has two new tools to help third-party AI agents shop on customers' behalf: agent profiles and an agent gateway.

The agent profiles link all transactions to the bot that performed them, and allow Walmart customers to manage authorizations and spending limits as they would for an additional user on their credit card account, the company said.

With agent gateways, bots no longer have to navigate a website that is designed for humans. Instead, Walmart is granting access through a model text protocol that it says will help agents work more quickly and accurately.

Walmart's move contrasts with Amazon's approach, which recently blocked Meta's agent Muse from its site, saying agents violate Amazon's conditions of use. Amazon has also pushed back on other third-party agents, including a lawsuit against Perplexity and restrictions on agents from Google and OpenAI.

"As customers begin using agents to help them shop, we're building connections, permissions and options that complement those tools and support how customers want to use them," the company said in a statement.

The company also said the gateway protects the information that Walmart has about its customers, and only provides what is necessary for completing a given transaction. In particular, the gateway can share a relevant pattern or preference — such as a customer's favorite laundry detergent brand — without sharing their entire purchase history with the agent.

The company also laid out a set of terms and conditions regarding how AI agents are expected to operate when shopping.

Under the terms, the company said it will honor its usual returns policy and that agents will always see the same pricing that a human would see on Walmart.com.

• Amazon's sales of fresh groceries like seafood and produce are growing fast, new data show.
• The retail giant is also gaining market share against more traditional retailers, Nielsen IQ found.
• The data shows momentum for Amazon in a business it's spent years trying to break into.

Amazon is gaining ground in grocery thanks to items like fresh shrimp and berries.

Roughly a year after expanding same-day fresh grocery delivery to thousands of cities and towns in the US, Amazon's perishable grocery sales are booming — and taking market share from traditional retailers, according to data from market research firm Nielsen IQ.

Sales of groceries such as seafood, dairy, and produce on Amazon increased severalfold between June and August, per Nielsen IQ's data. Amazon also posted market share gains in the food category for the year through late August as traditional grocery stores lost it, Nielsen found.

"Shoppers are increasingly embracing Amazon for categories that historically represented one of the largest barriers to online grocery adoption," Nielsen wrote in its report.

Amazon has spent years trying to break into grocery, though it hasn't hit a home run in the category as it did with books or cloud computing. The company acquired Whole Foods, opened and shuttered another brick-and-mortar grocery chain, and created a selection of private-label groceries, among other steps.

The Nielsen IQ data suggest that Amazon's latest push — toward delivering fresh groceries quickly across much of the US — is yielding some results in the competitive grocery space.

Many of the shoppers buying fresh foods on Amazon come from households with incomes over $100,000 and tend to be older, according to Nielsen IQ. They also tend to be frequent Amazon users, placing more orders and spending more money on the platform than an average user.

That means fresh groceries, one of the most frequent purchases for US households, are "a potentially important lever for increasing shopper frequency and overall spend" on Amazon, the report reads.

To keep the momentum going, Amazon will need to take on formidable rivals. One is Walmart, which already uses its stores and its own army of gig workers to deliver groceries same-day.

Amazon is considering opening about 1,000 same-day fulfillment centers around the US by 2031, Business Insider reported in September. That move would create the same sort of advantage that Walmart has by placing more fulfillment centers close to more customers, one analyst said.

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• Target has launched a beta version of its Ask Target AI chatbot to help with the holidays.
• Major retail competitors like Amazon, Walmart, and Lowe's have offered the features for months now.
• Conversational apps can help shoppers discover new products and build larger baskets.

Target shoppers have a new elf to help with their holiday gift lists.

The Bullseye retailer just launched a beta version of its AI-powered chatbot, called Ask Target, in time for the seasonal rush. The move brings Target into closer step with rivals like Amazon, Walmart, and Lowe's, each of which has offered the feature for months now.

"We have seen a lot of traction as we start to think about that conversational AI, so the team was excited to push it through to capitalize on our biggest season of the year," chief merchandising officer Cara Sylvester told Business Insider during a holiday preview event in New York.

Sylvester also said that the app can answer Target-related questions, not only holiday-specific ones. An internal rollout of the tool had store employees brushing up on new merchandise, particularly in the new Beauty Studio department.

The AI assistant comes two months after Target hired former Lowe's AI head Chandhu Nair as its first chief AI officer. At Lowe's, Nair oversaw the home improvement retailer's Mylow chatbot, which the company has credited with "dramatic improvements" in customer service.

Whether it's renovation advice or recipe ideas, retailers say chatbots trained on proprietary in-house data are more effective at responding to customer queries than an outside bot like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's Gemini. The in-house bots can also act as a digital counterpart for personal AI agents like Meta's Muse.

Walmart has said that its Sparky agent has helped the retailer better understand its customers, as shoppers are having more conversational interactions rather than simple keyword searches. Sparky users discover more items and build shopping baskets that are 40% larger than those of non-users, the company has said.

Sylvester said it's too early to say what the basket-size impacts of the new Ask Target agent are.