• 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.

• AT&T CEO is brushing off concerns that satellite-based internet could threaten his business.
• "I think LEO constellations are fantastic for delivering bandwidth to rural areas," he said.
• When it comes to where lots of people live, he said fiber-connected performance can't be beat.

Elon Musk wants SpaceX to become a major US mobile carrier. AT&T CEO John Stankey says: not so fast.

AT&T has an advantage from years of investment in dense urban and suburban areas, he said on AT&T's third-quarter earnings call, a day after Musk and SpaceX chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell reported more than 22 million monthly Starlink Mobile users.

"Our competitors cannot and will not match our operating proficiency, network performance, or exceptional converged value proposition," Stankey said.

Stankey sees a use case for satellite-based internet to soften the edges of fiber-connected and 5G networks, especially in places where it's too expensive to build out the physical infrastructure, he said.

"I think LEO constellations are fantastic for delivering bandwidth to rural areas," he said, using the acronym for low-Earth orbit satellite arrays.

Shotwell said Tuesday that Starlink recently got FCC approval to launch 15,000 V2 satellites. She also noted a recent agreement to acquire a portfolio of low-band transmission spectrum, or wireless frequency licenses, which better penetrate buildings to reach indoor devices.

Stankey was unimpressed.

"How you perform indoors, of course, is extremely important, and we shouldn't think about those as being nominal loads," he said. "They're significant loads, even with robust Wi-Fi networks that are out there."

This is especially critical in crowded environments like stadiums and hospitals, where he said AT&T has been focused on beefing up signal support.

"I wouldn't over-rotate on what I would call one carrier of low band spectrum," he said, referring to Starlink.

• 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.