Walmart says its AI assistant, Sparky, is leading to customers spending 40% more than those who shop without it

Enter Sparky, Walmart’s secret weapon. The artificial intelligence assistant, which the retail giant says drives significantly higher customer spending among those who use the AI tool to place orders, is already a major revenue driver for the company.

“We believe AI will improve nearly every part of our business by making shopping better and our associates’ work easier,” Walmart CEO John Furner said on the Q2 earnings call. “Sparky is a great example. The number of customers using Sparky is up 70% from last year, and the customers and members who use Sparky for shopping spend 40% more per order than others who do not.”

In his comments to analysts, Furner said someone recently told him they asked Sparky for a weekly meal plan of healthy, high-protein foods. “Within a few seconds, Sparky shared recipes and meal kits with the ability to add all the ingredients they needed to their basket with one click,” he stated.

The AI agent also recognized ingredients customers had recently purchased, both online and in-store, so they didn’t buy something they already owned. “It is building trust,” Furner noted. “When you step back, what encourages me the most is how these areas are increasingly connected.”

‘Causality and correlation are different things’

Launched only a year ago, Sparky is already a driving force for Walmart’s digital sales, with the company’s worldwide e-commerce sales up 23% year over year as of Q2.

E-commerce industry experts say digital shoppers are growing more confident in using AI to buy products online and are just as responsible for Walmart’s rising order numbers. Yet there are caveats.

“Be careful of interpreting a 40% increase in orders from Sparky users as a causal effect of the AI system to increase spending by 40%,” Jose Prabhu Michael Singarayan, a data scientist at Quantum Integrators, told Moneywise. “Causality and correlation are different things.”

Singarayan noted that Sparky users can be more tech-savvy, make purchases more often, have bigger basket sizes or may just be more curious about online shopping. “To prove causality, you would need to make comparisons between usage of and non-usage of AI-assisted shopping with spending before and after Sparky,” he said. “It’s a significant figure but not definitive evidence.”

Are AI shopping agents getting too intrusive?

By design, Sparky figures out what shoppers want by deploying conversational intent-matching and retail-specific data rather than relying on traditional keyword searches. The technology also uses direct authoritative sources to back up its recommendations, often citing Walmart customer reviews.

The technology also relies on goal-based interpretation, where search-bar keywords matter less than a user’s expressed intent. For example, Sparky specializes in open-ended queries like “what’s the healthiest chicken chili for my family?” or “what food won’t spoil on our family’s beach trip this weekend?”

While that help seems fine with technology trackers, some wonder if AI agents are getting too intrusive in deducing user requests.

“When the system knows the purchase history, it helps,” Singarayan said. “Knowing Sparky’s information on my purchase history, it can skip useless recommendations and can find the patterns of my regular purchases.”

However, some purchase histories may contain more information than just shopping activities. “It can show family size, lifestyle and financial concerns,” Singarayan noted. “Retailers should control the usage of this sensitive data and give consumers the ability to control personalization.”

Trust may be the biggest issue

Digital shoppers may also wonder if there’s a line between helping shoppers and becoming an upselling machine.

“That line comes down to whether the AI is working for the shopper or mainly trying to increase a retailer’s sales,” Daniel Burrus, a technology futurist and founder at Burrus Research, told Moneywise.

In particular, AI can become an impulse buying motivator for consumers. “That’s because it can put an appealing product in front of you at exactly the right moment, so shoppers need to remember that convenience can make extra spending almost frictionless,” Burrus said.