IT News on October 22: Walmart announced on Wednesday local time that it officially launched its own agent gateway for processing transactions and introduced several new features for consumers using AI agents, thereby laying out its strategy for agent-based e-commerce. Not long ago, Walmart's main competitor, Amazon, began to intercept AI agents to place orders and make purchases on behalf of online shoppers.
IT Home has noticed that Walmart's acceptance of AI technology sets it apart from other online merchants. Apart from Amazon, many travel and booking websites, facing the trend of more and more consumers using AI agents, have chosen to directly prohibit agents from accessing their websites. However, Walmart has previously announced a partnership with the leading Meta in this field, and has also integrated popular ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI applications.
Wal-Mart President and CEO John Furner ( John Furner ) stated on Wednesday at the Masters of Scale summit in San Francisco that Wal-Mart is now increasing its investment in related technology to prepare for the era of widespread adoption of AI intelligents. This technology will support both Wal-Mart and its discount warehouse stores, Sam's Club, in their intelligent shopping experiences.
The core of this is Walmart's intelligent agent gateway, which is the company's brand-new MCP server. The purpose is to allow approved intelligent agents to connect to the Walmart platform through a model context protocol (MCP). This protocol was initially developed by Anthropic and enables AI intelligent agents to interface with external data sources, tools, and various work processes. In this scenario, AI intelligent agents can retrieve Walmart's online inventory and place orders on behalf of users.
In addition, this retailer stated that through the agent gateway, consumers do not need to directly provide their personal information and purchase records to the AI agent when selecting common brands or products.
Wal-Mart has also developed new technology to distinguish between orders placed by agents and those initiated directly by customers, allowing shoppers to control the operational permissions of these agents.
The agent profile feature, which will be launched next month, allows users to create separate authorization profiles for each AI agent within their account, enabling them to view the orders generated by each agent individually. Users can also set their own order approval rules: they can require manual confirmation for each transaction or set a consumption limit, with orders within that limit being automatically authorized.
Wal-Mart explains that this permission control mechanism is similar to adding authorized users to a credit card, allowing for the identification of related transactions and the setting of consumption limits.
The company explains that when a user uses an agent to make a purchase through Walmart's intelligent gateway for the first time, the system will generate a corresponding agent profile. The process involves authorization first, binding the agent profile to the Walmart account, and then setting permissions or consumption limits. Users can also delete their agent profiles at any time. Having a Walmart account is sufficient to use agent-related functions; there is no need to activate Walmart + membership.
In addition to the aforementioned technologies, Walmart has specifically established terms of use for the AI intelligent agent, clarifying the operational guidelines for the agent as well as its permissions for conducting transactions on the platform. It is worth mentioning that Walmart states that even if there are deviations in the agent's operations, the platform's return policy still applies. This consumer-friendly provision is expected to alleviate concerns of early users who have tried smart-agent e-commerce, eliminating the worry of receiving products they do not desire due to errors made by the intelligent agents.
Wal-Mart also stipulates that agents must not perform any actions that go beyond the user's intent and are not allowed to obtain payment information; they can only collect the necessary information to complete the current task. Agents that do not comply with these terms will be prohibited from accessing the Wal-Mart website.
