Agentic Commerce Retail Media: Amazon vs Walmart's AI Agent Bet

Amazon and Walmart just made the two biggest and most opposite bets in retail history, and both companies are staking a combined 88% of a $74.4 billion market on being right. According to projections from data firm Emarketer, US retail media spending will reach about $74.4 billion in 2026, with Amazon and Walmart together controlling 88% of the market. One retailer is suing to keep AI shopping agents off its site. The other just built a front door for them.

This is the question at the center of agentic commerce retail media right now: should a retailer optimize its platform for human eyeballs scrolling sponsored listings, or for AI agents reading structured product data and buying on a customer's behalf? Amazon has chosen the first path, fighting Perplexity's Comet browser in federal court and blocking agents from Meta and OpenAI. Walmart has chosen the second, launching its Agent Gateway on October 21 to let outside AI agents shop and check out directly through a technical connection built for machines, not browsers.

Matt Britton, founder of Suzy and one of the most sought-after AI keynote speakers advising Fortune 500 marketing teams, has been tracking this divide closely. He argues this is the first real strategic fork in the agentic commerce era, and it will force every CMO and retail leader to pick a side faster than they expected. "The brands that win the next five years won't just be the ones with the best ads," Britton tells audiences. "They'll be the ones whose product data an AI agent can actually read, trust, and act on."

The stakes go well beyond two retailers. Morgan Stanley researchers estimate that AI shopping agents could represent 10% to 20% of US e-commerce spending by 2030. That shift threatens the sponsored-listing model that funds much of modern retail, and it explains why Amazon and Walmart are responding so differently to the same technology. This article breaks down what happened, why it matters, and what Fortune 500 leaders need to do about it right now, drawing on Britton's research into AI-driven consumer behavior featured in his book Generation AI and on his podcast, The Speed of Culture.

What Is Walmart's Agent Gateway and How Does It Work?

Walmart's Agent Gateway is an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that gives approved AI agents a direct, structured connection into Walmart's inventory and checkout systems rather than forcing them to scrape web pages like a browser would. The Walmart Agent Gateway provides a direct connection for AI assistants to shop. Instead of navigating webpages and clicking buttons, agents can use a connection built for automated shopping. CEO John Furner announced the move on October 21 at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, framing it as preparation for an inevitable shift in how people shop.

The rollout pairs the Gateway with a companion feature called Agent Profiles, which gives customers granular control over what any given AI assistant can do on their behalf. Each authorized assistant will have its own profile linked to the customer's Walmart account, making its purchases easier to track. Customers can require approval for every purchase or allow purchases within a spending limit. They can remove an agent's access at any time. Agents will not receive payment-card details or be allowed to change payment methods. Walmart has also published formal terms for AI agents operating on its platform, and the penalty for breaking them is a full block.

Several guardrails define how the system actually functions:

• Identity disclosure: Agents must identify themselves as agents, must not conceal that their interactions are automated, and must comply with rate limits and other technical measures.
• Scoped data access: Agents can access only the information needed for the task and allowed by the customer.
• Spending guardrails: Walmart's listed safeguards include category restrictions, rate limits, and compliance guardrails for agents.
• Returns protection: standard Walmart returns policy applies even to agent-completed purchases, extending customer protection to machine-initiated orders.

The timing is deliberate. Full rollout is targeted for late November, timed to land right before the busiest shopping weeks of the year. Walmart is already live with conversational integrations across Meta's Muse, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Google's Gemini through its Sparky assistant, and the Gateway extends that same openness to transactional, not just conversational, AI.

Why Did Amazon Block AI Shopping Agents Like Perplexity and Meta's Muse?

Amazon has taken the opposite stance, treating unauthorized AI agents as a security and business threat rather than a growth channel. The clearest example is its ongoing legal fight with Perplexity. Amazon sued Perplexity to stop its Comet AI agents from accessing Amazon's e-commerce website in what it alleges to be a covert manner, following a cease and desist letter in which Amazon alleged Perplexity is disguising Comet as a Google Chrome browser and refusing to identify Comet AI agents when operating in the Amazon Store.

Amazon initially won in court. Amazon won a temporary injunction against Perplexity to block its Comet AI browser from scraping its website, after suing the startup in November and accusing it of concealing its AI shopping agents. But the legal fight is far from settled. The Ninth Circuit vacated Amazon's injunction against Perplexity's Comet AI shopping agent, but an amended complaint keeps the case alive. The appeals court ruling hinged on a narrow but consequential idea: "It is the user who 'accesses' Amazon's computers," the Ninth Circuit wrote. That distinction, whether an AI agent counts as its own actor or merely an extension of the human who authorized it, will shape agentic commerce law for years.

Amazon has not stopped at Perplexity. Amazon has broadly locked down its shopping sites from AI agents, blocking dozens of agents, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, while investing in its homegrown tools like Rufus, a shopping assistant featured on its website and app. In September, it extended the same treatment to a major competitor. The news comes shortly after Amazon, Walmart's top competitor, began blocking AI agents from making purchases for online shoppers. In September, Meta's AI agent was blocked from using Amazon's website. Perplexity has publicly pushed back on Amazon's motives, arguing the real issue is advertising, not security. The San Francisco-based startup contended that AI agents bypass the advertising Amazon shows to human shoppers, and that protecting ad revenue was the real motivation for the lawsuit.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has pushed back on the idea that this is purely defensive. He stated that, as of late October, third-party agents had not yet had a meaningful impact on its advertising business. Britton reads Amazon's stance less as fear of AI and more as an attempt to control the terms of engagement, similar to how it has long controlled seller relationships and sponsored placement. The company isn't rejecting agentic commerce outright; it is building its own version through Rufus and Alexa for Shopping while keeping outside agents on a short leash.

Agentic Commerce and the $74.4 Billion Retail Media Problem

The reason this fight matters so much is money. Retail media, the business of brands paying retailers for sponsored placement, product ads, and data-driven targeting, has become one of the most profitable segments in e-commerce. US retail media spending will reach about $74.4 billion in 2026, with Amazon and Walmart together controlling 88% of the market, up from $60.7 billion in 2025, a forecast 22.6% growth rate.

AI agents threaten that model at a structural level. An agent that is sent to find and buy the best-reviewed blender under $80 has no reason to scroll past three sponsored listings to get there. Autonomous agents bypass the ads. Instead of scrolling through sponsored products and recommendations, the AI shopping agent skips to an item and initiates checkout. That single behavioral shift is why Amazon and Walmart are responding so differently even though they face the same underlying threat.

Analysts are split on how severe the damage will be. Some see outright disruption. AI shopping agents could erode that business, because an agent that researches and buys products for a consumer has little reason to look at an ad. Others see adaptation rather than collapse. Morningstar analyst Brett Husslein called the moment "an evolution rather than an existential threat" for retail media. Both retailers are already hedging by building advertising directly into their own AI assistants. Walmart began testing advertising within Sparky, its AI shopping chatbot, this year, while Amazon has embedded ads in its Alexa for Shopping assistant.

Industry watchers also expect retail media's mechanics to change shape entirely rather than disappear. Dan Marc, CEO of retail media platform Footprints AI, expects Amazon and Walmart to sign their biggest advertisers to multiyear deals and also expects more discounting on digital retail media as shoppers turn to chatbots and agents, with retail media turning into a kind of "bidding system" where agents hunt for a product at a consumer's price point and retailers set price ceilings and floors. Britton calls this the coming shift from "share of shelf" to "share of algorithm," and he argues Fortune 500 brands that still measure success by impression counts are optimizing for a shopper that is disappearing.

How Fast Is Agentic Commerce Actually Growing?

Skeptics could dismiss all of this as hype if adoption numbers were flat. They are not. Multiple independent studies show consumer trust and usage climbing quickly, even if full autonomous purchasing still lags research and comparison.

• Kearney estimates that 73% of consumers are familiar with AI tools and 60% expect to use AI agents for shopping within the next 12 months.
• In NielsenIQ's September 2026 data, 51% of US consumers had used an AI tool to shop in the past month, which NIQ calls a tipping point.
• The share of consumers who expect to make more than 10% of their purchases through an AI agent rises from 27% today to 40% in five years.
• YouGov finds that while 65% of Americans trust AI to compare prices, only 14% trust AI to place orders on their behalf.
• In five years, consumers expect 17% of their purchases to go through AI agents, close to in-store shopping at 18%.

That trust gap between research and checkout is exactly why Walmart built spending caps and approval gates into its Gateway rather than shipping fully autonomous purchasing on day one. It is a calculated middle path: open the door wide enough to capture the research-and-discovery traffic flowing through ChatGPT and Gemini, while keeping enough friction in place that nervous shoppers still feel in control. Britton frequently points to this exact tension in his keynotes on next-generation consumer behavior, noting that younger shoppers are consistently more comfortable delegating purchase decisions to AI than older cohorts, a trend that will only compound as Gen Z's spending power grows.

What Should Fortune 500 Brands Do About Agentic Commerce Right Now?

For brand marketers, the Amazon-Walmart split is not an abstract platform war to watch from the sidelines. It is an operational decision point that touches product data, media spend, and customer experience design simultaneously. Britton advises clients across retail, finance, and real estate to treat machine-readable commerce as infrastructure, not a future experiment.

Practical steps CMOs and retail leaders should take this quarter include:

• Audit product data feeds for structured, machine-readable accuracy, since agentic commerce decisions run on clean data, not creative messaging alone.
• Test visibility inside AI shopping assistants including Sparky, Rufus, Gemini, and ChatGPT to see how your products surface when an agent, not a human, is searching.
• Reallocate a test budget away from pure sponsored-listing spend and toward structured data optimization and AI-assistant partnerships.
• Build internal governance for how your brand wants to appear, and what price and promotion rules apply, when agents negotiate on a shopper's behalf.
• Monitor the Amazon-Perplexity legal outcome closely, since the final ruling on agent authorization will set precedent for every retailer's terms of service.

Companies like Suzy, the consumer intelligence platform Britton founded, are already helping brands run rapid studies on how real shoppers react to AI-mediated product discovery, giving marketing teams data instead of guesswork before they commit ad budgets to an uncertain channel. The brands moving fastest are not waiting for the legal dust to settle; they are building for both outcomes at once.

Key Takeaways for Business Leaders

• Treat product data as a marketing asset. Structured, machine-readable listings now determine whether an AI agent finds and recommends your product at all.
• Diversify retail media spend away from pure sponsored-listing models and toward emerging AI-assistant advertising formats inside tools like Sparky and Alexa for Shopping.
• Monitor the Amazon-Perplexity legal precedent since its outcome will define whether retailers can legally exclude unauthorized AI agents industry-wide.
• Build governance now for how your brand negotiates price, promotion, and personalization when the buyer on the other end is software, not a person.
• Pilot agent-facing commerce through Walmart's Gateway beta or similar programs to gain first-mover data before competitors do.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is agentic commerce retail media?

Agentic commerce retail media refers to the collision between AI shopping agents, software that researches, compares, and sometimes purchases products on a consumer's behalf, and the traditional retail media business of brands paying retailers for sponsored placement. As agents increasingly bypass sponsored listings to complete purchases directly, retailers must rethink how advertising works when the "shopper" reading product pages is a machine rather than a human scrolling a screen.

Why is Walmart letting AI agents shop while Amazon blocks them?

Walmart launched its Agent Gateway to capture free distribution through platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini, betting that controlled access with spending caps and identity rules builds long-term trust. Amazon, meanwhile, is fighting unauthorized agents like Perplexity's Comet in court, arguing they bypass security protections, degrade the shopping experience, and threaten its advertising business model.

How big is the AI shopping agent market expected to become?

Morgan Stanley researchers estimate that AI shopping agents could represent 10% to 20% of US e-commerce spending by 2030. Meanwhile, consumer adoption is accelerating quickly in the near term, with 51% of US consumers having used an AI tool to shop in the past month as of September 2026 , signaling rapid mainstream uptake well before full autonomous checkout becomes common.

What is the Walmart Agent Gateway?

The Walmart Agent Gateway is a technical connection, built on the Model Context Protocol, that lets approved AI agents search Walmart's inventory and complete checkout directly rather than scraping the website like a browser. It pairs with Agent Profiles, which let customers set spending limits, require purchase approval, and revoke an agent's access at any time, while blocking agents from ever seeing stored payment card details.

Book Matt Britton for Your Next Event

The Amazon-Walmart split on agentic commerce is not a tech story. It is a strategic fork that will determine which brands control customer relationships for the next decade, and most Fortune 500 leadership teams are not prepared for how fast it is moving. Matt Britton brings boardrooms and leadership offsites the data, context, and frameworks to act now rather than react later, drawing on real-time consumer research and two decades tracking exactly this kind of inflection point.

Organizations ready to build their agentic commerce strategy can explore Britton's speaker platform or book him directly for an AI keynote presentation built around this research. The retailers have already placed their bets. The only question left is which side of the gateway your brand will stand on.