Walmart's Sparky Drives 40% Higher AOVs as AI Reshapes Retailer

Walmart's homegrown AI assistant Sparky is driving average order values 40% higher, and the retailer is reinvesting the cost savings AI generates into customer experience improvements, Walmart U.S. President and CEO David Guggina said.

Guggina, appointed to his current role in February, laid out the numbers while speaking at the Goldman Sachs Global Consumer and Retail Conference last month in a conversation with Goldman Sachs' Katharine McShane. Advances in ambient AI automation and customer-facing applications like Sparky, he said, are producing marked gains in store execution, delivery speeds, average order value and conversion.

"We have been leaning into AI for quite some time — we've had physical AI in our supply chain for over seven years — and you can see it reshaping our company, reshaping our customer value proposition," Guggina said.

Where are the AI gains showing up?

The most visible results sit in Walmart's e-commerce performance. Sales grew 24% year over year in Q2, Guggina said, marking the 10th consecutive quarter of growth above 20%.

He attributed much of that growth to AI-driven efficiencies that sped up deliveries and cut costs. Walmart then reinvested those savings into competitive pricing and customer experience. The result, according to Guggina, is deeper appeal to today's consumer, whom he described as "resilient" but "intentional."

Sparky sits at the center of the experience push. Guggina described the assistant as "becoming more and more capable." Weekly engagement with Sparky has grown 60% quarter over quarter, he said.

The assistant's new visual search capabilities have delivered a 57% spike in conversion compared with text-based searches.

Guggina also hinted at expansion opportunities for Sparky inside Walmart's own hardware business, including its Vizio and Onn electronics unit — "helping you shop and navigate different applications on the TV."

How does Walmart treat third-party AI agents?

Unlike Amazon, Walmart is welcoming external AI agents onto its site. Guggina said he is "really happy" with partnerships involving OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.

"They are most often choosing to deep link out to us, meaning they send customers our way when they see applicable context, and when they do that, we're seeing fantastic conversion rates," he said.

Many customers arriving through ChatGPT and Gemini are new or returning, and they show a "very high" organic repeat rate, according to Guggina.

That openness stands in direct contrast to Amazon, which last month moved to block Meta's new AI assistant Muse from browsing and making purchases on its site. Amazon has taken similar action against AI agents from Perplexity, OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft.

For Walmart, the open-web approach has been a net positive. With Sparky engagement accelerating, cost savings compounding and third-party agents funneling high-converting traffic, Guggina signaled that AI will keep reshaping both the company's operations and its customer value proposition.