Walmart tested ads inside its AI assistant, raising workplace implications
Financial reporting summarized a Wall Street Journal piece saying Walmart ran limited tests of advertising inside its AI shopping assistant Sparky using a format called Sponsored Prompts. The trial began in September and produced modest early engagement, but the tests matter because they show how Walmart could monetize conversational shopping and change roles in product, ad sales, merchandising and support teams.
Walmart ran a small scale experiment to place advertising into its AI shopping assistant Sparky, according to financial press summarizing a Wall Street Journal report. The format, described as Sponsored Prompts, let advertisers surface product related prompts that when clicked produced an AI answer followed by a click to buy ad or product card. The tests began in September and were limited in scope, with early engagement rates described as modest.
The initiative is part of a broader company push to weave agentic AI into customer shopping flows and digital commerce. For Walmart, conversational AI offers a potential new channel to grow its higher margin ad business while keeping shoppers inside company owned experiences. The tests illustrate how AI agents can become both a discovery layer and an ad surface, blending personalized assistance with paid placements.
If Walmart expands the feature, the change could ripple across multiple internal teams. Ad sales staff may need new product training and new inventory to sell, since Sponsored Prompts would represent a different kind of placement than traditional display ads or search sponsored listings. Merchandising teams will likely need to coordinate more closely with ad sales to align paid placements with inventory and promotions for both online and store operations. Product and engineering groups will face the task of integrating ad triggers into conversational flows while monitoring relevance and user experience.
Customer support and trust teams may also see impacts. Support staff could be asked to handle questions about how recommendations are selected and to respond to shopper concerns about promotions served by an AI assistant. Operations and analytics teams will need to build new metrics that measure conversational conversions and the long term effects of monetizing assistant interactions.
The trial underscores the tension between improving shopper convenience and monetizing AI driven interactions. For workers, the shift means new skill sets, revised collaboration across departments, and new performance metrics tied to ad revenue as shopping becomes more conversational. How Walmart balances user experience, advertiser demand and internal coordination will determine whether Sponsored Prompts move beyond experiments into a company wide product.
