Walmart AI Assistant Sparky Grows Shopping Baskets by 35 Percent

Walmart's AI shopping assistant Sparky is delivering a measurable lift at the register: customers who use the tool build baskets roughly 35% larger than those who don't, CEO John Furner disclosed on the company's fourth-quarter earnings call. The figure, which multiple Walmart executives have now cited publicly, marks one of the more concrete performance benchmarks any major retailer has attached to a consumer-facing AI product.

Sparky lives inside the Walmart mobile app behind an "Ask Sparky" button marked by a smiley face. The tool helps shoppers locate products, read condensed review summaries, and plan for real-life occasions: checking what's on the sports schedule tonight, knowing what weather to expect at the beach, or building a cart for a birthday party, a camping trip, or a week of meals. About half of Walmart's app users have tried Sparky, according to Walmart U.S. President and CEO David Guggina, who was recently promoted from chief e-commerce officer.

Guggina framed the assistant's commercial logic in blunt terms. "Sparky is essentially helping us evolve from traditional search to intent-driven commerce," he said. "From an economic standpoint, better discovery and higher conversion translates into bigger baskets and greater frequency. Sparky is helping customers find the things they need, they want, and they love, and it's strengthening our digital unit economics as it scales."

CFO John David Rainey reinforced that framing, noting that Sparky users spend more while requiring fewer clicks to get there. "Simply put, Sparky is helping customers find the things they need," Rainey said. "It's strengthening our digital unit economics as it scales." The fewer-clicks detail matters for store operations too: lower friction in the digital funnel reduces the support burden on associates handling order corrections or substitutions.

Furner connected Sparky directly to the physical store network that the company's 1.5 million U.S. associates staff. "I love how Sparky perfectly fits within our omnichannel strategy; it connects digital intent to fulfillment through forward-deployed inventory and 1.5 million associates here in the U.S.," he said. "When Sparky builds a basket, we execute it through fast delivery, pickup, or in-store, turning AI engagement into immediate physical outcomes." That framing positions Sparky not as a digital-only product but as a demand signal that flows directly to the people picking, packing, and delivering orders.

Sparky, described as a 20-month-old chatbot at the time of the Q4 call, is currently available only in the United States. Furner said Walmart intends to expand it internationally over time. The company is also pursuing a parallel strategy of syndicating its product catalog into third-party AI assistants, including Google's Gemini and ChatGPT, so that Walmart products surface in conversations happening outside its own app. Separately, Walmart introduced a merchant-focused AI assistant called Wally to help the supplier and merchant side of the business manage the digital shelf.

The 35% basket-size gap between Sparky users and non-users is a company-reported figure, and Walmart has not disclosed the methodology, sample size, or product categories driving the lift. What the numbers do confirm is that Walmart's senior leadership, from the CEO to the CFO to the head of U.S. operations, is now treating Sparky as a core commercial lever rather than an experimental feature.