Dive Brief:
- Walmart’s AI assistant can now turn digital shopping lists — or even handwritten ones like a child’s note to Santa — into ready-to-go shopping carts.
- Other new Sparky features include visual recognition to help solve problems like removing a stain or replicating a coveted look, recipe generation with cart creation, the ability to suggest healthy ingredient swaps in favorite recipes, and the inclusion of the “Shop to Light” store location tool, which debuted in the Walmart app last month.
- The updates are available now for U.S. customers. As Sparky expands to Mexico and Canada, speech and text recognition in Spanish and French is also rolling out, with voice recognition capabilities expected to be available chainwide by year-end.
Dive Insight:
As beleaguered consumers focus on efficiency and value this holiday season, new Sparky AI features aim to go beyond just price and product comparison.
Since its June 2025 debut, Sparky has seen a 70% spike in usage, and customers who use the tool spend 40% more per order than shoppers who don’t, Walmart CEO John Furner shared in August.
A steady drumbeat of functionality improvements has helped drive this usage growth. For example, the introduction of visual search capabilities led to a 57% spike in conversion when compared to text-based searches, according to U.S. CEO David Guggina.
This latest round of enhancements moves further into visual search and begins to expand on voice capabilities in multiple languages. A shopper with a stain on their holiday tablecloth can now get advice, product suggestions and delivery assistance simply by uploading an image.
The “Shop to Light” feature helps shoppers easily beeline their way to the product they’re looking for by pinning the location on a store map and then allowing customers to trigger the electronic shelf label when they’ve arrived in the right area.
Walmart’s digital shelf labels have been at the center of recent concerns that the company might be engaging in dynamic pricing, but Furner refuted those matters and stated that Sparky would not be leveraged to increase prices or hide lower-priced items.
“When you engage with Sparky, that’s an invitation to serve you better, not to use your personal information to set a personalized price,” Furner said in an open letter. “We’ve never used the relationships our associates have with customers to charge more, and we won’t do that with AI.”
Walmart is bullish on AI assistants, and not just its own. It brought a Sparky-backed commerce experience to OpenAI’s ChatGPT earlier this year, has also integrated with Google’s Gemini. And last month, it rolled out new features to facilitate access for AI agents to its platforms.
Walmart is not alone in tuning up its AI assistant in the hopes of appealing to holiday shoppers. Target is beta testing a new assistant, Ask Target, on its website and app. Amazon’s Alexa for Shopping has seen adoption, and Best Buy’s new conversational AI assistant Ask Blue is tailored to offer expert advice on product selection.
