Understanding Walmart Sparky AI Powered By GenAI and Agentic AI

Walmart is among leading firms, especially in retail, in adopting new technologies. The company has done several innovations in combine with Artificial Intelligence and other associated technologies to procure its stakeholders.

Be it BOPIS, Scan-&-Go, AI-Powered inventory optimization, and now something cool, reportedly “first-mover” in the field of Generative AI Agents – Walmart introduced “Sparky AI” known as super agent for shopping.

Today’s blog is dedicated to understanding Walmart Sparky AI powered by Generative AI and Agentic AI capabilities. We will learn the following:

• Features of Walmart Sparky AI Assistant.
• Technologies behind Walmart’s Sparky.
• 5 facts about Walmart’s new AI shopping assistant.

What Is Walmart Sparky AI Assistant?

Walmart Sparky is a proprietary Artificial Intelligence Shopping Assistant comes with Generative AI and Agentic AI capabilities that answer customer queries, explore information, and perform agentic tasks.

• Resides in the Walmart mobile app.
• Help customers in their buying journey.
• Aware of every new products and reviews.
• Product search with natural language processing.
• Side-by-side comparison of items to choose best.

The assistant is well trained on large language models and deeply fine-tuned on retail-specific data of Walmart. Therefore, it is an intelligent chatbot assistant to enhance customer’s shopping experience.

It can provide real-time information about product information and availability, shipping updates and delivery status. While also excels at answering queries related to specific products.

Features Of AI-Powered Walmart Sparky

Following features of Walmart Sparky AI is reportedly available and live within the Walmart mobile application.

1. Natural language search

Instead of searching product through keyword, Sparky allow users to ask conversational queries to get informative, detailed, and helpful answers. Though Sparky AI is trained on a retail-specific data, it does not provide answers to questions like “What’s the weather at the beach?” or “Which sports teams are playing tonight?” and therefore, keeping the conversation within business policies.

2. Product search & comparison

Sparky AI is excel at product hunting, finding, and comparing two or more products simultaneously. Imagine if you get confuse choosing one from multiple options, asking Sparky is helpful and time saving. It let you know what product is suitable based on your prior requirements. It can read reviews, highlight pros and cons so you could pick the best product for yourself or as a gift.

3. Review synthesis & summaries

Reviews play an important role in learning the pros and cons of a product. Instead of exploring and reading reviews one by one, ask Sparky AI assistant to summarize reviews and explore what people dislike and buying most. In fact, customers can go beyond summaries by asking how-to questions to learn everything about the product before buying.

4. Context-based suggestions

Due to trained on retail-specific large datasets, their model is well at understanding the context of the query. It gives recommendations based on real-life context, e.g. for occasions (birthday, beach trip), based on weather, or based on events. Additionally, it fetches past order history information to personalized shopping recommendation and suggestion.

Technologies Behind Walmart Sparky AI

Following technologies supporting Walmart’s new AI shopping assistant empowering to scale customer experience.

1. Generative AI

Generative AI or GenAI is a type of Artificial Intelligence that excels at generating new content from its trained datasets. Sparky AI is a generative AI chatbot that excels at generating content based on queries. Sparky uses large language models to process natural language queries, summarize product reviews, generate recommendations, explain product features.

2. Natural Language Processing

Walmart Sparky AI indulges BERT architecture (Bidirectional Encoder Representation of Transformers) which is neural-based natural language processing which understand each word and its semantic relation with other. Therefore, understand user queries in a conversational form, manage dialogue, and parse nuances.

3. Retrieval-Augmented Generation

RAG, in short, is an AI technique to retrieve external information before generating the response. This technique is implemented to fetch up-to-date and accurate information. With Retrieval-Augmented Generation method, you allow LLM to communicate with external sources such as third-party application.

5 Facts About Walmart Sparky AI

1. Sparky is only available to Walmart customers in the United States. It has not been rolled out yet in international markets through Walmart’s global arms as of the latest reports.

2. Sparky is not just a chatbot for retrieving information, it is capable to work autonomously on behalf of you, for example., reordering previous orders, booking services, etc.

3. Walmart Sparky AI is an multimodal models, it means it well understand different forms of data input such as text, image, and videos.

4. The assistant have catastrophic knowledge of product from basic to technical details, helping customers to get rightful and quick information.

5. Walmart Sparky AI can cut long hours on shopping of customers with quick recommendation, product highlights, reviews, videos, etc.

Walmart Sparky AI FAQs

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Bharat Kumar

Bharat is a content editor at The Next Tech for the past 3 years. He is studying Generative AI (GenAI) from Analytics Vidhya and share his learnings by writing on Generative Engines, Large Language Models, and Artificial Intelligence. In addition to his editorial work, Bharat is active on LinkedIn, where he shares bite-sized updates and achievements. Outside work, he’s known as a Silver‑rank Valorant player, reflecting his competitive edge and strategic mindset.

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