Walmart expands Sparky AI assistant ahead of holiday season

Walmart's AI assistant Sparky can now turn a shopping list — even a child's handwritten note to Santa — into a ready-to-go cart, as the retailer pushes a new round of features to U.S. customers ahead of the holiday season.

The updates, available now, go well beyond list conversion. They include:

• Visual recognition that helps shoppers solve problems such as removing a stain or replicating a coveted look
• Recipe generation with automatic cart creation
• Suggestions for healthy ingredient swaps in favorite recipes
• The "Shop to Light" store location tool, which debuted in the Walmart app last month

Sparky is also expanding beyond the United States. As the assistant rolls out in Mexico and Canada, speech and text recognition in Spanish and French is arriving with it. Walmart expects voice recognition capabilities to be available chainwide by year-end.

What do the numbers say about usage?

The feature push builds on measurable momentum. 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 do not, Walmart CEO John Furner shared in August.

Steady functionality improvements have driven that growth. The introduction of visual search capabilities led to a 57% spike in conversion compared with text-based searches, according to U.S. CEO David Guggina.

The latest enhancements push further into visual search and begin to expand voice capabilities across multiple languages. A shopper with a stain on a holiday tablecloth can now get advice, product suggestions and delivery assistance simply by uploading an image.

The "Shop to Light" feature takes the assistant into the physical store. It pins a product's location on a store map, then lets customers trigger the electronic shelf label once they reach the right area.

What about dynamic pricing concerns?

Walmart's digital shelf labels have drawn recent scrutiny over concerns the company might engage in dynamic pricing. Furner refuted those concerns and stated that Sparky would not be used 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."

The pledge matters for marketers positioning AI shopping tools around trust as much as convenience during a season when, as the company notes, beleaguered consumers focus on efficiency and value.

Where does Walmart's AI strategy go next?

Walmart is betting on AI assistants broadly, not only its own. It brought a Sparky-backed commerce experience to OpenAI's ChatGPT earlier this year and has integrated with Google's Gemini. Last month, it rolled out new features to facilitate access for AI agents to its platforms.

Competitors are making similar moves for the holiday crowd. Target is beta testing a new assistant, Ask Target, on its website and app. Amazon's Alexa for Shopping has seen adoption. Best Buy's new conversational AI assistant, Ask Blue, is tailored to offer expert advice on product selection.

What does this change for practitioners? AI assistants are shifting from novelty features to conversion infrastructure — Walmart's 57% conversion lift from visual search sets a benchmark that retail marketers will need to match as voice and visual interfaces become default shopping behaviors chainwide.