Walmart is pulling the plug on OpenAI's Instant Checkout feature after it failed to gain traction, and instead is embedding its homegrown Sparky chatbot directly into ChatGPT and Google Gemini. The strategic reversal marks one of the first public failures in the agentic AI shopping race and signals a major shift in how retailers are approaching AI partnerships. Rather than letting AI platforms control the checkout experience, Walmart is keeping the keys to its customer data while riding on the massive user bases of consumer AI apps.
Walmart just rewrote the playbook on AI shopping partnerships. After months of quietly testing OpenAI's Instant Checkout feature, the retail giant decided it wasn't working and flipped the entire relationship on its head. Instead of letting OpenAI handle transactions inside ChatGPT, Walmart is now plugging its own Sparky chatbot directly into ChatGPT and Google Gemini, keeping full control of the shopping experience while accessing hundreds of millions of potential customers.
The original vision sounded promising. OpenAI pitched Instant Checkout as a seamless way for ChatGPT users to buy products without leaving the conversation. But according to sources familiar with the partnership, the feature struggled with accuracy issues and couldn't match Walmart's internal shopping tools. Customers complained about wrong items appearing in their carts, and conversion rates fell well below what Walmart sees through its own channels.
"We learned that our customers want consistency across every touchpoint," a Walmart spokesperson said in a statement. The company didn't share specific performance metrics, but the decision to completely restructure a partnership with the hottest name in AI speaks volumes about how the tests went.
Sparky, Walmart's in-house shopping assistant, has been live on Walmart.com and the mobile app since early 2025. Built on a combination of proprietary retail data and third-party language models, Sparky handles everything from product recommendations to substitution suggestions when items are out of stock. Now it's getting embedded as a plugin across both ChatGPT and Gemini, meaning users of either platform can invoke Walmart's shopping agent without OpenAI or Google touching the actual transaction.
