Walmart ads – Walmart is testing sponsored listings inside its AI shopping assistant Sparky, but the company’s head of growth says it’s tracking customer use closely to keep ads from becoming an annoyance. Seth Dallaire says the ads business grew 46% last year to $6.4 billi
For Walmart, the question isn’t whether ads belong in artificial-intelligence shopping chats—it’s how much.
Seth Dallaire. Walmart’s chief growth officer. said the retail giant is testing ads in its AI-powered shopping assistant. Sparky. that started last fall. During the Evercore ISI Consumer and Retail conference on Wednesday. Dallaire framed the challenge in blunt. practical terms: sponsored listings have to stay low enough that they don’t interfere with what customers came for.
“We’ll be careful to watch our customers and how they’re using these tools,” he said. In his view, advertising can earn its place when it supports shopping rather than interrupting it. “Advertising and retail media will have a role to play because it helps customers shop. It’s not an interruptive experience, it’s contextually relevant.”.
Walmart’s effort is coming at a time when its advertising business is already big—and getting bigger. Dallaire oversees that segment, which has become a significant revenue stream over the last few years. Its revenue grew 46% last year to $6.4 billion. and Walmart’s latest moves are designed to position it for a larger share of AI advertising dollars.
But the stakes for the shopping assistant are personal, in a way that pure revenue targets can’t capture. Dallaire also linked the ads strategy to how shoppers behave in real time—especially whether they proceed with a purchase or abandon their cart. If ads “overwhelm a customer and cause them to abandon their cart without making a purchase. ” he said. “that doesn’t work for Dallaire.”.
Alongside the ads business, Dallaire is responsible for growing Walmart’s e-commerce marketplace and Walmart Plus membership program, and he said ads can’t be measured only by ad performance. They also have to improve merchandise sales and member experience.
Dallaire argued that advertising can do more than push familiar products. “I like to be exposed to new products,” he said. “Advertising plays a critical role in that. In fact, it’s very similar to merchandising.” The difference, under his approach, is placement and relevance inside the chat experience.
Walmart has said the presence of sponsored listings in Sparky is significantly lower than what customers see in conventional search results. For now, Dallaire said Walmart is learning more from how people interact with Sparky than from the ads included in the chatbot.
“The types of prompts that we get from customers in those agentic environments are quite different than what maybe historically we’ve seen,” he said. In Sparky’s world, customers don’t just ask for a single item with a single filter. They often arrive with a fuller problem and a set of constraints.
He gave a concrete example: a customer might tell Sparky they are concerned about allergies and are looking for a laundry detergent that could help. Previously, they might have simply asked for fragrance-free detergent. With those longer conversations. Dallaire said Walmart doesn’t have to make as many guesses about what shoppers want and risk serving up an irrelevant ad.
“If that’s how our customers are coming to us to shop,” he said, “we need to orient ourselves around that.”
In other words, Walmart’s AI ads experiment isn’t only about monetizing a new format. It’s also about tightening the feedback loop between what customers ask for in a chat—and what Walmart shows them next—so ads stay useful instead of disruptive.
Walmart Seth Dallaire AI shopping assistant Sparky AI advertising retail media e-commerce marketplace Walmart Plus sponsored listings merchandising customer experience