The trend: AI shopping assistants are driving ecommerce sales at Walmart and Amazon, according to executives from both retailers.

• Shoppers who use Walmart’s Sparky have average order values that are 35% higher than nonusers, CEO John Furner said on the company’s Q4 earnings call.
• Customers that use Amazon’s Rufus are roughly 60% more likely to complete their purchase, according to CEO Andy Jassy.

Zoom out: Walmart’s and Amazon’s successes with retail chatbots show how the technology is improving the ecommerce experience.

• Tools like Rufus and Sparky are able to deliver better, more personalized recommendations to shoppers, increasing the chances of a sale, driving larger basket sizes, and encouraging more frequent purchases.
• They also aid customers throughout their purchase journey by answering product-specific questions as well as delivering more general advice.

Both chatbots have seen sizable adoption: Roughly half of Walmart’s app users have interacted with Sparky, while over 300 million Amazon customers used Rufus last year.

Implications for retailers: Thanks to Sparky and Rufus, shoppers are becoming more accustomed to using AI shopping assistants to support their online purchases.

However, that familiarity is not working entirely to the benefit of AI platforms like ChatGPT and Google Gemini—likely one reason that the former walked back its plans to introduce in-app checkouts.

• Shoppers have more confidence in retailer-owned AI tools, with 25% of US consumers trusting retailers to manage the end-to-end shopping experience, compared with 7% for AI platforms like ChatGPT, according to a September survey by Bain.
• We expect checkouts on AI platforms to account for just 0.1% of US retail ecommerce sales this year, and remain below 2% into 2029.

Retailers need to move quickly to take advantage of their trust edge. By offering more robust AI tools that deliver a superior experience—and leveraging their data to deliver more personalized, relevant recommendations—companies can forge deeper relationships with customers while keeping them from outsourcing their shopping to AI platforms.