Inside Walmart's Bid to Become the "Everything App" of Commerce

Walmart is no longer just the world's largest retailer — it's building itself into a tech company that happens to sell groceries. The company's own FY2026 10-K lays out the ambition in corporate-filing language: enhance omnichannel capabilities across stores, e-commerce, mobile apps, and services, layer AI on top of a 2.1-million-person workforce, and make customers see Walmart as their primary destination — not just for shopping, but for media, data, and money.

Strip away the jargon and the strategy is simple: retail, advertising, marketplace, fulfillment, and financial services aren't separate business lines anymore. They're designed to reinforce each other, so that no matter where a customer starts — a store aisle, Walmart.com, ChatGPT, or a crypto wallet — they end up transacting inside a Walmart-controlled environment.

That's the "everything app" playbook, and Walmart Connect (its retail media division) sits at the center of it.

1. In-Store: The Physical Network Becomes a Media Network

This isn't new territory — Walmart and PRN built an in-store IPTV ad network of over 100,000 screens back in 2006. What's different now is precision. Walmart is testing next-generation formats (Beauty Bars, live event activations) at its Dallas Innovation Hub before scaling nationally, and tying every screen impression back to real-time purchase data rather than treating it as a passive ad buy.

2. Search Onsite: The Original Engine, Now API-Driven

Walmart Global Tech built its Sponsored Search platform from scratch and has since layered machine learning on top of real-time first-party data pulled from nearly 5,000 U.S. stores, the Walmart app, and Walmart.com. The bigger shift: most Sponsored Search campaigns now run through automated APIs, meaning outside ad-tech companies plug directly into Walmart's infrastructure rather than building around it. Walmart isn't just running ads — it's positioning itself as ad infrastructure other companies build on top of.

3. Connected TV: Vizio Turns Walmart Into a TV Company

The 2024 Vizio acquisition gave Walmart a real foothold in connected television. Vizio's ambition to be "the center of the connected home" — powering smart TVs, its own OS, and audience targeting — has since been folded into Walmart Connect Select, a preferred-supply partnership with PubMatic delivering curated, high-performing CTV inventory. Analysts expect this to be a key growth driver, with Walmart Connect projected to be the only retail media network gaining market share through 2027 — helped directly by Vizio, off-site partnerships, and rising e-commerce share.

4. Off-Site the Open Web: Ads That Follow You Everywhere

Walmart Connect has built out a full demand-side platform (DSP), letting advertisers run Walmart's audience data against inventory outside Walmart entirely. Partners like Pacvue and Skai let advertisers plan, activate, and optimize campaigns both onsite and offsite from a single environment — extending Walmart's data reach well past its own digital properties.

5. AI Agents: Sparky Goes Wherever the Shopper Is

This is the newest and most disruptive front. Walmart launched Sparky, its agentic AI shopping assistant, in June 2025 — designed to replace keyword search with a goal-driven service experience. Tell it "plan a cookout," and Sparky reasons across Walmart's catalog, inventory, pricing, fulfillment, and services stack. It arrived as direct competition to Amazon's Rufus and Instacart's "Ask Instacart."

The bigger move came in March 2026: rather than let OpenAI's "Instant Checkout" process transactions inside ChatGPT, Walmart pulled its listings — reportedly because Instant Checkout converted at roughly a third the rate of Walmart.com, with problems like incorrect cart items and mishandled sales tax. Instead, Walmart embedded Sparky directly inside ChatGPT and Google Gemini.

Walmart's EVP of AI, Daniel Danker, summed up the logic: shopping can start anywhere now — a Walmart aisle or a ChatGPT prompt — but wherever it begins, the customer still gets the same personalized Walmart experience, assortment, value, and speed. Danker has called the original AI-checkout model "a very temporary moment in time," with Sparky designed to travel into any AI platform Walmart integrates with next.

The strategic point that matters most: Amazon and Walmart are both refusing to let outside AI platforms own the transaction. Amazon won't let another company's AI sell on Amazon; Walmart won't let another company's AI sell Walmart products. Users can log into their Walmart account, use loyalty programs, and pay through Walmart's own system inside ChatGPT, with carts syncing across the app, website, and chatbot. Walmart keeps the customer relationship and the data no matter which app the conversation started in.

6. Fintech: OnePay Turns Walmart Into a Bank — and a Crypto Exchange

OnePay, Walmart's financial-services arm (backed by Walmart and Ribbit Capital), is expanding on multiple fronts simultaneously:

• Banking-like services: cash-back rewards, a checking account, an investment platform, and buy-now-pay-later — with exploratory partnerships to offer direct-deposit accounts to employees outside Walmart's own workforce.
• Crypto: users can now buy, sell, and hold Bitcoin and Ethereum, converting assets to U.S. dollars in real time for in-store or online purchases, via infrastructure partner Zerohash. The explicit goal is a "crypto-friendly financial hub" — a model backers compare to WeChat Pay and Grab, where super-apps dominate daily transactions.
• Agentic payments: OnePay joined Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), acting as a credential provider that helps define how AI agents store, choose, and use payment methods.
• Scale: OnePay is reportedly now valued at $4 billion after an employee share repurchase, and launched co-branded credit cards with Synchrony, including a private-label Walmart card, in fall 2025.

7. Marketplace: Turning Sellers Into a Self-Reinforcing Advertiser Base

Walmart's third-party Marketplace keeps growing, backed by aggressive incentives — 75% off base referral fees for new sellers and $2,000 in fulfillment credits through early 2026. The logic is a flywheel: more sellers means more assortment and GMV, and every new seller is also a prospective Walmart Connect advertiser. Layered on top, Walmart Data Ventures monetizes the company's first-party shopper data directly, selling analytics and insights that improve advertiser campaign performance — a business line entirely separate from, but reinforcing, the ad and marketplace engines.

How This Compares to the Competition

Industry analysis frames Walmart and Amazon as converging on the same endpoint from different starting points. Amazon's parallel vision is "ambient intelligence" — Fire TV, Ring, and Alexa working together so shopping becomes an extension of daily routines. Walmart is building the same outcome from a physical-retail foundation outward: stores, fintech, and agentic AI, rather than a cloud-and-device base.

The Bottom Line

Walmart Connect isn't an ad network bolted onto a retailer anymore. It's becoming the connective tissue across every surface a customer might touch — in-store screens, connected TV, search, marketplace, fintech, and AI agents — all feeding the same first-party data engine.

The "everything app" ambition isn't really about a single app icon on a phone. It's about one identity, one wallet, and one data relationship that follows the customer across every surface they shop on — whether that surface belongs to Walmart or not.