“In the coming weeks we'll be launching agent profiles. As a customer, whether it's through your agent or our agent, you can delegate authority: what the agent can buy, or the spending limit. It's like having a family member that you've given your credit card to. There may be limits. My kids in college have a card with a limit that's different than mine, and around the 20th of the month I get a phone call.”
Masters of Scale · Startups & Venture · November 2026
Context
Jeff Berman asked how Walmart is preparing for a world where personal AI agents, not people pressing a button, start the purchase. Furner, Walmart's CEO, announces agent profiles that let customers set what an agent may buy and how much it may spend. A concrete example of a big retailer building for agent shoppers.
Transcript
…the organization that is always thinking about how we get to better and best for them. And this is a time that, you know, I've heard it this morning. It's a great time to be alive. It's a great time to be in business because we can do things that we've dreamt of for a long time and it's real now.
…plus, we've been thinking about it. But now, with the rise of Muse and Insight and all these other personal agents, say nothing, what people build for themselves, it's not just going to be at the press of a button. It's going to be at the initiation of an agent. How is Walmart thinking about that?
Yeah, it's a great question. We're thinking about the connection from the screen to the physical world. And I don't want to step past understanding how we listen to the 275 million or so customers we serve every week and understand them at the individual level, think about what it is they're trying to accomplish, and then bringing it to life. The second half of that is something that we feel is a unique opportunity for us. We have 2.2 million people around the world who wake up every day, they come in, they try to serve. And if we can remove friction for them, if we can give them the information that they need in their palm, if we can somehow get to them the best next action that they can take to make their operating unit, their team more successful, and how that all comes together is pretty unique, all the way to aggregating deliveries and trying to do this in a way that respects the fact that we're proud of being an everyday low-cost operator, that we're trying to enable everyday low prices, and we need to move faster. That's where we started. And so, you know, one of the things that we're doing over the next few weeks, the coming weeks, is we'll be launching agent profiles. So as a…
And that's a big announcement and a big step forward for Walmart, for your customers. And, you know, I've got two kids in college as well, and I can see the benefit for me there, and I appreciate it. At the same time, Rabbi Sharon Brouse will be on our stage later in the summit. She wrote a…
It's a great question. Earlier, I heard you say something about big institutions or do you trust big or not? What I hear so many times in the markets all over the world, when you talk to customers, regardless what they think of big institutions or even us, what they typically come back to…
terms of the customer experience, I mean, do you actively think about Walmart as a third place after home and decreasingly, but still work as one in two and creating an even warmer in-person experience for your customers? Is that part of how you balance this out?
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