Walmart ended its partnership with OpenAI's Instant Checkout feature due to accuracy and integration issues. The feature, announced in October 2025, allowed customers to shop through ChatGPT but failed to deliver reliable results in production. Walmart now embeds its own chatbot, Sparky, on platforms like ChatGPT and Google Gemini instead. Other major retailers including Target and Instacart also prefer their own AI solutions over OpenAI's offering.
Why it matters
The world's largest retailer tried and abandoned OpenAI's agentic commerce feature — a clear signal that enterprise-grade AI agents aren't reliable enough for customer-facing workflows. CIOs should treat this as a cautionary case study for their own agentic AI pilots.
What to do
CIOs evaluating agentic AI for customer-facing use cases should demand accuracy guarantees and run extended pilots before committing. Walmart's experience shows that even the largest AI provider can't guarantee production quality for complex transactions.