Walmart fires OpenAI in playbook-changing move
Comments
djmips
cf100clunk
Its not that Walmart abandoned AI, it just swapped out OpenAI's chatbot for its own.
brianwawok
Which is potentially powered by ChatGPT according to the article?
JumpCrisscross
> Which is potentially powered by ChatGPT
It’s not. It’s distributed through ChatGPT and Claude. But Sparky is Walmart’s kit.
hooloovoo_zoo
Well, they seem to be using 3rd party LLMs for websearch.
JumpCrisscross
> they seem to be using 3rd party LLMs for websearch
Source?
hooloovoo_zoo
If you ask the agent a product question you can trigger it into web search mode where it provides web links and autocomplete suggestions. You can follow the a/c suggestions down some pretty elaborate chains of questions but eventually it hits a rate limit and reverts to the default dumb bot.
kotaKat
It sounds more like they probably have some kind of generic prompt that runs on top of either platform to "be" "Sparky" to provide Walmart sales and advertising on top.
I wonder if this is so Walmart can sell the advertising for products inside Sparky from their own platform (Walmart Connect) and then run the Connect ads onwards 'inside' Sparky.
See also: https://www.walmartconnect.com/resources/articles/2025/the-n...
Is Sparky better because it has privileged access to Walmart Data and and business knowledge?