According to PYMNTS.com, Walmart is piloting “Sponsored Prompt” ads inside its AI shopping assistant Sparky, marking a strategic shift from pure convenience feature to potential retail media revenue stream. Amazon already launched similar sponsored prompts for its Rufus AI assistant on November 18, revealing that over 250 million customers have used Rufus this year with monthly users up 149% and interactions increasing 210%. Customers using Rufus are over 60% more likely to make purchases during shopping sessions. Walmart’s Q3 2026 earnings released November 20 confirmed value remains consumers’ dominant concern, while PYMNTS data shows 26% of consumers struggled paying bills in September—the highest rate in two years. Both retailers are responding to contradictory consumer behavior where shoppers report price sensitivity but still pay for convenience and premium goods.
The AI Shopping Revenue Pivot
Here’s the thing: we’re watching a fundamental business model shift in real time. Walmart and Amazon spent years building these AI assistants as customer service tools—helpful bots that could answer questions and make shopping easier. Now they’re realizing these conversational interfaces represent a completely new advertising frontier. Instead of just being cost centers that improve customer experience, they’re becoming profit centers themselves. It’s basically the same playbook we saw with search engines decades ago—first you build something useful that people rely on, then you monetize the attention.
How Sponsored Prompts Actually Work
So what exactly are these “sponsored prompts”? Imagine you’re chatting with Sparky or Rufus about planning a holiday dinner. You ask for wine pairing suggestions, and instead of just getting neutral recommendations, the AI might inject a sponsored response like “Would you like to see specially curated options from [Brand Name]?” The branded content gets woven directly into the shopping conversation. This is fundamentally different from traditional retail media where you’re buying banner ads or search result placements. Now brands need to think about how their products fit into natural language dialogues and intent-based shopping journeys.
The Consumer Spending Paradox
What makes this timing so interesting is the contradictory consumer behavior driving these moves. People say they’re worried about inflation and price-sensitive, yet they’re still spending on convenience and premium items. Retailers are caught in this weird spot where they need to demonstrate value while also finding new revenue streams. And let’s be honest—when 26% of consumers are having trouble paying bills, you can’t just keep raising prices. So instead, Walmart and Amazon are getting creative with their existing assets. They’re essentially saying, “We can’t necessarily charge consumers more, but we can charge brands for better access to those consumers.”
Retail Media Reconfiguration
The implications here are massive for the entire retail media ecosystem. We’re talking about potentially moving billions in advertising budgets from traditional search and display toward these AI-driven conversational formats. Brands that have spent years optimizing for SEO and keyword bidding now need to figure out how to be “prompt-worthy.” The whole architecture of product discovery is being rebuilt around intent-based dialogues rather than category pages and filters. And for retailers, this requires incredibly tight integration between product algorithms, inventory data, ad logic, and fulfillment systems. It’s not just about slapping ads into a chat interface—it’s about rebuilding the entire commerce stack around conversational AI.
