When one thinks of retail competition, the battle between eCommerce and brick-and-mortar is typically what leaps to mind.
Traditionally, Amazon has been the eCommerce landscape’s leading representative, and Walmart the flag bearer for traditional physical shopping. But 25-plus years into the 21st century, that framing has come to feel almost quaint.
Walmart’s decision Tuesday (Dec. 9) to trade on Nasdaq and not the NYSE, exemplifies the retail landscape’s ongoing shift. The retailer wants the market to value it less like a grocer and more like the AI-laced eCommerce platform it is becoming.
“Nasdaq’s focus on technology and its support for companies driving digital transformation align perfectly with our strategic vision. This is an exciting next chapter as we continue building a frictionless future for our customers, members, associates, and shareholders,” Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said in a statement.
After all, retail competition today is becoming less about channel and more about compression: compressing the time it takes for shoppers to find what they want, to buy it and to have it show up at their doors.
Both retail giants, Amazon and Walmart, are trying to collapse those moments into something approaching zero friction. Increasingly, the battleground for these goals is artificial intelligence.
Read more: Walmart Reinvents Its Footprint as Amazon Eyes Cutting Out USPS
The Business Case for Shrinking Time
Amazon’s latest initiatives point toward an ambition to be everywhere all at once. Its same-day delivery network, which now reaches more than 2,300 cities and towns in the United States, has quietly become one of the most complex logistical matrices in the world.
The expansion is not simply about speed; it is about conditioning consumers to expect speed as the default. While the broader eCommerce industry still treats two-day shipping as a premium amenity, Amazon is defining a world where same-day shipping is standard.
After all, delivery speed often correlates directly with conversion. The psychological barrier of waiting days for an item, especially an impulse purchase, decreases dramatically when arrival is imminent.
At the same time, the company is signaling its next phase of global growth through a massive $35 billion investment commitment in India. The funds are earmarked for e-commerce, logistics, cloud computing, and what Amazon calls “AI infrastructure” — a phrase that captures everything from data centers and silicon to sovereign cloud capabilities that meet India’s evolving regulatory demands.
The scale of the commitment reflects not only India’s position as one of the most important growth markets in the world but also Amazon’s belief that its future depends as much on building the computational spine of global commerce as it does on selling things.
Walmart isn’t standing still, either. The retailer on Tuesday announced it is extending its holiday delivery deadline with one-hour Express delivery available on orders placed until 5 p.m. Christmas Eve, giving last-minute shoppers more flexibility.
Walmart now claims that it can deliver its products to 95% of U.S. households in under three hours, thanks to the retailer’s physical footprint of brick-and-mortar stores, which are fast becoming crucial micro-fulfilment nodes.
Read also: The Protocol Power Struggle Reshaping AI-Driven Commerce
The Next Frontier of Agentic AI and Commerce
While Amazon and Walmart are competing fiercely, the more consequential battle may not be between them but between retail interfaces. AI agents threaten to abstract away where a customer shops. If a conversational assistant handles product selection and orders automatically, brand loyalty could shift from retailer to agent.
Both retailers recognize this. Amazon, for example, announced Tuesday that it is rolling out new shopping features for its artificial intelligence assistant Alexa+. The new offerings come amid, as PYMNTS wrote earlier this week, updates to Alexa+ which mark a “significant shift toward agentic AI,” going “beyond scripted commands and toward autonomous task execution.”
Data from the “Prompt Economy™: When Bots Are the Customer,” a collaboration between PYMNTS Intelligence and Visa, revealed how the rise of agentic AI is redefining the fundamentals of digital commerce. As bots from retailers like Amazon and Walmart become digital concierges, merchants must make their data and policies readable by machines, not just people.
Walmart’s version of this future looks different but is equally ambitious. The company is integrating generative AI into its mobile app and store experiences, providing personalized shopping lists, conversational recommendations, and contextual suggestions powered by its uniquely large dataset of in-person and online purchases. The company’s vast physical footprint also gives it something Amazon does not have: the ability to fuse artificial intelligence with in-store navigation, local pricing and real-time inventory visibility.
