Walmart’s Retail Media Scores Wins While Amazon’s AI Goes Ambient

The holiday shopping spree has come to a close. And while returns are no doubt occupying a fair amount of time at the world’s two biggest retailers, a relatively quiet (but consumer retail-focused) week at Amazon stood in contrast to some interesting developments around AI and retail advertising data and media at Walmart.

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2026 in Las Vegas Tuesday (Jan. 6), Omnicom highlighted a partnership with Walmart integrating purchase data into influencer planning on Meta platforms, effectively using real transaction history to identify which creators’ audiences are most likely to buy certain products.

This is a step beyond simple sponsored listings: It treats retail purchase data as a source of truth for influencer ROI, helping brands quantify not just impressions or clicks, but purchase-probable audiences.

And across the retail landscape, from Walmart’s artificial intelligence-powered shopping agents and Amazon’s redesigned smart carts at Whole Foods, Walmart’s financial services expansion and Amazon’s ambient computing, the news this week did not point to a single disruptive breakthrough.

Instead, it revealed a coordinated shift. Retail’s future is becoming less about isolated transactions and more about the systems that connect shopping, media, payments and technology into something closer to an operating layer for everyday life.

Data as the New Marketplace Currency

At a business model level, Walmart has been doubling down on its retail media strategy, launching its “Marty” solution for brands an advertisers in July. The Marty super agent is an agentic AI advertising assistant that helps suppliers, sellers, and advertisers manage onboarding, orders and campaigns; although the assistant won’t be made fully available to all Sponsored Search advertisers in the Walmart Connect Ad Center until later in the year.

For brands and agencies alike, this may represent a structural shift. The result could be tighter coupling between demand generation and conversion attribution.

On the consumer-facing front, Walmart on Tuesday moved to introduce advertising into its AI shopping agent, Sparky, reflecting a growing confidence in conversational commerce. Rather than positioning artificial intelligence solely as a utility, Walmart is treating it as a new interface, one capable of guiding discovery in ways that feel more natural than search bars or category menus.

This past week also saw Walmart add an AI specialist, Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra, to its board of directors, a move that combines governance with strategic direction at a moment when every major retailer is grappling with how artificial intelligence should shape product recommendations, personalization, supply chain automation and customer engagement.

Before joining Superhuman, Mehrotra was CEO and co-founder of Coda, a productivity and AI platform, and before founding Coda, Mehrotra served as chief product officer and chief technology officer at YouTube.

The addition is emblematic of a broader tilt: Walmart is not simply adopting artificial intelligence tools; it is embedding AI leadership at the strategic decision-making level.

At the same time, the launch of crypto functionality within Walmart’s OnePay FinTech platform, going live in 2026, is a case in point. By enabling users to buy, sell and convert digital assets for spending, Walmart is testing how emerging financial tools can be integrated into everyday commerce without requiring customers to leave a familiar ecosystem.

Amazon Goes Ambient at CES

Amazon’s presence at CES this year reinforced a different but complementary vision. Rather than spotlighting a single hero product, Amazon emphasized how its devices and services work together, across Fire TV, Ring and Alexa, to create more seamless experiences.

The throughline was ambient intelligence. Amazon continues to refine systems that anticipate needs and reduce friction, whether that’s controlling a home, managing entertainment or facilitating commerce through voice and screens. Shopping, in this model, becomes an extension of daily routines rather than a discrete activity.

Physical retail is also evolving, not disappearing. Amazon’s freshly redesigned Dash Cart at Whole Foods, which is lighter, larger and equipped with tap-to-pay and navigation features, illustrates how in-store experiences are being reimagined with technology as an enabler rather than a replacement for human interaction.

Smart carts address familiar pain points: long checkout lines, uncertainty about total spend and inefficient store navigation. They also unlock new insights into how shoppers move through stores and make decisions, data that can inform better layouts, assortments and promotions.

Across all the initiatives at both Walmart and Amazon, data plays a central role, but one increasingly as a foundation rather than a headline. Purchase histories, interaction signals and contextual insights are being used to improve relevance, reduce friction and connect disparate parts of the retail experience.

The opportunity for retailers is to translate this data into clear consumer value. When personalization saves time, recommendations feel timely and payments become simpler, data use becomes less abstract and more tangible.  The question is how Amazon and Walmart can compete in demonstrating that the technology powering the future of retail is being applied in service of the customer.