How AI Is Changing the Way Brands Reach Customers on Walmart Connect
Walmart Connect has spent years building advertising tools on top of first-party data from stores, digital platforms, and everything in between. What is changing now is the layer of intelligence that sits on top of that data. At CES 2026, Daniel Danker and Khurrum Malik walked through how AI is shifting what the platform can do for brands, from the way customers are targeted to the way campaigns are managed to the way creative gets produced.
This article draws on a CES 2026 Content Studio conversation between Danker, Executive Vice President of AI Acceleration, Product and Design at Walmart, and Malik, VP of Business and Product Marketing at Walmart Connect, supplemented by Walmart Connect’s published AI product updates and industry reporting where noted.
The difference between pattern matching and understanding
Malik opened the CES conversation by asking Danker to define what AI actually means in the context of retail. Danker’s answer drew a distinction that runs through much of what followed.
Machine learning, he said, is really just pattern matching. It uses technology to access so much data at once that you can start making predictions. But it was a bit of a black box. It did not really understand the customer. It just noticed patterns and assumed that they would repeat themselves.
His example: machine learning is likely to recommend that you buy turkey the week after Thanksgiving because it suddenly noticed a surge of people buying turkeys. AI will recommend that you buy turkeys the week before Thanksgiving. The shift is from recognizing a pattern to understanding the reason behind it.
Danker then connected that distinction to what it means for brands on the platform. Today, reaching customers through Walmart Connect means targeting based on the queries customers put in and their search terms. AI adds a layer on top of that, one that can understand what the customer is actually trying to do. When the system can understand the problem a customer is trying to solve, he said, you do not just show up with one product or one item. You show up with a collection of things that solve their needs. That is a whole different way of reaching customers.
Why this matters for suppliers: The shift Danker described changes what determines whether your product gets surfaced. In a keyword-matching environment, visibility depends on whether your terms align with a customer’s search query. In an intent-based environment, visibility depends on whether the system understands what your product does and who it is for. Suppliers whose product data, content, and catalog information are thin or generic will be harder for an intent-based system to match to real customer needs. The quality of your product detail pages and the specificity of your product attributes become more important as the matching logic gets smarter.
2026: the year pilots become real
Danker was direct about the timeline. For the last year, he said, Walmart has been experimenting with AI, running a bunch of pilots, learning a lot about what works and what does not. 2026 is going to be a year where we move from pilots to real-world impact. The theories turn into reality.
He repeated the same framing at the ICR Conference the following week, telling attendees that for the last year or two they had been tinkering with AI, and that this is the year where tinkering becomes transformation, as reported by Retail Dive.
The scope extends well beyond advertising. AI will affect inventory, the flow of goods, what customers see where in stores and online, and how Walmart matchmakes between brands and customers across shopping journeys and moments in between. For Walmart Connect specifically, Danker said his focus is on a few things: driving the adoption of AI across the enterprise so Walmart makes full use of the new capability, and thinking differently about what is now possible, serving customers in more personalized ways and enabling brands to reach customers in much more intentional ways than before.
Malik put the scale in context: 150 million weekly U.S. customers, more than 4,600 stores, and new surfaces expanding the reach of the platform.
Why this matters for suppliers: That “pilots to real-world impact” timeline is not just an internal Walmart milestone. It changes what suppliers will encounter on the platform in 2026. AI-powered targeting, agentic campaign management, and automated creative generation are moving from test environments to the tools brands actually use. Suppliers planning their Walmart Connect investment for this year should expect the platform to work differently by the second half of 2026 than it does today.
From dashboards to an assistant that takes action
One of the most specific parts of the CES conversation was Danker’s description of what the Marty advertising assistant changes about how brands interact with campaign data.
Danker started with how things have worked up to now. Walmart Connect built incredible dashboards that showed an abundance of information. It was awesome to see that data in such a granular way, he said, but it was probably a little bit overwhelming as well. Brands asked themselves the same questions: what should I do based on all this information, how do I know that I got it right, and how do I know that I did not miss a trick by not seeing some part of the dashboard?
The Marty assistant cuts through all of that, Danker said. It digests all the data with the intention not of showing you more data but of turning that into action, suggesting the best actions you could take to achieve your goals. A brand can tell it about a new product it wants discovered, about areas where it is trying to increase its return on investment, or about demographics it has been trying to reach. The assistant makes recommendations and can actually take action on your behalf.
Walmart Connect’s own product updates provide more detail on what the assistant does in practice. The Marty advertising assistant is now in beta for Sponsored Search campaigns, offering conversational guidance on bidding, keywords, and billing, along with four types of research reports including share-of-voice analyses. Walmart Connect reported that 97% of user queries to the assistant are unique, a signal that advertisers are using it in highly personalized ways rather than asking the same preset questions. The assistant will be available to all Sponsored Search advertisers in the Walmart Connect Ad Center later this half, with expanded capabilities rolling out alongside it.
Measurement came up as well. The technology, Danker said, can bring together data from across Walmart’s digital products, stores, and omnichannel touchpoints, and even well beyond the data that exists within Walmart, to drive the decisions that we make.
Why this matters for suppliers: The Marty advertising assistant is not a chatbot. In its current beta, it provides campaign recommendations through conversation, not just data displays. For suppliers whose internal teams manage Walmart Connect campaigns without a dedicated retail media specialist, the assistant starts to close the gap between having access to the platform and knowing what to do with it. For larger advertisers with specialized teams, the 97% unique query rate suggests the tool can handle specific, non-standard questions rather than just walking users through setup wizards.
AI-generated creative that reduces production time
The conversation also covered how AI is changing creative production for the platform. As Walmart’s assortment grows, particularly through its marketplace where the product catalog is much larger, the volume of creative needed to reach customers increases. Walmart is building tools that generate creative in more automatic ways. Instead of one size fitting all, Danker said, you can actually tailor the creative to different use cases and different customer segments, and the Walmart Connect platform will automatically bring that to customers in the right way.
Walmart Connect’s published data puts a number on the impact. In early beta testing, the platform’s Automated Creative Generation tool reduced median creative production time by 80%, measured from the point of creative creation to submission in the Walmart Connect Ad Center Creative Hub.
The creative tools are especially relevant for emerging brands. Danker mentioned emerging brands specifically as a group that benefits from AI-powered creative generation, and Malik agreed, calling this one of the areas where AI will have a massive positive impact for both enterprise and emerging advertisers. For smaller brands trying to reach customers through the marketplace, the tools lower the bar for producing creative that used to require large budgets and dedicated production teams.
Why this matters for suppliers: The 80% reduction in creative production time matters most for suppliers who currently treat Walmart Connect display campaigns as too time-consuming or expensive to produce custom creative for. An emerging brand that previously used a single generic image across all placements can now generate tailored versions for different customer segments and use cases without a proportional increase in production cost or time. For enterprise suppliers, the implication is that competitors who previously could not afford to produce segment-specific creative now can.
What Danker wants brands to take away
Danker closed the conversation with a direct point. Walmart Connect is all about sparking sales, he said, and AI is going to enable us to do that in really clever ways that we have never been able to do before.
The practical summary of the CES conversation is a platform that is no longer just showing brands what happened. It is telling them what to do and, in some cases, doing it for them. The targeting layer now tries to understand what a customer needs, not just what they typed. The Marty assistant interprets campaign data and proposes action rather than presenting another dashboard. Creative tools produce segment-specific content at a fraction of the time it used to take. And the measurement layer is pulling in data from across Walmart’s digital products, stores, and sources beyond Walmart’s own ecosystem.
On the customer side, things are moving just as fast. In a Walmart survey published alongside the platform’s 2026 AI updates, 81% of surveyed customers said they had used the Sparky AI shopping assistant to check product availability and review product specs before making a purchase. That is a customer base that is already interacting with AI-powered tools when deciding what to buy.
As Danker put it, 2026 is the year. For suppliers investing on the platform, the practical questions are specific. Is your product data rich enough for an intent-based system to work with? Does your team know how to interact with an agentic advertising assistant? Can your creative workflow take advantage of tools that cut production time by 80%? Those are the questions the CES conversation pointed toward, and the answers will shape how well the platform works for your brand this year.
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