Walmart Connect Grew 44% Last Quarter. Its Growth Chief Spent His Time On Something Else.

At the Evercore ISI Consumer and Retail Conference on June 10, Walmart’s top growth executive made a case about how the company’s newer businesses fit together. Seth Dallaire, who became executive vice president and chief growth officer for Walmart Inc. on February 1, told analysts that retail media, the third-party marketplace, membership, and data subscriptions are not separate bets but one connected system built to serve customers across channels while producing margin the rest of the company can spend.

Much of his framing centered on how Walmart wants suppliers and shoppers to understand advertising. He described retail media as a form of digital merchandising rather than advertising clutter, comparing a sponsored placement in the app to the way a shopper discovers an unfamiliar product walking a physical aisle. Ads that overwhelm a customer and send them out of the app without buying do not serve that goal. “It’s not an interruptive experience, it’s contextually relevant,” he said.

Walmart Wants Connect Spend Read As Price Investment

The more pointed part of Dallaire’s message was about where the money goes. He said the growth businesses, retail media, data subscriptions, membership, and marketplace seller services, carry a materially different profit profile than traditional retail, and that the income from advertising and membership can be deployed toward new stores, remodels, and price investment, consistent with Walmart’s everyday low cost and everyday low price principles. For suppliers, the implication runs deeper: in Walmart’s telling, the Connect budgets they fund are not only a cost of doing business on the platform but part of how Walmart pays for the price position that pulls in the traffic those same suppliers are trying to reach.

The numbers behind the system are current. In its first-quarter fiscal 2027 results, for the quarter ended May 1, Walmart reported global advertising up 36% overall and Walmart Connect up 44% excluding VIZIO, with Walmart U.S. eCommerce growing 26% on strength in store-fulfilled delivery, advertising, and marketplace. Those figures come from Walmart’s own earnings release, not from the conference, where the growth rate was described only in round terms.

The Ad System Is Already Moving Into Conversational Surfaces

Dallaire’s comments on artificial intelligence described a direction Walmart has already started building. He said the company has introduced ad placements into its own agentic tools and expects retail media to stay relevant as natural-language questions replace keyword search. Walmart Connect’s own account supports that: the company tested its first advertising formats tied to Sparky, its in-app shopping assistant, in fall 2025, and is rolling out an AI advertising assistant, now in beta for Sponsored Search campaigns, tied to the Marty super agent it introduced in July 2025. Dallaire was candid that the work is early, saying Walmart is currently learning more from how shoppers use Sparky than from the ads placed inside it.

The implications split along familiar lines. The agentic discovery surface matters most to third-party Marketplace sellers, whose products surface or vanish inside a conversational interface that behaves differently from the search bar, and to whom Dallaire’s comments on catalog quality were most directly aimed. He said marketplace catalog ingestion still needs human moderation rather than fully automated handling, a signal to sellers about how much of that process Walmart intends to keep supervised. The evolution of Connect’s ad formats and reporting touches first-party suppliers and third-party sellers alike, since both buy into the same media system.

Two supporting threads rounded out the picture. Dallaire pointed to a direct link between delivery speed and how often customers buy, a claim Walmart’s own quarter backs up: store-fulfilled delivery has more than doubled over two years, and more than 36% of those orders arrived in under three hours in the first quarter. He also described Walmart’s Scintilla data platform extending across borders under a build-once approach, though that geographic step is largely complete rather than forthcoming. Scintilla has been live in the United States, Mexico, and Canada since 2024.

What Dallaire laid out was less a set of announcements than a statement of how Walmart reads its own growth and where it is steering it. The open question the conference left for suppliers is one of discovery economics. As Walmart routes more shopping through conversational tools, the company has said new end-of-campaign and path-to-conversion reports are due in the Connect Ad Center during fiscal 2027, which is where brands will find out whether visibility inside an agent behaves like the keyword auctions they know or like something they have not planned for yet.

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