The retail playbook just changed: shoppers still click and scan, but AI agents now browse, compare, and buy on our behalf. We brought together leaders from academia, CPG, platforms, and agencies to break down what that means for brands selling at Walmart and across the modern digital shelf. The big takeaway is simple and hard: trust wins. Trust between people and machines, and trust between models and your product data. Clean attributes, consistent claims, and verifiable signals across PDPs, retail media, and third-party sources are now the difference between being recommended, or ignored.
We dive into the “perpetual moment of truth,” where inspiration, evaluation, and purchase collapse into one seamless flow. You’ll hear how bot-facing content, bullets, tables, certifications, and structured data, helps AI reason and cite your products. We explore generative engine optimization (GEO) versus traditional SEO, why Content Quality Scores keep shifting, and why Walmart’s new item setup will demand complete attribution at creation. Expect concrete tactics: set up agents to monitor rankings and data health daily; build a shared prompt library; reverse-engineer great answers; and run A/B tests that balance keyword search with conversational queries.
New modalities are already here: AI-enabled browsers, vision-plus-voice experiences, and wearable interfaces that parse shelves in real time. That makes consistency across packaging, imagery, and PDP claims critical, especially for safety and dietary needs. Our panel keeps it practical; scope one category, perfect attributes, verify claims, and let auditing agents alert you to drift. Move fast without breaking trust, and treat conversation as the new code your whole team can write.
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More About this Episode
How AI is Transforming the Future of Retail: Insights from the AI Retail Summit in Bentonville
The retail landscape is evolving at an unprecedented pace, and at the heart of this transformation is artificial intelligence. At the recent Doing Business in Bentonville AI Retail Summit, retail executives, educators, and thought leaders came together to explore how AI is reshaping everything from consumer engagement and product discovery to workforce strategy and operational efficiency.
This wasn’t just another industry event, it marked a defining moment for the future of retail. It was a deep dive into how AI is no longer a buzzword or a “future-facing” technology. It's already here, impacting the ways consumers shop and how brands must respond. And if you're in retail, especially connected to Walmart or Sam’s Club, it's time to start asking: Am I ready for what's next?
Here are the key takeaways from the summit, and what they mean for your business.
The New Age of Agentic Shopping: When AI Becomes the Customer
AI agents aren't just helping consumers, they're becoming the consumers.
We're entering an era where "agentic shopping" is becoming reality. In this model, AI-powered agents do the browsing, filtering, and even purchasing on behalf of customers. Bill Akins, Executive Educator at the University of Arkansas, highlighted how companies like Walmart partnering with OpenAI is more than a novel move, it’s a signal of what's ahead. AI is poised to become the new gateway to commerce.
Whether through OpenAI's browser Atlas, Perplexity's Comet, or AI-powered retail search, shopping is becoming less about human-led exploration and more about AI systems making decisions based on context, data signals, and user preferences.
That means your brand is no longer just marketing to humans, you're marketing to algorithms.
So what ensures your product is chosen by an AI shopper? According to Akins, it comes down to signal quality. Your product content, claims, reviews, certifications, and consistency across platforms all feed into the AI's decision engine. The future of product discovery depends not only on visibility but on credibility, in a language and structure that AI understands.
Trust and Consistency: The New Pillars of AI-Driven Commerce
As Brandon Viveiros, CEO of AdFury.ai, noted, winning in this AI-driven retail environment depends on two crucial factors: trust and consistency.
- Trust between consumer and AI: Consumers want answers they can rely on. If AI recommends a product, it must be accurate and backed by data.
- Trust between AI and brand: AI agents determine relevance and quality based on your data signals. Are your claims verified? Is your content consistent across the web? If not, your product may be bypassed.
The integrity of your PDPs (Product Detail Pages), the accuracy of your claims, and the semantic consistency across your digital footprint all matter more than ever. Viveiros emphasized that every retail media ad, every line of copy, and every product attribute now functions as a signal that AI models evaluate.
Even your product photography can affect your standing with both human and AI shoppers. One brand's attempt to optimize their primary images for AI caused them to be penalized in Google Search, proof that today’s strategy must be balanced across multiple modalities.
Search is Evolving: From SEO to GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
Traditional SEO isn’t going away, but it’s no longer enough.
With more consumers using ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI-driven tools to search for products, a new concept is gaining traction: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).
What does GEO mean for brands?
- You’re not just optimizing for Google anymore. You need to optimize for LLMs (Large Language Models) like GPT-4 and Gemini.
- Traditional keywords are less powerful than structured, factual, and semantically rich content that models can easily process.
- Verified product claims, trustworthy data sources, and clean metadata are vital.
Chris Brantley, who leads digital consumer experience at L’Oréal for Walmart, explained that Walmart’s back-end is already shifting. Frequent changes in CQS (Content Quality Scores) and the evolving item setup requirements hint at a broader move toward preparing for generative search. In the near future, Walmart will require fully optimized content at the point of item creation, not months later.
That’s a wake-up call for brands: clean your data, complete your attributions, and ensure your content is both human and AI-friendly, or risk being invisible in tomorrow’s digital shelf.
AI is Reshaping Workforce Strategy and Operations
AI’s influence isn't limited to the customer journey, it’s transforming how we work, staff, and structure our teams.
Andy Wilson, Executive Director of Doing Business in Bentonville and former Walmart HR executive, shared insights from recent conversations with Walmart CEO Doug McMillon and U.S. CEO John Furner. The message was clear: AI will affect every job.
From staffing models and training programs to operational efficiencies, the integration of AI means we must prepare our workforce for new responsibilities, tools, and ways of working. Retailers and suppliers alike must think beyond tech adoption and into people transformation.
What’s needed is a workforce fluent in AI, not just engineers, but marketers, merchandisers, buyers, and planners who understand how to work alongside AI tools to gain a competitive advantage.
Practical Steps: How to Prepare for the Future Now
The panelists didn’t just deliver theory, they offered actionable strategies for getting started, even if you're not a tech expert or data scientist.
1. Focus on Fundamentals First
- Complete your product attributes
- Ensure all claims are accurate and verified
- Use structured data formats (tables, bullet points, clean HTML)
- Check your PDPs across multiple platforms for consistency
2. Adopt a Crawl-Walk-Run Mindset
- Start small. Choose a product line and experiment with optimizing for AI agents.
- Use AI to reverse engineer your PDPs: Ask ChatGPT to “roast” your product listings. What does it find? What’s missing?
3. Build Internal Knowledge and Buy-In
- Run workshops with your team to teach prompt engineering
- Encourage experimentation across departments
- Develop internal “prompt libraries” for repeatable AI use cases
4. Create an Agent Strategy
- Think about how your products will be interpreted and ranked by AI agents
- Test tools like Comet and Atlas to see how your brand appears in AI browsers
- Start developing AI personas for internal use (e.g., "act as a Walmart buyer")
5. Think Ahead to AI Modality
- The future of prompting isn’t just text. Think voice, vision, context, memory.
- As wearable devices like Meta’s Ray-Ban or Google Glasses integrate AI, shopping becomes ambient, contextual, and multimodal.
Looking Ahead: What’s Next for Doing Business in Bentonville
Doing Business in Bentonville has evolved from an event series into a full-scale media company. With over 86,000 listeners, 515,000 impressions, and a growing slate of podcasts and panels, the organization is quickly becoming a go-to resource for retail intelligence in the Walmart ecosystem.
At the summit, Andy Wilson announced future initiatives including:
- More live events in 2026, including one focused on AI and People
- Workshops on workforce transformation and AI integration
- A steering committee to guide future topics and event planning
- Weekly email alerts and podcast content to stay ahead of retail trends
Their mission? To walk alongside brands during this time of immense change, serving as both a partner and a resource.
Final Thoughts: AI Won’t Replace People—But People Using AI Will
One quote that echoed throughout the summit was this:
“AI won’t replace people. But people with AI will replace people without AI.”
The takeaway is clear: The brands that adapt to this AI-driven landscape will not only survive, they’ll thrive. That means embracing new tools, transforming your workforce, optimizing for agents as well as humans, and treating your data as the fuel that drives AI decision-making.
It’s not about having all the answers. It’s about asking the right questions, and being bold enough to start.
