Walmart 🤗 Agents + Perplexity 🫶 PayPal
A big WSJ/CIO Journal Walmart agentic story plus PayPal announces a relationship with Perplexity as they look to raise > $500m at > $14b valuation!
Phew, it’s been a huge news week and we haven’t even caught up on all the Agentic payment news (that will have to wait for next week). Today we are covering two important items. Let’s start with….
Walmart on Agents
This morning when Walmart released their Q1 for fiscal 2026 results (I know it’s weird -retailers 🤷♂️), they also dropped this WSJ article ($) that’s a very good read. This was on the heels of announcing e-commerce growth of 22% (wow!).
The article is excellent and introduces some of the interesting friction points that are going to come up with the rise of AI Shopping agents. It kicks off with Walmart’s CTO, Hariva Sudev, who pontificated on how agents will change things and said:
“It will be different,” said Walmart U.S. Chief Technology Officer Hari Vasudev. “Advertising will have to evolve.”
Then they pull in Robert Hetu, retail analyst at Gartner, who says:
“(agentic shopping ) It’s a step change that will force retailers to rethink the way they advertise, describe their products online and even price them and retailers risk losing control of the direct customer relationship if the checkout process moves from their own website to that of the third-party agent, like Operator or others to come.”
Hetu continued:
“Even then, the way a bot shops is fundamentally different from the way a human shops, meaning retailers should think carefully about the way they display products on their sites, said Gartner’s Hetu. For one, agents may be less likely to be attracted to images or visuals designed to elicit an emotional response.
Retailers may also have to make split-second decisions on pricing and when to offer agents discounts versus letting them nab the same option cheaper elsewhere in an instant”
Summary of 'Retailgentic’ Challenges Raised
This is as good a time as any to start tracking some of these challenges:
What’s going to happen to advertising (Retail Media Networks)?
What’s the best way to show an agent product information?
How are retailers going to handle dynamic/competitive pricing?
What happens to the customer relationship if the customer is behind an agent and never logs in?
What happens to personalization - can the retailer ‘keep’ this level, or does personalization ‘move up’ the stack to the agent layer (where it will work across retailers).
What happens to loyalty programs?
Perplexity and PayPal Collab
Way back on, oh Wednesday the 14th, PayPal announced that they were collaborating on agentic payments. Coming this Summer in Perplexity Pro’s shopping agent, certain retailer’s items will be able to pay right on Perplexity (via their agent and PayPal) vs. having to go to the retailer’s site.
Perplexity’s CEO said:
“Perplexity wants to have accurate, trustworthy answers wherever people are making decisions. PayPal is a natural partner because we share a vision for how important trust is in the age of AI”
This one was simultaneously exciting and sad. I was excited to give it a try and then realized that it’s not coming until this Summer.
One bullet in the press release seems to indicate that PayPal is giving Perplexity some form of distribution to their customer base:
Global Reach: Expanding Perplexity's commerce tools to PayPal's 430+ million active accounts across approximately 200 markets.
Now THAT’s the part I want to learn more about and if PayPal is aggressive with it, this could be a huge win for Perplexity. What if PayPal subsidizes or makes total free the $200/yr Pro fee?
Perplexity is raising….again! (More + Bigger)
Finally, the press is saying that Perplexity is back on the fundraising trail. I’ve read articles that say that Perplexity was looking to raise $1b at $18b valuation and others saying they are raising $500m at $16b. The previous valuation was $9b, so either number is a huge mark-up.
$665M++ !?
According to Crunchbase, Perplexity has raised $665,000,000 across 5 rounds. This new round - let’s call it Series E, if it comes at the lower end of reporting, $500m - that will put them into the $1b raised club and double-deca-corn club!
It’s a wrap!
When we started thinking about launching Retailgentic, we thought we’d do news updates about once a month. Well here we are with our second update…this week. Who knows what next week holds, stay tuned and let us know your thoughts.