While Amazon blocks AI agents, Walmart rolls out the welcome mat

Walmart is positioning itself for agentic commerce by launching an Agent Gateway built on MCP, enabling approved AI agents to search inventory and complete purchases on behalf of customers, while giving shoppers granular controls over permissions, spending limits, and separate agent profiles. For CIOs and technology leaders, this signals that AI agents are becoming a new digital channel that can drive conversion and customer convenience, but only if IT can enforce identity, authorization, data minimization, transaction governance, and exception handling at scale.