Amazon and Walmart are the two dominant forces in US retail. They are also taking fundamentally different approaches to agentic commerce — and those differences will shape how payments, checkout, and consumer trust get redesigned over the next three years. This divergence has direct implications for card networks, payment processors, authentication infrastructure, and anyone building for the future of checkout.
Amazon: Closed Stack, Agentic Inside-Out
Amazon is building agentic commerce from the inside out — embedding AI agents deep into its own proprietary infrastructure and deliberately keeping external agents at arm’s length. The strategy is control through ownership.
This week Amazon unveiled an agentic AI experience inside Seller Central, allowing merchants to visualise data, model scenarios, and act on AI-generated insights without leaving the platform. Alongside this, AWS launched Amazon Connect Health — a fully agentic AI solution for healthcare that handles patient verification, scheduling, medical histories, and payment coding. Amazon is also positioning its own AI models as the foundation for call centre optimisation.
The pattern is consistent: Amazon is building vertical, integrated agentic stacks within its own ecosystem. And critically — Amazon has blocked external AI agent access entirely to its commerce platform. If you want to shop Amazon via an AI agent, it will be Amazon’s agent, on Amazon’s terms, with Amazon’s payment rails.
For payments, this has significant implications. Amazon Pay, its stored credentials, and its one-click checkout infrastructure become the exclusive payment layer for agent-initiated transactions within its walled garden. External wallets, card networks, and third-party payment providers get no direct seat at that table.
Walmart: Open Agentic, People-Led
Walmart is taking the opposite bet. At the Morgan Stanley conference this week, Walmart executives drew a sharp distinction between what they call “robotic commerce” — automated, rule-based execution — and “agentic commerce,” which they define as personalised product discovery powered by AI that understands context and intent.
Walmart’s strategy is already paying big dividends as their own internal AI agent Sparky delivers 35% increase in basket size.
Walmart’s strategy is “people-led and tech-powered.” Rather than replacing human judgment with autonomous agents, Walmart is investing heavily in augmenting its 1.6 million US and Canadian employees — offering free AI training through a partnership with Google’s AI Professional Certification programme. Digital shelf labels are rolling out across all 5,200 US stores by 2027, creating the physical infrastructure for dynamic, AI-driven pricing and inventory management.
Crucially, Walmart is leaning into Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), the open protocol announced at NRF in January 2026 that allows external AI agents to interact with retailers in a standardised, interoperable way. Where Amazon blocks external agents, Walmart is building to receive them.
The Payment Divergence
These two architectural choices create two very different payment futures:
| Amazon | Walmart | |
|---|---|---|
| Agent access | Closed — Amazon agents only | Open — via Google UCP and partners |
| Payment rails | Amazon Pay / stored credentials | Open to multiple payment methods |
| Authentication | Amazon-managed identity | Device-based / Google credential layer |
| Workforce model | Autonomous systems | AI-augmented humans |
| Protocol stance | Proprietary | Open / interoperable |
In Amazon’s model, Amazon controls the agent, the checkout, and the payment. In Walmart’s “have it your way” model, open protocols like UCP and Google’s AP2 remain relevant. Card networks, issuers, and processors can still participate (if they adapt to the new mandate-based trust model where agents present cryptographically signed proof of user intent before a transaction completes).
What This Means for the Payments Industry
The Amazon vs Walmart divergence is not just a retail story. It is an early preview of the structural split coming across the entire commerce landscape:
- Closed ecosystems (Amazon, potentially Apple) will route agentic transactions through proprietary rails, compressing network economics and reducing interchange opportunity.
- Open ecosystems (Walmart via UCP, Target, and others adopting open protocols) will require payment providers to support mandate-based authorisation flows — intent mandates, cart mandates, and cryptographic proof of delegation.
- Trust. Amazon doesn’t need cross domain trust, they can control end-end. Walmart does need it. This creates more network dependency but it is also an ecosystem where everyone is investing to make it work.
The Bigger Picture
What Amazon and Walmart are building right now is the commercial infrastructure of the next decade. The choices they make about openness, authentication, and payment rails will become the defaults that thousands of smaller retailers follow.
Amazon’s bet is that owning the full stack (agent, checkout, payment) delivers the best consumer experience and the highest margin. Amazon will win in speed and control as they manage everything.
Walmart’s bet is that an open, interoperable layer where the benefit from investments across a community of stakeholders that build on trusted protocols and global scale across a physical and digital estate of 5,200 stores.
Both bets are rational. Both will find customers. But only one of them leaves room for the existing payments industry to participate.
Sources: PYMNTS, Digital Commerce 360, Investing.com (Walmart Morgan Stanley Conference), FourWeekMBA