Walmart 与 Home Depot 为 AI 购物代理设定准入规则

By PYMNTS  |  October 29, 2026

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Highlights

Walmart’s Agent Profiles, which are set to launch in November, let customers cap an agent’s spending at $50, $100 or $200 or approve every order, and agents never see customers’ card details.

Home Depot CIO Angie Brown said the retailer will admit AI agents that identify themselves and the customer they act for, and it is in talks with Meta about how its Muse agent should do that.

Eighty percent of merchants in the PYMNTS Intelligence report “The Agent Advantage” expect to pay a fee or commission on agent sales. A separate PYMNTS Intelligence report found only 15% of merchants have product data ready for agents to read.

An artificial intelligence (AI) agent can now put groceries in a cart and pay for them, and the retailer on the other end decides whether the agent gets in, what it can see and who pays when the order is wrong.

Walmart introduced three tools on Oct. 21: Agent Profiles that give each agent its own identity inside a customer’s account with a spending cap of $50, $100 or $200 or approval on every order; an Agent Gateway that lets approved agents shop through a direct connection without seeing card details; and terms that get an agent blocked if it breaks them. Walmart compared the setup to adding an authorized cardholder and said its returns process applies when an agent does something the customer did not ask for, PYMNTS reported. Agent Profiles will launch in November.

PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wrote in her Wednesday (Oct. 28) column, “Why AI Agents Will Live or Die on Permission,” that the design settles the commercial question before the first order. “Walmart decides who gets in, what they see and what they spend, and says its normal returns process still applies when an agent messes up,” she wrote.

Home Depot Wants Meta’s Muse to Show ID

Home Depot is taking the same position without a gateway. Angie Brown, the retailer’s executive vice president and chief information officer, told Business Insider that Home Depot will support agents that search, compare and buy for customers if they identify themselves as agents and confirm the customer they represent. Brown said Home Depot is in active talks with Meta about how its Muse agent should introduce itself, and that the retailer does not want to lose contact with the customers behind those agents.

Meta and Sierra announced the Personal Agent Protocol on Oct. 6 to standardize that introduction, with Walmart, Shopify and Stripe among the companies developing it, PYMNTS reported. Sierra published a draft of the protocol on Oct. 9 that does not yet handle payments.

Amazon drew its line the other way. It blocked Muse less than two weeks after launch, saying Meta never secured permission. Amazon also raised concerns about how the agent identified itself. Webster saw the two retailers as closer than they look. “Amazon said no to agents from outside their virtual walls and Walmart said yes. But they said the same thing. Agents come in on the owner’s terms,” she wrote.

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Walmart wants the extra orders, while Amazon has an ad business built on shoppers browsing its own pages. “Same agent, different business model, different answer,” Webster wrote.

80% of Merchants Expect to Pay for Agent Sales

The rules cover more than fraud. They set who holds the customer, who holds the data and what access will cost. PYMNTS Intelligence’s “The Agent Advantage: How Merchants Plan to Win AI Shopping,” based on an August survey of 60 senior eCommerce decision-makers at U.S. merchants with $50 million to $1 billion in revenue, found that 80% expect to pay a fee or commission on completed agent sales. Fewer than three in 10 would offer their full catalog to agents on the same terms as their own site. “Blocking usually gives way to a price,” Webster wrote, adding that merchants “just want to know what they’re buying.”

The product data is not ready, either. Another PYMNTS Intelligence report, the “2026 Global Digital Shopping Index: Merchant Edition,” which was created in collaboration with Visa Acceptance Solutions, found that 15% of merchants have structured product data for agents to read.

Liability is an open problem. Walmart’s returns process covers agent mistakes, and American Express has announced protection for registered-agent errors, but Webster noted that nothing covers an agent that rummages through bank or patient records or breaks a site without buying.

“The agent company sells the convenience and keeps the upside. The bank, the merchant, the hospital, the agency, the business gets the risk, the cleanup and the angry or confused customer when things don’t work as advertised,” Webster wrote.

Walmart’s Agent Profiles arrive in November, payments are still on the roadmap for Sierra’s protocol, and Home Depot’s talks with Meta are still open.

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