Walmart’s Dr. Astha Purohit on the Rise of AI Agents in Retail

The retail landscape is currently fracturing into three distinct tiers based on how consumers make purchases. According to Purohit, luxury goods remain an experiential, human-centric domain where AI is largely excluded from the customer journey. Considered purchases—such as electronics or appliances—utilize AI for research and comparison, though the final choice remains firmly in the hands of the buyer. Everyday shopping, however, is rapidly shifting toward automation, where AI agents manage subscriptions and replenishment, turning the chore of grocery buying into a background rhythm.

To remain visible in this new era, retailers must address two major technical hurdles. The first is catalogue debt; legacy data is often too messy for machines to parse, requiring AI-driven cleanup to normalize taxonomies and fill in missing attributes. The second is the emergence of generative engine optimization (GEO). Unlike traditional search engine optimization, GEO requires brands to build trust signals across the wider web—such as expert reviews and community sentiment on platforms like Reddit. Because AI agents treat these external signals as proxies for human trust, clean structured data alone is no longer enough to secure a recommendation. As Purohit notes, the brands that survive will be those that balance this algorithmic visibility with a genuine, human-centric layer that machines cannot easily replicate.