At CES 2026, VP of business and product marketing of Walmart Connect, Khurrum Malik, explains why Walmart’s AI push is built for stores, shoppers and sales – not hype. From Sparky and Marty to incrementality tools and Vizio, retail media is becoming a full-funnel system.
Retail media looks very different when you’re forced to test ideas in the open. When new technologies don’t live in pilots or presentations, but are exposed to real customers, real stores and real purchasing behaviour – every day.
That’s the vantage point Khurrum Malik brings. As VP of business and product marketing of Walmart Connect, he operates inside a business where scale isn’t an ambition but a condition – and where marketing only works if it connects directly to how people actually shop.
It’s a perspective that shapes how he views CES itself. When we caught up with him at CES 2026, AI was once again the loudest conversation on the show floor. But Malik’s reaction was notably measured.
“Speaking with our partners and advertisers, there’s a lot of excitement around AI,” he says. “But there’s also apprehension. The common theme is: what can it do for me? How can it keep me out of trouble – but, more importantly, how can it grow my business?”
Compared with last year, he senses a shift. “Last year was a lot more noise. This year feels more real. It feels much more about implementation.”
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For Malik, retail media starts with a simple premise: it has to earn its keep. “Retail media exists to derive value for advertisers. All media does, but retail media is very front and center on that.”
Historically, that value was tied closely to shopper marketing. Today, Malik frames it more bluntly. “We think about retail media as being built to spark sales.”
Doing that consistently, he argues, requires scale – not as a talking point, but as an operating reality. “We have 150 million omnichannel customers every week, both in-store and digital. And we have 4,600 stores.”
That reach underpins everything Walmart Connect is building and explains why its approach to AI is less about spectacle than systems.
Walmart’s customer-facing AI assistant, Sparky, is one of the clearest examples of that thinking in practice. Rather than positioning AI as a novelty layer, Walmart has embedded it directly into the shopping journey.
“Within that scale, we have an agentic experience for customers,” Malik explains. “It’s on the app and web, and it helps customers discover products.”
The behavior matters. “When we survey customers, 81% say they want to use Sparky for discovering new products. Help me prepare for a moment – a birthday party, for example. Solve a problem for me.”
Behind the scenes, this reflects a broader shift Walmart is leaning into: AI-first shopping experiences that anticipate needs rather than simply respond to queries. Search remains the dominant entry point, but agentic interfaces are beginning to sit alongside it as new discovery surfaces – ones that retail media will inevitably have to adapt to.
On the advertiser side, that adaptation is already underway. “If Sparky is for the customer, Marty is for businesses,” Malik says.
First introduced last year and now being rolled out more widely, Marty acts as an advertising assistant inside Walmart Connect, helping brands plan, optimize and troubleshoot campaigns through conversational prompts rather than dashboards alone.
“It helps advertisers optimize campaigns – keywords, share of voice, how to make campaigns work harder.”
What’s surprised Walmart most is how advertisers are using it. “97% of the inquiries coming through are new. They’re asking for new things, new ways to help.”
In practice, that means advertisers aren’t just automating existing tasks. They’re probing performance, benchmarking categories and interrogating their own activity more deeply – a sign, Malik suggests, that AI is reducing friction rather than replacing judgment. “You don’t need to wait for someone to support you. You get the agent to help you. It makes things much more efficient.”
Despite growing interest in automation, Malik is careful not to overpromise where it leads. “It’s very early,” he says, when asked about bot-to-bot commerce. “We’re really focused on people-to-agent experiences.”
That discipline applies just as strongly to creative. Walmart is increasingly using Gen AI to help brands scale creative output – from automated lifestyle backgrounds to faster display asset generation – particularly for smaller advertisers.
“We can generate display creative and save about 80% of the time,” Malik says. “But if that creative doesn’t perform as well as something they did on their own, it’s a trade-off.”
The principle remains consistent. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s created by a person or a machine. What matters is whether it drives sales.”
Measurement, Malik suggests, is where retail media’s credibility is ultimately tested. “This week, we launched search incrementality. If you run a search campaign on Walmart, we can show you the incremental lift you got.”
What he’s describing is a shift away from simple attribution towards isolating what advertising actually caused – separating sales that would have happened anyway from those genuinely driven by media. In food categories, Malik says, that translated into a $2.30 incremental return on ad spend.
Walmart has also published research with Circana, showing Walmart Connect delivering incremental ROAS 2.5 times higher than social benchmarks – across both digital and in-store activity.
For Malik, the implication is clear: stores and screens shouldn’t be measured separately. “We think about store conversions and digital conversions as one and the same. The store is just another way for people to engage and shop – just like the web. Sparky is another surface, too.”
That framing leads directly to what he sees as the next major opportunity. “In-store is the next great frontier.”
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The acquisition of Vizio pushes Walmart further into that territory, giving it owned connected TV inventory alongside search, display, in-store and delivery touchpoints. “It’s a really exciting time to have a story you can show sells,” Malik says. “Create demand and fulfil demand – all in one.”
Asked whether that makes Walmart a media company, he’s pragmatic. “It’s hard to have Walmart be just one thing. But the Connect piece is a media business.”
Retail media, Malik argues, is following a familiar trajectory – much like social media did a decade ago – expanding beyond a single format into a broader digital media ecosystem. “What’s different is the roots,” he says. “And how we use that data to influence better media.”
At CES, amid the noise around AI’s potential, Malik’s message is notably grounded: technology matters, but only insofar as it survives contact with reality – and proves it can spark sales.
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