Walmart has put its chief executive's name on a promise that its AI shopping assistant and its electronic shelf tags will not be used to charge shoppers more based on who they are. In a public letter to customers and Sam's Club members dated September 25, President and CEO John Furner said Walmart will not set prices using a shopper's income, shopping history, urgency or estimated ability to pay. He summed it up in one line: "We price the product, not the person."
The letter lands at an awkward moment for retail AI. Sparky, Walmart's generative shopping assistant, is growing fast. Digital shelf labels are being rolled out across the chain's roughly 4,600 U.S. stores by the end of 2026. And regulators in Washington and several state capitals are building rules against what critics call "surveillance pricing," where personal data is used to set individual prices.
Three Commitments, One Assistant
Furner's letter makes three commitments. First, Walmart will not set different prices based on who a customer is or the time of day. Second, its shopping tools, Sparky included, will not use information customers share to raise their price or to hide lower-priced options that meet their needs. Third, customers will decide whether to share extra details in exchange for more personalized help, and Walmart says it will be clear about how that data is used and will protect it. The company adds that people, not algorithms, will continue to oversee pricing, and that it will "monitor and test" its technology against the pledge.
The Sparky passage is the part aimed most directly at AI. "We've never used the relationships our associates have with customers to charge more, and we won't do that with AI," Furner wrote, calling a customer's use of the assistant "an invitation to serve you better, not to use your personal information to set a personalized price."
The stakes around Sparky are growing. On Walmart's August 20 earnings call, Furner said the number of customers using the assistant was up 70% from a year earlier, and that shoppers who use it spend 40% more per order than those who don't, according to the supplier-focused outlet Winning With Walmart. Sparky already notices what customers have recently bought online and in stores to build meal plans and one-click baskets. That is the kind of personal context critics fear could someday drive prices.
The Shelf Labels Question
The letter also defends Walmart's electronic shelf labels, which have drawn social-media suspicion that they enable surge pricing. Furner said the labels keep the shelf price consistent with what rings up at checkout and spare workers from swapping paper tags by hand, a job he said he has done himself and called time-consuming. A Walmart explainer published September 4 describes the labels as closed-system displays with no cameras, microphones or facial recognition, and says every customer in a given store sees the same price. Walmart said in March that about 2,300 U.S. stores already had the labels, and CNBC reported the rollout would reach every U.S. store by year-end.
Much of this is not new. Walmart's July pricing overview already listed surveillance pricing and surge pricing as practices it does not use. What is new, as Winning With Walmart noted, is that the CEO has signed it and that it now explicitly covers AI tools and the data customers give them. Business Insider reported that Furner described the letter as a response to questions he has received this year about the shelf labels and Sparky.
Why It Matters
The timing looks deliberate. September 25 was the last day of public comment on the Federal Trade Commission's proposed enforcement policy on personalized pricing. Released August 19, the proposal says companies that personalize prices should clearly disclose it where consumers would reasonably expect prices not to depend on their personal data. States are moving faster. New York's Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act, in force since November 2025, requires a notice saying a price was set by an algorithm using the shopper's personal data. Maryland's ban on individualized food pricing takes effect October 1. New Jersey signed a grocery surveillance-pricing ban in July that will also pause new electronic shelf label rollouts for a year starting in February 2027.
Banks are uneasy too. This week a group including Bank of America, Capital One, NatWest and ING warned that AI shopping agents are outpacing fraud, privacy and transparency protections. Their message was that consumers don't know whose side the agent is on. Walmart's letter is essentially a public answer to that question for Sparky.
There are gaps worth watching. The pledge covers higher prices, but it does not say whether individually targeted discounts and promotions count. That is exactly where state lawmakers, the National Retail Federation and the FTC are still arguing. It also doesn't say how Sparky ranks sponsored products against organic results, even though the assistant now carries ads, or whether the promise covers prices set by third-party Marketplace sellers on Walmart.com. And "monitor and test" comes with no outside auditor and no published metrics.
What to Watch
The next tests are regulatory and technical. Watch whether the FTC finalizes its personalized-pricing policy after reviewing the comments, and whether New York Governor Kathy Hochul signs the stricter One Fair Price Act. Watch whether Walmart publishes any evidence of the testing Furner promised. And as the shelf-label rollout finishes, watch whether rivals such as Amazon, Kroger and Target make similar public pledges about their own AI assistants. If "price the product, not the person" becomes an industry standard for agentic commerce, it will likely be because regulators forced it, and Walmart has now put itself ahead of them in writing.
“We've never used the relationships our associates have with customers to charge more, and we won't do that with AI.”— John Furner, President and CEO, Walmart Inc.