Walmart opening its checkout to AI agents is one of the clearest signs that agentic commerce is moving from demos to production. The trust scaffolding — human approval, spending caps — is exactly what needs to become standard before people hand a bot their wallet, so the design here matters more than the feature itself. Strategically, this sharpens the industry divide: some retailers treat agents as a new channel to embrace, others guard their funnel and ad revenue jealously. On our read, the real battle ahead is over standards — agent identity, checkout protocols, payment rails — and Walmart is betting early that openness wins. If the rollout works, expect competitors to scramble to match it within quarters, not years.