Your customer's AI negotiates with you: what Walmart's supplier chatbot means for suppliers

Published 2026-11-10 · Istrate Laurentiu, Negotra

When a large buyer sends a price review through an AI agent, the supplier still answers by email, by phone and by spreadsheet. The buyer's side now runs every day, at any hour, on rules it set in advance. This note sums up what is public about these negotiations and what a supplier can prepare.

What Walmart's pilot showed

Harvard Business Review described Walmart's pilot with Pactum's negotiation chatbot in November 2022. According to the case study summarised by Talking Logistics, the three-month pilot targeted tail-end suppliers of goods not for resale. It reported:

agreement with 64% of the suppliers approached, against a 20% target;
average savings of 1.5% on the spend negotiated;
payment terms extended to an average of 35 days;
an average negotiation turnaround of 11 days.

In April 2023, PYMNTS relayed a Bloomberg report that nearly three out of four suppliers preferred negotiating with the chatbot.

It is no longer one retailer

Pactum's public client list includes Walmart, Maersk, Linde, SUEZ and Greencore, and, according to the Honeywell testimonial on Pactum's site, Pactum became Honeywell's standard for supplier negotiations. At Gartner's IT Symposium/Xpo 2025, Gartner forecast that AI agents will intermediate more than $15 trillion of B2B spending by 2028 (reported by Digital Commerce 360).

What changes for the supplier

Speed. A buying agent can send dozens of requests and counter-offers in the time a sales team answers one. Slow answers lose rounds.
Consistency. The agent compares every answer with the last one. Concessions given under pressure become the next starting point.
Payment terms. In the Walmart pilot, longer terms were part of the deal. Each extra day has a cost that has to be priced.
A floor. Without a written minimum margin per product, a fast answer can be a loss-making answer.

What to prepare this quarter

Write down a minimum margin per product or product family, and who may go below a list price.
Price payment terms: what 30, 45 and 60 days cost you.
Decide the order value and discount above which a person must approve.
Make your catalogue, units, volume tiers and lead times readable by software (see our checklist).

Where Negotra fits

Negotra is a sales agent on the supplier's side. It answers the buyer's agent within the rules above, concedes step by step, never offers below the floor and sends the deal to a person above your limits. We tested it on 110,000 simulated negotiations against procurement agents in five styles, including hostile buyer moves: 0 offers below the floor. These are simulation results on a demo catalogue, not customer results; your results depend on your catalogue, customers and rules.

Free 30-day pilot on your own price list, then you pay only 20% of the gain the agent brings. See how the pilot works →