Walmart and Ulta AI Retail Productivity Play

Walmart is the clearest case. The stock has rallied to about $105.94, but it remains below its 50-day moving average of $110.32 and its 200-day average of $118.20, showing the market is still digesting the move rather than fully embracing the thesis. Yet the longer-term setup is more compelling than the chart suggests. Walmart’s U.S. e-commerce business is already contributing meaningfully to comparable sales, and the company has repeatedly framed growth, margin improvement and return on investment as the core of its operating strategy. AI fits that playbook almost perfectly: recommendation engines, demand forecasting, labor planning, pricing and fulfillment optimization all feed directly into productivity.

Ulta is the more asymmetric story. The beauty chain’s shares have been volatile — recently around $546.40, still below its 200-day moving average of $556.75 — but the business is exactly the kind of high-frequency, data-rich retailer where AI can compound advantages fast. Beauty purchases are repeatable, personalized and digitally influenced, which gives AI tools a clear role in product discovery, targeting, assortment planning and loyalty engagement. For investors, that makes Ulta a potential operating leverage story, not just a consumer discretionary name.

The broader narrative is that AI is becoming a toll road for retailers with scale and data, not just a cost center. The winners will be the companies that already control traffic, inventory and customer relationships. Walmart has the balance sheet, omnichannel reach and logistics muscle to turn AI into lower unit costs at massive scale. Ulta has the customer intimacy and category specificity to convert AI into better conversion and higher basket size. Amazon, which remains a key benchmark in retail tech, is still deeply committed to AI spending, underscoring how competitive the battlefield is and how much of the next efficiency wave is already being financed.

That is why I believe investors are underestimating the second-order winners of the AI boom. The next big gains are not only in the infrastructure behind AI, but in the retailers that can weaponize it to protect margins in a slow-growth consumer environment. If you want exposure to that inflection point, Walmart and Ulta deserve to be on the shortlist now, before the market fully prices AI as a retail productivity engine rather than a Silicon Valley story.