Walmart Data Ventures announced at its Inspire conference this week that Scintilla, its first-party data platform for merchants and suppliers, will receive significant upgrades in 2027 (Modern Retail). New features include access to marketplace data for suppliers who sell on both first-party and Walmart.com channels, customizable dashboards that connect multiple data sets, custom alerts, and deeper integration with the Marty AI agent and Walmart's replenishment systems (Modern Retail). The new dashboards will allow users to see sales trends, customer behavior changes, and supply chain performance in a single view (Modern Retail).
The expanded AI functionality represents a shift from summarization to actionable recommendations. Currently, Scintilla's AI is limited to explaining metrics, highlighting report changes, and summarizing findings (Modern Retail). The upgraded Marty agent will analyze all data sets to alert users and recommend actions—such as addressing customer churn through supply chain or advertising interventions (Modern Retail). For commerce practitioners, this means suppliers gain deeper decision intelligence to uncover growth opportunities across Walmart's formats and markets, though marketplace-only sellers remain excluded from the platform for now.
Walmart has been expanding Scintilla access beyond traditional suppliers; the company plans to extend the platform to Sam's Club suppliers in the U.S. next year (Modern Retail). Walmart Data Ventures, led by Mark Hardy, continues to drive meaningful growth for the company, though revenue is not disclosed in public financial statements (Modern Retail).