How Walmart Used Lottie to Power Its New AI Shopping Assistant, Sparky

Summary & Key ROI

JKR partnered with Animade to bring Walmart’s refreshed AI-powered shopping assistant, Sparky, to life through expressive, lightweight Lottie animations. By combining Illustrator, After Effects, and Lottie, the team delivered a character that feels responsive, human, and emotionally rich.

• Lightweight Lottie animations enabled Sparky to animate fluidly at scale, with each file averaging just 20KB to 30KB (around 10% the size of a GIF!)

• Faster approval cycles thanks to sharp Lottie previews, which let stakeholders review exact motion without quality loss

• Stronger brand personality through a library of over 60 expressive animations, spanning 12 emotional ranges and conversational states

• Enhanced interactivity where developers could easily integrate Lottie files and trigger hidden seasonal easter eggs inside the app

• Optimized app performance by keeping download sizes small and maintaining smooth, uninterrupted animation playback across devices

Bringing Walmart’s AI Shopping Assistant Into the Future

When Walmart aimed to reimagine their brand, together with JKR, the American multinational retail corporation decided to refresh its beloved character into an AI-powered shopping assistant now known as Sparky.

Originally introduced as Smiley in 1996, the character has now evolved into a next-generation assistant that represents Walmart’s commitment to innovation with heart. Through Lottie’s scalable and flexible format, Sparky can now deliver warmth, emotion, and energy at every digital touchpoint.

Animating Personality at Scale

Sparky is designed to connect humanity and technology to a new generation of shoppers.

Sparky lives inside the Walmart app and helps users find products, while also answering any questions they may have. As an AI assistant, Sparky is made to interact with people which meant adding characterful motion was crucial; it needed to feel responsive, empathetic, and alive.

Animation and design studio, Animade, built a library of over 60 vector animations that were crafted to represent different emotions and conversational states. Sparky has expressions that include multiple intermediary states that create transitional navigation paths, enabling instant shifts across 12 emotional ranges; plus a few hidden festive easter eggs triggered by specific user prompts.

To achieve this level of personality, Animade relied heavily on a motion pipeline anchored in After Effects. Facial designs and poses were first signed off in Illustrator before being imported into After Effects for animation. The team leveraged faux-3D techniques to capture the spherical nature of Sparky’s face, using crisp vector shapes to ensure every nuance—from micro-smiles to subtle eyebrow lifts—felt intentional and expressive.

Lightweight Files, Limitless Expressions

By using Lottie, Walmart’s new AI shopping assistant was able to achieve fluid and character-rich motion without sacrificing performance. Each animation remained lightweight enough for instant playback inside the app to ensure that Sparky’s interactions felt natural and uninterrupted; a crucial advantage in large-scale mobile environments where speed and efficiency matter most.

Exporting these animations as Lottie files made the approval process significantly smoother. Thanks to the sharp resolution of Lottie previewers, even at small file sizes, the team could share exact motion tests with stakeholders without any degradation in visual quality. Compared to exporting dozens of GIFs, which would have lacked crispness and ballooned in size, Lottie preserved vector integrity throughout.

File size proved to be a major advantage. Nearly 100 Lottie files were delivered for the project, each averaging only 20 to 30 KB; around 10% the size of a GIF equivalent. For an app ecosystem with millions of users, this reduction directly contributed to keeping the Walmart app performant, lightweight, and highly accessible even on lower-end devices or slower networks.

Implementation was equally seamless on the development side. Walmart’s engineers could drop Lottie files directly into the app, benefitting from native interactivity and the ability to trigger hidden seasonal easter eggs—bringing an extra layer of delight to the overall experience.

Learn more about the creative process behind Sparky at Animade.tv