Retail·WalmartWalmart now plans to bring drone deries to ‘most areas that we operate in,’ exec saysBy Jessica MathewsBy Jessica MathewsSenior WriterJessica MathewsSenior WriterJessica Mathews is a senior writer for Fortune covering startups and the venture capital industry.SEE FULL BIO Walmart has been testing drones for more than five years, such as these Florida tests in 2023.Paul Hennesy—Anadolu Agency/Getty ImagesFor more than half a decade, Walmart has been testing a variety of drones to assess the viability of airborne deries.
On Tuesday, a Walmart executive said the company now believes drone deries are ready to become a key part of the retail giant’s operations.
Drone dery will “be in most areas that we operate in,” Walmart senior vice president of transformation and innovation Greg Cathey said Tuesday.
While Cathey did not vide a specific timeline, he made it that the retail giant is moving beyond small-scale tests.
“The regulatory environment is making it where this can be a viable for us,” Cathey said onstage at the UP.Summit, in the city where Walmart is headquartered, Bentonville, Ark.
While drone dery is only currently available at a handful of Walmart’s more than 4,600 U.S.
locations—via partnerships with drone makers Wing, a subsidiary of Alphabet, and Zipline, a startup backed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz—Cathey’s s mark a notable transition in how major companies are treating drone dery.
Walmart is indicating it is piecing together concrete plans to scale drone dery, which Cathey described as “really important” to the company.
Walmart signaled its increasing commitment to drones in June, when it announced it would expand its partnership with Alphabet’s Wing to offer dery across 100 of its stores in Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando, and Tampa.
Onstage Tuesday, Cathey said, “100 stores is just the start,” and announced that Walmart would add another region to the mix: Northwest Arkansas, where it is headquartered, with a dery operation at a Walmart across the street from the retailer’s old headquarters in Bentonville, as well as a location nearby in Rogers, Ark.
While Cathey declined to vide a specific number of stores, he said that Walmart planned to add “a lot” and emphasized that drone dery was a “key part” of the retailer’s last-mile dery strategy.
Drone deries doubled since June Widespread drone dery is ly still several years away owing to the numerous nical, regulatory, and financial issues that need to be ed out.
The Trump administration has issued two executive orders on drone dery, and this summer the FAA finally posed its new rule that would enable drone operators to fly beyond visual line of sight.
However, there is an public period, and the rule isn’t expected to go into effect until next year.
Once it is finalized, it will ly take a long time for companies and retailers to build out the infrastructure needed for mass dery—and for customers to get comfortable enough with the new nology to use it en masse, as drone dery is still unfamiliar to most of the population and has caused concern in some of the communities where testing has taken place.
Nevertheless, Walmart’s public plans offer a major early indication that—after a decade of drone development—some of America’s largest companies do finally see a case and path to scale because of the evolving regulatory environment.
viability has been one of the greatest barriers to scale and adoption over the past several years. Walmart has been experimenting with various drone partnerships for more than six years.
The retailer has for several years had a small-scale testing operation near its headquarters with Zipline, the startup known for transporting blood in several countries in Africa.
Walmart had also made an investment in and launched a temporary service with DroneUp, though the retailer announced earlier this year that it was ending that partnership.
But it’s Alphabet’s Wing, which has emerged as an industry front-runner in the U.S., that Walmart has begun to work with to actually scale.
Wing is one of a select few companies the FAA has allowed to conduct package dery beyond visual line of sight in Dallas—meaning without human observers—as part of its efforts to develop new regulations and parameters specific to drones.
Cathey spoke onstage with Wing CEO Adam Woodworth at the UP.Summit, discussing the plans to scale and the partnership. Zipline was not mentioned in the conversation.
Cathey pointed out onstage that Walmart had now surpassed 300,000 drone deries—double that of the 150,000 deries it had announced this past June.
“We’re committed to this,” Cathey said.Fortune Global Forum returns Oct. 26–27, 2025 in Riyadh. CEOs and global leaders will gather for a dynamic, invitation-only event shaping the future of .
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