OpenAI is moving fast. The past few weeks and months have seen rapid-fire developments, including partnerships up and down the stack – from processing to data centers to content. Its own feature and version rollouts have likewise been fast & furious, acting as the pace car for the agentic AI market.
Somewhere in that procession of market moves, OpenAI announced it will start to integrate eCommerce directly into ChatGPT. Under the heading of AI eating the world, the thought is that you can execute end-to-end shopping workflows in ChatGPT – from research to price comparisons to transactions.
This happened a few weeks ago and was referenced heavily at the recent Street Fight Live, including Yext’s Brook Henderson’s insights on the age of AI search. At the time, it was positioned as an agentic shopping system that can perform complex and multi-part shopping tasks (more on that in a bit).
With that foundational layer of functionality, the program has potential… but only so far as the retailers and e-tailers that come on board as partners. These represent the content, product listings, and transactional functionality that are fed into ChatGPT to make it a comprehensive shopping experience.
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Walmart Scale
To that end, OpenAI initially named Etsy and Shopify as launch partners. Now, just a few weeks later (again, the speed of AI), the program has gained steam, scale, and a dose of validation with Walmart. OpenAI announced on Tuesday that the retail giant will join ChatGPT’s agentic shopping engine.
The partnership will specifically bring groceries, household essentials, and other Walmart product categories to ChatGPT so users can browse and transact. That includes product listings getting indexed/trained, as well as the ability for customers to check out without leaving ChatGPT.
From a UX perspective, Walmart shoppers can connect their accounts with ChatGPT for a more integrated experience. This raises one of many benefits for OpenAI in that it establishes direct customer relationships with signed-in users, first-party shopping data, and a certain degree of stickiness.
For all these reasons, OpenAI isn’t alone in chasing agentic shopping. Google recently launched its AP2 protocol that lets eCommerce players integrate their products and shopping flows directly into Gemini. This aligns with Google’s longstanding quest to keep the entire click stream under its roof.
Surface Area
Backing up, what are we talking about here, and what’s meant by agentic shopping? In short, shoppers can prompt ChatGPT with complex multi-part shopping tasks. Given prompts like “compare prices and features for all of the 2025 mini-LED TVs on the market,” it will come back with a time-saving list.
This functionality was present before OpenAI’s latest developments, and is a tenet of the rapid rise of agentic AI in general. The latest evolution is the transaction part. In other words, research done on ChatGPT would previously hand off to another engine or eCommerce site to consummate the purchase.
By integrating transactional functionality directly in ChatGPT, OpenAI effectively closes the loop and keeps consumers under its roof for the entire shopping flow. This has lots of implications for its monetization potential. Again, Google has been chasing a version of this principle for years.
But for OpenAI, Google, or any agentic AI shopping engine, it’s only as good as the breadth and depth of participating retailers, as noted. Fortunately, they’re motivated to play ball to maximize their own surface area. Given that, and coming full circle to the speed of AI, we expect more integrations to follow quickly.
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