Walmart is giving online shopping a conversational twist. The retailer’s latest partnership with OpenAI lets people buy items directly through the ChatGPT app – turning on a regular basis chats into shopping sessions for meals or personal needs.
“For a few years now, eCommerce shopping experiences have consisted of a search bar and a protracted list of item responses,” said Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart. “That is about to change.”
As reported by Business Insider, Walmart already uses OpenAI’s tools for worker training and productivity, with Sam’s Club employees accessing to ChatGPT’s enterprise version. Walmart has also been developing its own AI assistants, like Sparky, to help with internal operations and shopping tasks.
According to Walmart US CEO John Furner, what matters most is giving shoppers the liberty to buy nevertheless they need.
“We want to be sure we’re constructing in the pliability that you may shop nevertheless you would like,” he said. “Whether that comes off of our marketplace – it’s pickup, delivery, it’s our stores – I would like to be sure that we’re just there to prepare you the best way that you just want to be served.”
From search to conversation
The partnership signals a bigger shift in e-commerce – from keyword searches to AI-guided conversations. Analysts say it represents the subsequent phase of digital shopping, where brand visibility and ad strategies may depend less on search rankings and more on how well products are understood by AI systems.
“We view this as a serious step forward within the adoption and broader acceleration of agentic commerce,” said David Bellinger, analyst at Mizuho. “Walmart is clearly ahead of the curve here, while others have been slow to adapt and even made efforts to block AI web crawlers.”
Agentic shopping, or AI-assisted commerce, allows virtual agents to take over parts of the buying process – from search and product comparison to checkout. A user might ask for cereal based on flavour preferences, and the AI could recommend products and complete the order.
Shifting retail strategies
Walmart’s collaboration with OpenAI comes as more firms test conversational shopping features. In September, OpenAI worked with Stripe to add an “Instant Checkout” button inside ChatGPT, letting users buy items directly in a chat. Some Etsy sellers within the US are already using it for easy purchases.
But this latest approach also creates marketing challenges. Retailers that depend on external AI platforms lose some control over how their listings appear or how shoppers find them. That’s one reason Amazon has kept its product catalogue mostly closed to AI chatbots, as an alternative promoting its own shopping assistant, Rufus.
Rufus sits inside Amazon’s search bar and helps users explore products, however it doesn’t make purchases directly. The design helps Amazon maintain control over user traffic – and protect its $56 billion promoting business, which is dependent upon shoppers staying on Amazon property.
Walmart, meanwhile, is taking the other approach: meeting customers where they’re.
A brand new test for retail AI
The next few months will test whether AI-assisted shopping can turn engagement into sales. OpenAI says ChatGPT already fields about 50 million shopping-related questions a day. Walmart’s integration could turn those interactions right into a latest marketing channel. “We’re still learning how these strategies are going to go,” Furner said last month. “I don’t think we all know yet where it’s going to end, but we do know that the work that we’re doing with our agent, Sparky, is an awesome place to start.”
(Photo by David Montero)
See also: Making AI work for marketers: How YouScan’s Insights Copilot brings clarity to social data
Find out more concerning the Digital Marketing World Forum series and register here.
Read the complete article here
