AI companies within the United States and China are moving quickly to bring shopping tools into their major consumer apps. Each side wants to construct an all-purpose service that helps people search, talk, buy, and manage each day tasks in a single place.
OpenAI has added a brand new “shopping research” tool to ChatGPT. The feature can pull together buying guides for users and comes just ahead of the busy holiday period. It works in an analogous way to AI shopping services already common on Chinese platforms reminiscent of Tmall and Taobao.
Users can type prompts like “Best TVs for a shiny room,” and the system will search the net for suitable items. It then asks follow-up questions contained in the chat to help narrow the list and guide people toward options that match what they want.
The update builds on a step OpenAI took in September, when it added “fast checkout,” which lets users buy certain products inside ChatGPT. The company said shopping research will later link with fast checkout so people can move from search to purchase in a single place.
China’s web firms have been using this model for years. Their apps often pull together chat, videos, payments, and shopping in a single space. Alibaba and ByteDance at the moment are adding more fast shopping features to their AI chat apps as they struggle to keep users inside their wider platforms.
ByteDance, based in Beijing, recently linked its major AI app, Doubao, with Douyin, its online shopping and short-video platform. Douyin sits contained in the China-only version of TikTok and drives much of the firm’s online sales. QuestMobile says Doubao has 172 million users, while Douyin has greater than 1 billion.
As reported by the South China Morning Post, Alibaba is making an analogous push with Qwen, its major consumer AI app. The app has been downloaded greater than 10 million times since its launch last week. The company also said Qwen reached those 10 million downloads in the primary week after its relaunch, which brought several older apps under one unified name on iOS and Android.
Qwen’s fast rise comes as China doesn’t allow access to ChatGPT, giving local apps a clearer path to reach recent users.
Alibaba has said it wants to shift toward an AI-first approach and use the reasoning and agent features in its Qwen models across its full shopping network. That includes Taobao and Tmall, which together reach greater than 1 billion users.
One market watcher, Kenny Ng of China Everbright Securities International, said: “Whether or not they’ll leverage the Qwen app to drive their to-consumer business will likely be a very important factor influencing the corporate’s future valuation.”
Alibaba has already added an “AI Mode” to Alibaba.com, its global business-to-business site. The tool may help sellers find products through the use of large language models to adjust search results based on the user’s needs.
ChatGPT is blocked in mainland China, but Alibaba said it plans to release a world version of Qwen for users outside the country. Both OpenAI and Alibaba want to widen their app ecosystems by adding outside services. ChatGPT is bringing in apps reminiscent of Booking.com and Spotify for its greater than 800 million users. Alibaba said Qwen will slowly add services from across the firm, including maps, food delivery, and travel booking.
Alibaba added that Qwen may also fold in office tools, education, and health guidance as a part of a wider plan to tie more each day tasks into one app.
The growth of Qwen also follows a move by Ant Group, Alibaba’s finance arm, which launched its own multimodal AI assistant called LingGuang. Ant Group said LingGuang crossed 1 million downloads in its first 4 days. This shows how Alibaba’s wider group can be trying to construct useful consumer-facing AI tools.
Competition between the most important AI firms in each countries is constructing as all sides tries to shape the subsequent stage of online shopping. The idea is to move toward “agentic commerce,” where AI tools handle more of the steps people often take after they shop online. Instead of searching, comparing, and trying out on their very own, users may depend on AI tools that ask a couple of questions and place orders for them.
Analysts at McKinsey & Co said in a report last month that global consumer retail could reach US$5 trillion by 2030 as these AI-driven tools grow to be a standard a part of how people shop.
(Photo by Shutter Speed)
See also: Retailers turn to generative AI for smoother store operations
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