Shop Walmart Directly in ChatGPT
▼ Summary
– Walmart announced a partnership with OpenAI enabling customers to shop for groceries (excluding fresh food), household essentials, and other products via the ChatGPT AI chatbot with instant checkout.
– The feature will allow Sam’s Club members to plan meals, restock essentials, and discover new items while interacting with the AI, and requires linking Walmart accounts to ChatGPT and using a “buy” button.
– Walmart aims to use the partnership to better learn and predict customer needs, making online shopping more personalized and proactive rather than just reactive.
– This collaboration follows OpenAI’s plan to enter e-commerce with agentic shopping systems, including partnerships with Etsy and Shopify sellers, and Walmart also has its own AI shopping assistant called Sparky for product discovery and purchases.
– Walmart and Sam’s Club already use AI in other business areas, such as speeding up fashion production and improving customer care, and the CEO emphasized a shift toward more personalized, multimedia AI shopping experiences.
Walmart has unveiled a new collaboration with OpenAI, enabling customers to purchase a wide array of goods directly through the ChatGPT interface. This integration covers items such as groceries, excluding fresh produce, along with household necessities and other merchandise, all with an instant checkout process. Shoppers simply need to link their Walmart account to ChatGPT and tap a “buy” button within the app to complete their transactions.
Sam’s Club members will also benefit from this agentic shopping capability, using it to plan meals, replenish everyday supplies, and uncover new products during their conversations with the AI. When the feature becomes available later this fall, it will include offerings from third-party sellers as well.
According to Walmart, this arrangement with OpenAI will help the retailer better understand and anticipate customer preferences. The goal is to shift online shopping from a purely reactive model to one that is more personalized and forward-thinking.
This move comes on the heels of OpenAI’s recent e-commerce initiative, which focuses on an agentic system for product discovery, recommendations, and payment processing. OpenAI has also confirmed partnerships with Etsy and Shopify merchants as part of the same effort.
ChatGPT is not the only AI shopping tool Walmart is developing. The company recently launched its own generative AI assistant named Sparky, designed to help shoppers find, compare, and buy items. Future updates will allow Sparky to handle reorders, service bookings, and interpret various inputs, from text and images to audio and video.
Walmart and OpenAI already cooperate in other business areas. The retailer has implemented OpenAI Certifications and ChatGPT Enterprise for internal team use. Both Walmart and Sam’s Club apply artificial intelligence extensively, for example accelerating fashion production by as much as 18 weeks and cutting customer service response times by up to 40%.
“For a long time, online shopping has meant typing into a search box and scrolling through pages of results. That’s going to change,” said Walmart President and CEO Doug McMillon in a statement. “A native AI experience is emerging, one that’s multimedia, tailored to the individual, and context-aware. We’re embracing that more convenient and enjoyable future with Sparky and through strategic partnerships, including this key step with OpenAI.”
(Source: TechCrunch)
