AI companies in the US and China are moving quickly to bring shopping tools into their main consumer apps. Each wants to build an all-purpose service that helps people search, talk, buy, and manage daily tasks from one place.
OpenAI has added a 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 a similar way to AI shopping services already common on Chinese platforms like Tmall and Taobao.
Users can type prompts like “Best TVs for a bright room,” and the system will search the web for suitable items. It then asks follow-up questions inside 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 “instant checkout,” which lets users buy certain products inside ChatGPT. The company said shopping research will later link with instant checkout so people can move from search to purchase in one place.
China’s internet firms have been using this model for years. Their apps often pull together chat, videos, payments, and shopping in one space. Alibaba and ByteDance are now adding more instant shopping features to their AI chat apps as they try to keep users inside their platforms.
ByteDance linked its main AI app, Doubao, with Douyin recently, its online shopping and short-video platform. Douyin sits inside 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 more than 1 billion.
As reported by the South China Morning Post, Alibaba is making a similar push with Qwen, its main consumer AI app. The app has been downloaded more than 10 million times since its launch last week. The company said Qwen reached those 10 million downloads in the first week after the relaunch, which brought several older apps under one unified name on iOS and Android.
Qwen’s fast rise comes as China does not allow its citizens to access to ChatGPT, giving local apps a clearer path to reach new users.
Alibaba has said it wants to shift toward an AI-first approach and use the reasoning and agent features in its Qwen models in its full shopping network. That includes Taobao and Tmall, which together reach more than 1 billion users.
One market watcher, Kenny Ng of China Everbright Securities International, said: “Whether or not they can use the Qwen app to drive their to-consumer business will be an important factor influencing the company’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 by using 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 an international 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 like Booking.com and Spotify for its more than 800 million users. Alibaba said Qwen will slowly add services from in the firm, including maps, food delivery, and travel booking.
Alibaba added that Qwen will also fold in office tools, education, and health guidance as part of a wider plan to tie more daily 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 the one million downloads mark in its first four days. This shows how Alibaba’s wider group is also trying to build useful consumer-facing AI tools.
Competition between the major AI firms in both countries is building as each side tries to shape the next stage of online shopping. The idea is to move toward “agentic commerce,” where AI tools handle more of the steps people usually take when they shop online. Instead of searching, comparing, and checking out on their own, users may rely on AI tools that ask a few questions and place orders for them.
Analysts at McKinsey said in a report last month that global consumer retail could reach US$5 trillion in value by 2030 as AI-driven tools become a normal part of how people shop.
(Photo by Shutter Speed)
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