Walmart is giving online shopping a conversational twist. The retailer’s new partnership with OpenAI lets people buy items directly through the ChatGPT app – turning everyday chats into shopping sessions for meals or personal needs.
“For many years now, eCommerce shopping experiences have consisted of a search bar and a long 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 employee training and productivity, with Sam’s Club workers 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 freedom to buy however they want.
“We want to make sure we’re building in the flexibility that you can shop however you want,” he said. “Whether that comes off of our marketplace – it’s pickup, delivery, it’s our stores – I need to make sure that we’re just there to prepare you the way that you want to be served.”
From search to conversation
The partnership signals a larger shift in e-commerce – from keyword searches to AI-guided conversations. Analysts say it represents the next 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 major step forward in 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 or 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 companies 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 in the US are already using it for simple purchases.
But this new approach also creates marketing challenges. Retailers that rely 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, instead promoting its own shopping assistant, Rufus.
Rufus sits inside Amazon’s search bar and helps users explore products, but it doesn’t make purchases directly. The design helps Amazon maintain control over user traffic – and protect its $56 billion advertising business, which depends on shoppers staying on Amazon property.
Walmart, meanwhile, is taking the opposite approach: meeting customers where they are.
A 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 into a new marketing channel. “We’re still learning how these strategies are going to go,” Furner said last month. “I don’t think we know yet where it’s going to end, but we do know that the work that we’re doing with our agent, Sparky, is a great place to start.”
(Photo by David Montero)
See also: Making AI work for marketers: How YouScan’s Insights Copilot brings clarity to social data
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