Walmart is partnering with OpenAI to allow customers to shop through ChatGPT, the retail giant announced Tuesday.
“For many years now, eCommerce shopping experiences have consisted of a search bar and a long list of item responses. That is about to change,” Walmart President and CEO Doug McMillon said in a statement.
“There is a native AI experience coming that is multi-media, personalized and contextual,” he added. “We are running towards that more enjoyable and convenient future with Sparky and through partnerships including this important step with OpenAI.”
The company unveiled its artificial intelligence (AI) shopping assistant, Sparky, earlier this year. The new partnership with OpenAI seeks to take advantage of the AI firm’s Instant Checkout feature, which allows users to purchase items directly within ChatGPT.
The feature initially allowed for purchases from Etsy and is set to expand to Shopify merchants, such as Glossier, SKIMS, Spanx and Vuori, according to the announcement late last month.
“We’re excited to partner with Walmart to make everyday purchases a little simpler. It’s just one way AI will help people every day under our work together,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement Tuesday.
The Walmart partnership underscores a growing focus across the tech and retail industries on agentic AI — technology that can perform multistep tasks for users.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff suggested Tuesday at his company’s annual Dreamforce conference that agentic AI is the “next revolution.”
“We’ve gone through cloud, we’ve gone through mobile, we’ve gone through social, we’ve gone through predictive AI. And now we’re entering this new agentic AI revolution,” Benioff said.
