Walmart’s new partnership with OpenAI will allow its customers to shop through ChatGPT.
They can ask the chatbot to recommend things like “Christmas gifts for my dog-obsessed cousin,” and it will return a personalized selection of products. “For many years now, e-commerce shopping experiences have consisted of a search bar and a long list of item responses,” says Doug McMillon, Walmart president and CEO. “That is about to change.”
Notably, ChatGPT will not direct the user to the Walmart website. Instead, you can purchase the product from within the chat through OpenAI’s new Instant Checkout technology. McMillon calls it a “native AI experience…[and a] more enjoyable and convenient future.” He also mentions “personalization,” which would likely require the trove of data OpenAI can offer on its users.
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Walmart is the largest retailer in the US, primarily due to its extensive network of brick-and-mortar stores. It trails Amazon by a significant margin in online shopping, so perhaps it’s willing to forego its own website in pursuit of a new revenue stream through ChatGPT, currently the fourth most-visited website in the world (Amazon is No. 13). Walmart’s stock jumped nearly 5% after the announcement.
Walmart calls the AI-based experience a shopping “transformation,” toward a world where AI “learns, plans and predicts, helping customers anticipate their needs before they do.” It calls this “agentic” commerce, or where the tech basically shops for you, presenting options it thinks you’ll like—an algorithm on steroids. The retailer debuted its own Sparky AI shopping assistant in June.
In the announcement, Walmart also talked about its efforts to AI-ify Sam’s Club, the bulk retailer it also owns. Last year, Sam’s Club tested replacing humans with AI receipt checkers at the doors. “Today, Walmart and Sam’s Club leverage AI across every part of the business,” Walmart says. Sam’s Club is not included in today’s ChatGPT announcement.
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OpenAI is in the process of baking more websites directly into ChatGPT. At its annual DevDay event last week, it announced a similar partnership with Spotify, Zillow, and Booking.com, among other sites. You can ask the chatbot to pull up “Homes under $900,000 with four bedrooms,” for example, rather than browsing Zillow.
“What you’re going to see over the next six months is an evolution of ChatGPT from an app that is really, really useful to something that’ll be a bit more like an operating system, where you can access different services, you can access software,” OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, said during a Q&A with the press during DevDay.
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