OpenAI launches shopping assistant

A key difference in OpenAI’s latest model is that it accurately finds items adhering to all aspects of user queries 64% of the time, the company said. That’s a significant increase from when users previously asked ChatGPT about online products, which it accurately responded to 37% of the time, but a far cry from the near-perfect results AI leaders are promising of the technology.

OpenAI’s instant checkout feature that allows users to make purchases within the chat isn’t available yet, as the company is still inking deals with big-box retailers in addition to ones already struck with Walmart and Target that enable purchases directly from the chat. Manuka Stratta, a researcher who helped build the product, told reporters Thursday the company didn’t want to limit any users from making purchases in the early days of the service. Since the shopping model scans the whole internet for products, instant checkout would have only been available for items from certain stores, with others requiring a link to purchase.

“Launching shopping research globally first ensures everyone can shop anywhere, while instant checkout expands as more merchants adopt the integration,” an OpenAI spokesperson said via email. Instant checkout will be added to the shopping model in the future, but OpenAI declined to provide a timeline for the rollout.

The absence of instant checkout is just the beginning of the challenges for AI commerce. Today’s internet is dominated by closed platforms where interoperability requires permission. Full agentic commerce would require data to be accessible and shared, including information about up-to-date pricing, shipping details, and integration with reliable payments systems — which every website structures differently. “Without an integration, the model would be guessing its way through a checkout flow,” the spokesperson said.

Even traditional shopping platforms like the Google Shopping tab rely on retailers opting in to listing their products. Staying closed off, meanwhile, means maintaining more control of the brand and how users interact with it.

To allow in-chat checkout for any product on the internet, either every retailer must sign onto its commerce protocol, or there has to be a significant shift in how the internet works. That shift could come from governments, though it seems unlikely the US will unite on sweeping AI-related legislation, and Europe’s Digital Markets Act, now facing watered-down proposed reforms, doesn’t deliver the level of change this would require. More likely, it will emerge through merchants’ voluntary adoption of agent-friendly standards, especially if consumers begin changing the platforms where they spend their money.

Enshittification author Cory Doctorow argued in a recent blog post that government intervention in the form of breakups, fines, and interoperability mandates are a “laudable goal” in fixing the walled garden problem. But first, governments must repeal anti-circumvention laws that restrict users from bypassing digital barriers.

Doing that “only requires that governments control their own behavior — unlike taxing or fining companies, which only works if governments can control the behavior of companies that have proven, time and again, to be more powerful than any country in the world,” he wrote.