Walmart and OpenAI Are Bringing Online Shopping Right Into ChatGPT

Generative AI is quickly becoming that dimly lit basement with the computer in it that you never have to leave. You know, like that one creepy kid in high school who’d stay parked down there all day among the Mountain Dew cans with his mom’s Dell.

That’s what ChatGPT is turning into, as OpenAI keeps adding ways to get real-life tasks done without ever having to leave the ChatGPT window. The latest is an October 14 announcement that ChatGPT will complete purchases at Walmart.com without ever making you hop onto the Walmart site.

turning ChatGPT into an all-in-one hub

First, it was that ChatGPT would fetch you the information you needed to make a shopping decision, whether it was booking a hotel room in Germany or figuring out what cables you needed to buy for your new surround system. Then you’d take its answer and head out onto the appropriate websites to make the purchases. Now it’s increasingly likely that ChatGPT will do it all in the window for you.

OpenAI introduced apps to ChatGPT last week. Now you can stay within the ChatGPT window as it carries out your bidding on Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Figma, Expedia, Spotify, and Zillow, booking airline flights, hotels, and rental cars, searching for homes, asking for financial news, or looking for song recommendations.

Perplexity AI fired the first shot this past July when they introduced Comet, a browser that integrates Perplexity’s powerful search-oriented AI into most functions, as a way to bring generative AI into every corner of your browsing experience.

Then last week Opera, known for its browser, came out with Neon as another stab at the AI-first browser market.

OpenAI doesn’t have a browser, and so it seems to be nudging its users in the opposite direction. Rather than bring its ChatGPT AI out into every corner of users’ browsers, it’s working harder to bring the users into ChatGPT and keep them there.

Why switch tabs to bring up the booking page for a hotel? Do it in ChatGPT. Or to search for a song on Spotify? Do it in ChatGPT. And now, to buy a few things from Walmart.com.