Image Courtesy of Walmart
October 21, 2025
Will OpenAI Reinvent Walmart’s Online Shopping Experience?
Seeking to keep up with the new ways consumers are discovering products. Walmart reached a partnership with OpenAI to allow shoppers to buy items directly through ChatGPT, using the AI chatbot’s new Instant Checkout feature.
Describing the experience, Walmart’s release stated, “This is agentic commerce in action: where AI shifts from reactive to proactive, from static to dynamic. It learns, plans and predicts, helping customers anticipate their needs before they do.”
Walmart said customers will be able to “plan meals, restock essentials, or discover new products simply by chatting — Walmart will take care of the rest.”
ChatGPT Partnership Follows Walmart’s Sparky Assistant
The partnership builds on Walmart’s introduction in June of Sparky, a GenAI shopping assistant that enables customers to summarize and answer questions about reviews, offer recommendations, and help shoppers plan purchases. At the time of Sparky’s introduction, Walmart said Sparky’s capabilities would soon be expanded to include reordering, service booking and understanding text, image, audio, and video inputs.
Walmart did not say when shoppers would be able to start buying Walmart items via ChatGPT.
“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,” said Doug McMillon, president and CEO of Walmart Inc. “There is a native AI experience coming that is multi-media, personalized and contextual. We are running towards that more enjoyable and convenient future with Sparky and through partnerships including this important step with OpenAI.”
OpenAI in September launched similar “Instant Checkout” offerings for some Shopify merchants, including Skims and Glossier, and Etsy sellers, with checkout supported by Stripe.
Several analysts spoke highly of Walmart’s OpenAI partnership. Jefferies’ Corey Tarlowe wrote in a note, according to Seeking Alpha, that the OpenAI partnership will help Walmart “reduce customer shopping friction, gain mind/wallet share with customers, and support sales and margin growth.”
UBS analyst Michael Lasser said, “ChatGPT is being increasingly used for product discovery. Thus, this should provide incrementality and differentiation vs. the rest of retail.”
An Acosta Group’s shopper panel based on a survey taken in mid-June found only 15% of consumers have used Walmart’s Sparky, with 62% of shoppers having never heard of it. Use and awareness were slightly less for Rufus, Amazon’s GenAI conversational agent introduced in February, and even less for virtual assistants from Instacart, Lowe’s, Kroger, and Ultra.
However, 70% of Acosta’s respondents had used one or more AI tools or features to assist with shopping, with ChatGPT leading in usage and recognition. A full 53% percent of Gen Z AI users find GenAI more trustworthy than traditional sources.
Discussion Questions
What do you think of Walmart’s partnership with OpenAI and the potential of ChatGPT as a purchase driver?
What are the obvious and less obvious hurdles to ChatGPT’s adoption as a shopping tool?
Poll
Loading …BrainTrust
Lisa Goller
B2B Content Strategist
Shep Hyken
Chief Amazement Officer, Shepard Presentations, LLC
Gary Sankary
Retail Industry Strategy, Esri
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AI will certainly evolve Walmart’s shopping experience, and it will become a bigger driver of the revenue pie. The first point of disruption will be replacing, in some instances, traditional search. The second will be greater automation in shopping – especially for routinized purchases – via AI agents. Walmart is smart to get ahead of the curve on this as it needs to be where the customer is. However, AI is not the only channel; it will be one of many. People will still shop in physical stores and use traditional websites and mobile apps. Not everyone will automate their buying. There are too many people running around saying that AI is going to be the only channel or will dominate. This view is misguided because it ignores human behaviors and the plurality of their preferences.
Here are my thoughts on Walmart’s partnership with OpenAI and the potential for ChatGPT as a purchase driver:
What’s promising — Walmart’s move to enable shopping directly through ChatGPT marks a strong strategic shift. Instead of a traditional search bar and product grid, the customer simply chats and buys—what Walmart and others call “agentic commerce.” This could reduce friction, increase impulse buys or routine re-orders (e.g., household essentials), and position Walmart as ahead of the curve in digital convenience. For many consumers, it may feel as natural as asking a friend for a recommendation.
Hurdles to adoption — There are clear obstacles. On the obvious side: customer trust and data/privacy concerns (do I want to shop via a conversational AI and share personal/payment details?); integration with back-end systems (inventory, fulfilment, returns); and ensuring the experience is seamless across cart, checkout, and delivery—not just conversational. Less obvious: the challenge of product discovery in a chat format (will users miss browsing serendipity?), the risk of algorithmic bias (promo fatigue, over-recommendation of big brands), and maintaining retailer brand equity (if the interface is ChatGPT, does Walmart lose direct customer relationship?). Also, mass adoption requires behavior change—shoppers must feel comfortable saying “hey chat, I need…” rather than browsing themselves.
Bottom line — Yes, I believe there’s strong potential for ChatGPT to drive new kinds of shopping behaviour, especially for routine, convenient purchases. But I don’t believe it will replace traditional e-commerce or browsing anytime soon—it will augment it. For Walmart to win, they must make the chat-experience better than browsing, ensure reliability, build consumer trust, safeguard their brand relationship, and make sure the economics (margins, fulfilment, returns) make sense. If they manage that, the partnership could reshape how people shop with Walmart online.
Retail is catapulting into the future. Walmart’s partnership with OpenAI (plus Shopify’s instant checkouts in ChatGPT) will efficiently solve shoppers’ problems. These retail and tech collaborations smash the silos that separate search and e-commerce platforms, integrating everything from discovery to payment in a single app.
AI is already driving a better customer experience. More and more, customers are using AI to help them make purchasing decisions. It’s smart for big retailers to learn more about AI and how to use it. They have a broader customer base to test new ideas with. So, try something new, and if it doesn’t work, fail fast and move on.
By the way, the future for retail is to not only market to the customer, but also to market to the algorithm. As mentioned, AI will assist customers in making their decisions. This will be an entirely new retail experience. Exciting times ahead for those who adopt. Scary times for those who don’t!
The conventional view is that ChatGPT’s “instant checkout’ function with Walmart reduces friction and captures shopping traffic where consumers already are. That misses the deeper strategic meaning. Walmart is executing a two-track strategy: building platform-controlled agents through their four super-agent architecture (Sparky, Marty, Associate, Developer) while simultaneously hedging through ChatGPT integration in case consumer-controlled agents prove popular.
This is strategic brilliance. ChatGPT represents the closest approximation to consumer-controlled agency currently available at scale. Unlike Walmart’s Sparky (15% awareness) or Amazon’s Rufus, ChatGPT has 200+ million users who already trust it. Importantly, ChatGPT still shows multiple retail options—Walmart’s integration enables ‘instant checkout’ directly within ChatGPT so you can browse, cart, and checkout without leaving the chat. While full rollout continues this fall, this capability represents genuine friction elimination that competitors requiring site click-throughs cannot match. Walmart is winning through convenience, not preventing comparison.
For most retailers, follow Walmart’s ChatGPT strategy, not their Sparky strategy. Ensure your inventory is discoverable and accessible to AI agents regardless of who controls them. Compete on actual retail excellence that any AI agent will reward and consider AI-powered function-specific agents (customer experience, operational support). Walmart’s own hedging behavior reveals everything: even they’re not betting exclusively on their walled garden strategy.
Kudos to Walmart for experimenting. I’m holding off on pontificating on the final sales impact, but the discussion needs to be framed by core retail goals: frequency and growing basket size. AI can certainly drive frequency—it’s the next Subscribe & Save for weekly lists—but its ability to increase the basket size is a strong “maybe?” A chat-only experience removes the browsing experience that drives impulse buys.
My biggest question is one of strategy: Why make this a separate channel and call it out as such? It feels like these LLM tools should be integrated seamlessly into the existing digital path to purchase. Adding a new channel just adds friction. The customer doesn’t care if their search was powered by ChatGPT; they care only that the results are right and they can check out quickly. We are very very early in this development. That said, Walmart’s strategic vision is spot on. I strongly believe they are poised to shape the conversation for Agentic AI’s role in how retailers interface with their customers in the near future.
This move represents a major leap toward “agentic commerce,” shifting the online experience from searching a website to conversing with an AI agent that plans and purchases on your behalf. While this OpenAI partnership immediately leverages ChatGPT’s massive user base and high trust with younger shoppers, the key challenge will be scaling adoption beyond single-item purchases and integrating smoothly with Walmart’s in-house AI, Sparky. If successful, this could fundamentally disrupt the traditional e-commerce model where the search bar is the starting point, instead making conversational AI the new digital storefront.