Ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT about a product on Etsy, and chances are you can enter your payment details and buy it without ever leaving the app. Instant Checkout was one of the first features to emerge from a recent wave of partnerships between leading AI and ecommerce companies. The aim is to encourage people to hand off parts of the browsing and ordering experience to AI tools and usher in an era of agentic shopping. But while these so-called agents have started to become more commonplace, they are far from taking over as full-time virtual buyers.
OpenAI, Google, Amazon, and other AI chatbot developers are still negotiating with major retail partners on the best way to limit costly mistakes by agents and the amount of product data and chat history that have to be exchanged to make these agents successful, according to executives at seven tech and ecommerce companies who spoke with WIRED. As a result, the features currently on the market require significant input from users and operate slowly or only for a limited number of items. With discussions and testing ongoing, consumers hoping to offload shopping chores to automation this holiday season may be disappointed.
“I haven’t yet felt a super magical agentic experience in commerce,” says Talia Goldberg, a partner at the venture capital firm Bessemer, who has invested in AI companies including the search and browser startup Perplexity and the coding platform Cursor. “There are big questions that have to be solved around a true functional experience.”
In the past few months, surveys of US consumers found that 60 percent plan to use AI to assist with shopping, 20 percent say they would let an AI agent fully handle everyday purchases, and just 25 percent say they would prefer to shop without the help of AI. Long-term projections are rosy. McKinsey estimates that up to $1 trillion in sales will be generated through agentic shopping by 2030 in the US alone.
To help set this future in motion, OpenAI partnered with Walmart to soon allow ChatGPT users to buy Walmart products right within the chat window. Both OpenAI and Perplexity have announced deals with PayPal and Shopify, which hosts online stores for brands. And last week, Google introduced AI agents that can fill out online checkout forms and call stores to inquire about pricing.
Some prototypes show promise. Expedia’s app for ChatGPT provides real-time flight and hotel pricing data in response to user queries. Users must still manually make bookings—no AI agents are involved yet. But the feature is leading to greater sales than Expedia anticipated. “That means there's something in these tools that works,” says Clayton Nelson, a vice president who oversees Expedia’s strategic alliances with AI giants.