ChatGPT wants to be your AI personal shopper – Information Age | ACS
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By David Braue on Oct 08 2025 01:40 PM
With Christmas treats on the shelves of your local grocery store, the holiday shopping season is imminent – and generative AI (genAI) giants want to help, with OpenAI launching commerce services that let ChatGPT recommend gifts and complete your purchase.
Using the new Instant Checkout feature you describe what you want to buy, and ChatGPT will not only find suitable options from relevant websites – Etsy and Shopify are launch partners but others will inevitably be added – but help you pay for it, too.
Users can only buy one product at a time for now, and it’s only available in the US, but expansion will inevitably bring it to Australian customers and merchants – and with it, a surging concept called ‘agentic commerce’ that turns genAI into your own personal shopper.
OpenAI sees a massive opportunity in allowing its 700 million users to not only research products, but buy them inside the chat session – with merchants paying it a small fee for completed purchases, which are processed through the Stripe payment network.
“What starts as a simple question – planning a dinner party, finding the right gift – naturally becomes a shopping moment,” Shopify explains, noting merchants like Spanx, Vuori, and Glossier can “sell directly through ChatGPT conversations… [it’s] just seamless commerce.”
Aiming to head off concerns that its results could prioritise merchants that pay it for better placement in search results, OpenAI has designed the feature to provide what it calls “organic and unsponsored” results that, it says, are “ranked purely on relevance to the user.”
Where multiple merchants sell the same product, they are ranked on factors such as availability; price; merchant quality; whether a merchant is the primary seller; and whether Instant Checkout is enabled to, as the company puts it, “optimise the user experience.”
“AI will fundamentally reshape how our customers shop,” Steve Madden vice president of e-commerce Colleen Waters said, noting that “being on Shopify means we can automatically be wherever our customers are shopping – including inside AI conversations.”
OpenAI’s new shopping feature is just the latest salvo in a battle that is rapidly expanding across the genAI ecosystem as new standards, resolution of legal complexities and broader support from merchants make agentic commerce an integral part of the genAI experience.
Instant Checkout, for one, is based on the new Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), a Stripe and OpenAI-built open standard designed to facilitate the two-way communication that lets agents translate product information in the genAI chat to actionable purchases outside of it.
When ChatGPT users are ready to buy a product the chatbot has recommended, they’re given a link to a Stripe checkout and choose their preferred payment method, which is used to produce a Stripe Payment Token (SPT) that keeps payment details confidential.
The SPT is linked to a specific merchant and order number, then passed by API to the merchant for completion of the order – including accepting or declining the order, calculating taxes, handling fulfilment and managing returns.
ACP’s release comes just days after Google released a rival standard called Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) that, it said, provides a “payment-agnostic framework for users, merchants, and payments providers to transact with confidence across all types of payment methods.”
AP2 – which is an extension of the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol and Model Context Protocol (MCP) that help AI agents interact for uses such as workflow automation – has the support of over 60 services including Coinbase, AMEX, Mastercard, Paypal, Revolut, and Worldpay.
It may sound like a novelty now, but the massive number of people using genAI means the opportunity for customers to buy products inside of ChatGPT sessions could become a serious money spinner for OpenAI and its rivals.
Consumer use of ChatGPT is surging, with a recent analysis finding that 73 per cent of the 2.6 billion messages ChatGPT handled every day in June 2025 represented non-work queries – up from 53 per cent of the 451 million daily messages a year earlier.
Some 24.4 per cent of all messages were classified as “seeking information” and 2.1 per cent relate to “purchasing products”, suggesting that Instant Checkout already has 54.6 million opportunities per day to convert increasingly AI-comfortable shoppers to buyers.
That opportunity is set to grow rapidly as new developments like Visa Intelligent Commerce, Mastercard Agent Pay and Amazon Buy for Me overhaul e-commerce – empowering AI agents by automating shopping and buying decisions that are constrained by user rules.
Gartner, for one, has predicted that 20 per cent of digital commerce transactions will be executed using genAI platforms by 2030 – although senior director analyst Anushree Verma believes hype could see over 40 per cent of agentic AI projects cancelled by the end of 2027.
Hype “can blind organisations to the real cost and complexity of deploying AI agents at scale,” Verma said, “stalling projects from moving into production… [companies] must cut through the hype to make careful, strategic decisions about where and how they apply it.”
David Braue is an award-winning technology journalist who has covered Australia’s technology industry since 1995. A lifelong technophile, he has written and edited content for a broad range of audiences across myriad consumer and business topics, with a particular focus on managing the intersection of technological innovation and business transformation. He has twice won Best IT Journalist at the Australian IT Journalism awards, and was named Best Technology Journalist at the 2024 Australian Technologies Competition.
