America’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer is partnering with the country’s most prominent AI firm in the clearest signal yet that companies are hoping to boost their sales with artificial intelligence-assisted shopping tools.
Today, Walmart and OpenAI announced a new partnership that will allow ChatGPT users to buy Walmart products directly from within the chatbot itself.
Here’s what you need to know about the news, and how Walmart’s stock price is reacting.
The Walmart-OpenAI deal explained
Today, retail giant Walmart Inc. (NYSE: WMT) announced a major new deal with ChatGPT maker OpenAI. The deal will see the artificial intelligence firm’s chatbot gain the ability to make purchases through Walmart and Sam’s Club on a customer’s and member’s behalf.
This AI shopping experience will be done through natural language interaction with ChatGPT.
In other words, you tell ChatGPT what you want to buy from Walmart or Sam’s Club, and ChatGPT will add the item to your cart, and your preferred payment method will be charged—all without leaving the ChatGPT interface.
This type of shopping, which is referred to as “agentic commerce” due to it being powered by a generative AI chatbot, utilizes OpenAI’s Instant Checkout and Agentic Commerce Protocol, which the company launched last month.
“This marks the next step in agentic commerce, where ChatGPT doesn’t just help you find what to buy, it also helps you buy it,” OpenAI said when introducing Instant Checkout in September.
Walmart’s adoption of OpenAI’s technology underscores how the largest retailers on the planet are betting that consumers will increasingly turn to AI chatbots to help fulfill their shopping needs.
When can Walmart shoppers start using ChatGPT?
Despite announcing the OpenAI deal today, Walmart did not give a date for when users could begin shopping through their normal ChatGPT conversations, only saying that the deal would allow this interaction “soon.”
The company also wasn’t shy about making promises about how transformative agentic commerce will be—for shoppers and artificial intelligence itself.
“At the center of this transformation are the everyday moments that define how people shop,” the company said. “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.”
The ushering in of the intention economy?
While AI adherents and ChatGPT junkies may be excited about the possibilities of agentic commerce, the expanding role of the technology also risks speeding the arrival of the so-called “intention economy.” As University of Cambridge researchers have warned, our interactions with AI chatbots could be used to manipulate us into doing things we otherwise wouldn’t have intended to do.
“In an intention economy,” the researchers wrote in a December 2024 paper titled Beware the Intention Economy: Collection and Commodification of Intent via Large Language Models, “an LLM could, at low cost, leverage a user’s cadence, politics, vocabulary, age, gender, preferences for sycophancy, and so on, in concert with brokered bids, to maximize the likelihood of achieving a given aim (e.g., to sell a film ticket).”
Chatbots with aegentic commerce capabilities could conceivably use your innocuous conversations with them to steer you into buying products without you fully realizing this subtle manipulation.
“You sound a bit down,” a chatbot might say, after you reveal to it that you’ve been unhappy with your work and social life. “A run can boost your endorphins, but just make sure you have appropriate running shoes because I know you’ve had knee problems before. There’s a great deal on the latest Nike’s in your size at your preferred retailer. Would you like me to order them for you?”
Whether agentic commerce reaches this level of dystopia or not remains to be seen. However, if you are buying things through chatbots, it’s a good idea to be vigilant that your purchase decisions come from you and not the chatbot itself.
WMT shares spike on news of ChatGPT shopping integration
However AI hawks and critics might view Walmart’s partnership with OpenAI, investors appear to be cheering the news.
Immediately after Walmart announced the deal, WMT shares spiked around 3% in premarket trading to above $105 per share. As of the time of this writing, WMT shares were up 2.98% in early Tuesday trading.
Today’s OpenAI deal isn’t the first between the AI giant and Walmart. Back in September, Walmart announced that it will use OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology to train U.S. frontline and office-based workers beginning in 2026.