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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.
Social commerce—or shopping through platforms like TikTok and Instagram—hasn’t been a smash hit in the US, in part due to ongoing distrust of tech giants among consumers and big retailers. To help ensure AI initiatives don’t encounter similar resistance, major payment processors such as Visa and software startups like New Generation, which helps stores develop or partner with chatbots, are trying to broker technical compromises with retail partners. “We do think that a service provider like us will be faster to earn the trust of retailers, which is pretty important,” says New Generation CEO Adam Behrens.
Retailers want in because chatbots have become a crucial tool for consumers researching and validating purchases. Partnerships between AI and ecommerce companies could ensure that chatbots not only present accurate product information, but also consume fewer computing resources when executing online orders. All of that could boost profits for both sides—if they can come to terms.
In one of the frankest comments on agentic shopping made by a top tech boss, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently criticized how agentic shopping currently works on other platforms. “I would say the customer experience is not good,” Jassy said on an earnings call last month. “There’s no personalization. There’s no shopping history. The delivery estimates are frequently wrong. The prices are often wrong. We have got to find a way to make the customer experience better and have the right exchange of value. ”
A task as simple as adding eggs to an Amazon cart took the Opera browser’s AI agent 45 seconds in a WIRED test this month; manually doing so on Amazon’s shopping app took a third of the time.
Opera has been inviting potential partners to workshops to weigh in on security and design choices. “If our agent doesn’t work with the biggest websites people go to, it will be a suboptimal experience,” says Per Wetterdal, an executive vice president who leads Opera’s commercial partnerships. “No one benefits if [a purchase] is ending up at the wrong place or in the wrong quantity.”
Deal Talks
As is often the case in the tech industry, money and data are central to the negotiations. With agentic shopping, the financial exchange could be straightforward. AI companies including Opera want a cut of sales for facilitating purchases. “If we do something that adds incrementality, it’s very fair to be compensated for that,” Wetterdal says. OpenAI is showing a path forward by collecting what it describes as “a small fee” from partners such as Etsy for Instant Checkout purchases.
But data sharing may be more complicated. Retailers guard pricing and availability data, as well as customer information, to maintain an edge over competitors. AI companies want to protect conversation histories to preserve the feeling of intimacy that chatbots can deliver. But chatbots require real-time information to fulfill user requests, and retail brands prefer greater context to develop relationships with shoppers.
OpenAI’s apps feature provides partners such as Expedia the user’s IP address and their relevant chat queries, according to a permission screen on ChatGPT. Nelson, the Expedia executive, says he’s pleased with the initial trade but wants to get more eventually—provided that ChatGPT users consent to it. “I want to know the full conversation,” he says. “I know they're looking for a hotel room in Las Vegas right now for two guests, but I want to know, are the guests friends? Have they traveled before? Do they have other things that they like?”
Some discussions have soured. This month, Amazon sued Perplexity for using AI agents to make purchases on users’ behalf in ways that allegedly interfered with the ecommerce giant’s businesses, including sales of advertising and Prime subscriptions. Perplexity said it will fight back.
At the same time, Amazon is pursuing its own shopping agent. It has been testing a feature called Buy for Me that uses agentic AI to complete purchases on other retailers’ websites when Amazon doesn’t have a particular item in stock. The tool automatically adds items to a cart, and users check out with their Amazon payment details. The third-party stores don’t receive shoppers’ real email addresses and can contact Amazon to keep its agents away.
So far, AI companies aren’t sharing how well their agents are working. An executive in charge of online initiatives for a large clothing retailer in California says they're eager to make deals because chatbots are driving significant traffic. But the opportunities on the table feel undeveloped. “Up to today, no one has a solid solution,” says the executive, who wasn’t authorized by their employer to speak to the media. “Everyone is just making marketing announcements.”
Some smaller AI companies are forgoing agent shopping deals for the time being. Archit Karandikar, CEO of CoInvent AI, which develops the travel planning chatbot Airial, says getting AI to generate useful recommendations is a significant challenge on its own. Pursuing agentic purchases would be too much to add, given the current state of the technology. “You can’t be spending someone’s money without being sure you’re making the right transactions,” Kandikar says. So Airial links to booking websites and receives a commission when someone buys.
Expedia’s Nelson is blunt. “My goodness, no one wants to mess up their vacation for their entire family because a bot went left instead of right, or didn't follow the specific prompt that was given,” he says. “It's up to us and our partner to make sure that we never leave travelers astray. And so that's the big thing that's holding us back on fully agentic booking experiences.”
This holiday season, users may turn to chatbots to help select gifts, add them to their carts, and even instantly checkout. But humans will still be in control. Maybe next year they can blame the bots if a loved one doesn’t like their gift.
