Walmart has just become the latest retailer to ink a shopping partnership with technology gargantuan OpenAI.
The two companies announced Tuesday that, in the near future, ChatGPT users will soon be able to use ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout feature—launched late last month—to purchase items from Walmart’s site.
That means that, rather than going directly to Walmart’s own site to search for products, consumers using ChatGPT as part of their shopping journey can buy items Walmart sells directly through the large language model (LLM).
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The companies did not disclose when Instant Checkout will become available for Walmart purchases. The feature allows users to checkout without ever leaving ChatGPT; the technology platform said last month that it does not store consumer purchase data, so the merchant handles its own payment and fulfillment processes.
Experts have said agentic commerce continues to be on the up and up, with about 20 percent of Americans noting that they use AI somewhere in their shopping journey, per Salesforce data. Walmart seems to believe that the core of how consumers want to shop is a moving target, particularly with the proliferation of tools like ChatGPT.
Sam Altman, CEO and co-founder of OpenAI, said the integration will give consumers an easier way to shop for products they need and love.
“We’re excited to partner with Walmart to make everyday purchases a little simpler. It’s just one way AI will help people every day under our work together.”
The Instant Checkout integration does not mark Walmart’s first swing at collaborating with OpenAI; the company announced earlier this year that it will launch an employee AI certification—developed in large part by OpenAI—in 2026. At the time, Donna Morris, Walmart’s chief people officer, said the company remains invested in helping its associates “develop the skills to succeed and grow.”
In addition to its partnerships with OpenAI, the company has worked to develop AI models that touch various parts of the employee and consumer experience. For instance, its generative AI-based shopping assistant Sparky, made publicly available last fall, allows consumers to gain access to stronger information about products and ask the assistant to to find items for a specific reason or occasion.
What’s more, Walmart said earlier this year that it had redeveloped its strategy on agentic AI, by working to build several super agents that conglomerate myriad existing agents designed to handle specific pieces of employees’ job functions.
Doug McMillon, the company’s president and CEO, said the latest partnership with OpenAI is merely a powerful extension of the company’s own AI efforts and plans.
“For many years now, e-commerce shopping experiences have consisted of a search bar and a long list of item responses. That is about to change. There is a native AI experience coming that is multi-media, personalized and contextual,” McMillon said in a statement. “We are running towards that more enjoyable and convenient future with Sparky and through partnerships including this important step with OpenAI.”
Walmart isn’t the only major company moving in on agentic commerce. When OpenAI announced Instant Checkout, it noted that items on Etsy were already eligible to be purchased directly through ChatGPT, and said that “over a million” Shopify merchants, including Skims and Vuori, were also on the way.
Notably, though, Amazon has not made any such move. The company has been heavily focused on leveraging AI to enable stronger customer outcomes through backend processes and through user-facing tools; it has been investing in its own shopping assistant, Rufus, and in upgrading existing tools, like Lens, with emerging AI systems.
But e-commerce expert Juozas Kaziukenas noted in a LinkedIn post earlier this year that Amazon has actively worked to block Big Tech players’ LLMs from crawling its product data to show consumers. More recently, Kaziukenas predicted that “Amazon is not going to be part of” the bandwagon on ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout.
