Walmart announced a new partnership with OpenAI on Tuesday. This collaboration will enable consumers to shop for Walmart products directly through an AI chatbot. The available items will include groceries, excluding fresh food, household essentials, and more. Customers will also be able to instantly check out.
The new agentic shopping feature will also allow Sam’s Club members to plan meals and restock essentials. While chatting with the AI, members can discover new items. To use this feature, customers will link their Walmart accounts to ChatGPT. When shopping, they will press a buy button in the ChatGPT app. Products from third-party sellers will also be supported when the feature launches later this fall.
Walmart explains that this agreement with OpenAI will help the retailer better learn and predict customer needs. This shift aims to make online shopping more personalized and proactive rather than just reactive.
This partnership follows a recent announcement from OpenAI about its plan to enter e-commerce with an agentic shopping system. That system includes product discovery, recommendation, and payments. OpenAI initially stated it is teaming up with Etsy and Shopify sellers.
The ChatGPT shopping feature is not the only way Walmart is integrating AI. The retailer recently introduced its own generative AI shopping assistant named Sparky. This assistant is designed to help customers discover and compare products and make purchases. The feature will later expand to include reordering, service booking, and understanding multimodal inputs like text, images, audio, and video.
Walmart already has an existing relationship with OpenAI in other business areas. The company has adopted OpenAI Certifications and ChatGPT Enterprise for its internal teams. Both Walmart and Sam’s Club use AI for various other purposes, such as speeding up fashion production by up to 18 weeks and improving customer care timeframes by up to 40 percent.
The President and CEO of Walmart, Doug McMillon, noted that e-commerce has long relied on a search bar and a list of items. He stated that this is about to change with the arrival of a native AI experience that is multimedia, personalized, and contextual. He added that Walmart is running towards that more enjoyable and convenient future with Sparky and through partnerships, including this important step with OpenAI.