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 generative media platform Fal. “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 this 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.

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 partners 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.

","freeContentEncoded","textContent","published","strategy","curl-ready","locked","deletedAt","isSyncedFromOwnBlog","original","duplicatesCount","duplicateVersion","originalArticleId","errorsCount","story:full-width","color","backgroundColor","#0441dd","shortSummary","AI is making inroads into e-commerce, promising agentic shopping, but practical implementation is still facing hurdles with data sharing and cost concerns.","summary","AI companies and e-commerce giants are forming partnerships to enable AI agents to handle parts of the shopping process, like instant checkout. However, widespread adoption is slowed by challenges in managing costly mistakes, data exchange, and the need for significant user input. While long-term projections for agentic shopping are positive, current limitations mean consumers may still be in full control this holiday season.","bullets",[193,194,195,196,197,198,199,200,201,202],"Partnerships between AI and e-commerce companies are leading to features like \"Instant Checkout\" within AI apps.","The goal is to create 'agentic shopping' where AI handles browsing and ordering.","Current AI shopping features require substantial user input and face limitations in speed and scope.","Companies like OpenAI, Google, and Amazon are negotiating with retailers to address issues of costly errors and data exchange.","Consumer surveys show a strong interest in using AI for shopping, with long-term sales projections estimated at $1 trillion by 2030.","Examples of current integrations include ChatGPT with Walmart and Perplexity with PayPal and Shopify.","Challenges include ensuring accuracy, avoiding personalization issues, and the complexity of data sharing between AI firms and retailers.","Retailers are motivated by chatbots' role in purchase validation and the potential for increased profits, while AI companies seek a share of sales.","The exchange of money and data remains a central point of negotiation.","Despite ongoing development, users will likely remain in control of purchases this holiday season.","persons",[205,206,207,208,209],"Talia Goldberg","Clayton Nelson","Adam Behrens","Andy Jassy","Per Wetterdal","places",[212],"US","words",716,"sentiment",0.1,"neutral","subject","tech","meta",{"_222":223,"_228":24,"_229":230},"data",{"_218":224,"_225":62,"_226":62,"_74":227},"ai","autosign","autopublish","mainstream","userSchema","scheduleVariant","scraping-bee-classic-proxy",[],"eventId","77c716666bd16af9cc8e7b498ec0afb8362c9c6218091b44eb19ddaa64974b9d","nostrRootEvent","event",{"_19":233,"_237":238,"_239":240,"_72":241,"_253":26,"_166":254,"_255":256},"sig","23499186110e9cb85083e83bb99e377da8046ab540c00baec4eb62c6df1f2f8e6a53e81e3410be053add24b981d312b44d0412781b1490566996db05cb50553c","kind",1,[242,243,244,248,251],[218,152],[35,159],[245,246,16,247],"a","30023:fa1756185f2879c4d47b882789bc588d3ad64030bf50c2f7e48eb57d2d8d02a8:abd924df-226d-4a64-b74a-d03cd2d99e29","mention",[249,250],"client","Layer3.press",[252,26,16],"p","pubkey","You Won’t Be Able to Offload Your Holiday Shopping to AI Agents Anytime Soon\nTo revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.\n\n\nnostr:naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzp7sh2cv972recn28hzp83x793rf66eqrp06sctm7fr4405kc6q4gqqjxzcny8yergerx95erydny956xzd35943rwdrp94jrqvmrvsexgwfev5erjpyjmll ","created_at",1763667867,"authorNPub","markdown","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](https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-ai-agents-shopping-guides-rufus/ \"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](https://www.wired.com/story/the-prompt-ai-agents-how-much-should-we-let-them-do/ \"so-called agents\") have started to become more commonplace, they are far from taking over as full-time virtual buyers.\n\nOpenAI, 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](https://www.wired.com/story/uncanny-valley-podcast-unpacking-ai-agents/ \"offload shopping chores to automation\") this holiday season may be disappointed.\n\n“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 generative media platform Fal. “There are big questions that have to be solved around a true functional experience.”\n\nIn the past few months, surveys of US consumers found that [60 percent](https://www.kearney.com/documents/d/asset-library-291362522/agentic-commerce-retail-disruption-pdf \"60 percent\") plan to use AI to assist with shopping, [20 percent](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/survey-ai-and-agentic-commerce-gain-ground-but-adoption-hinges-on-savings-and-consumer-protections-302550149.html \"20 percent\") say they would let an AI agent fully handle everyday purchases, and just [25 percent](https://ir.riskified.com/news-releases/news-release-details/global-study-73-shoppers-using-ai-shopping-journey-merchants \"25 percent\") say they would prefer to shop without the help of AI. Long-term projections are rosy. McKinsey [estimates](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-agentic-commerce-opportunity-how-ai-agents-are-ushering-in-a-new-era-for-consumers-and-merchants \"estimates\") that up to $1 trillion in sales will be generated through agentic shopping by 2030 in the US alone.\n\nTo help set this future in motion, OpenAI [partnered with Walmart](https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2025/10/14/walmart-partners-with-openai-to-create-ai-first-shopping-experiences \"partnered with Walmart\") to soon allow ChatGPT users to buy Walmart products right within the chat window. Both [OpenAI](https://newsroom.paypal-corp.com/2025-10-28-OpenAI-and-PayPal-Team-Up-to-Power-Instant-Checkout-and-Agentic-Commerce-in-ChatGPT \"OpenAI\") and Perplexity have announced deals with PayPal and [Shopify](https://www.shopify.com/blog/expanding-your-ai-horizons-summer-edition-25 \"Shopify\"), which hosts online stores for brands. And this week, [Google introduced](https://blog.google/products/shopping/agentic-checkout-holiday-ai-shopping/ \"Google introduced\") AI agents that can fill out online checkout forms and call stores to inquire about pricing.\n\nSome 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.\n\nSocial commerce—or shopping through platforms like TikTok and Instagram—[hasn’t been a smash hit](https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-shop-sales-global-ecommerce/ \"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.\n\nRetailers 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](https://www.wired.com/story/fast-forward-chatgpt-hunger-energy-gpu-revolution/ \"computing resources\") when executing online orders. All of that could boost profits for both sides—if they can come to terms.\n\nIn 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. ”\n\nA 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.\n\nOpera 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.”\n\nDeal Talks\n----------\n\nAs 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”](https://help.openai.com/en/articles/12440090-instant-checkout-buy-directly-from-merchants-through-chatgpt \"“a small fee”\") from partners such as Etsy for Instant Checkout purchases.\n\nBut 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.\n\nExpedia’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 partners 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.”\n\nThis holiday season, users may turn to chatbots [to help select gifts](https://www.wired.com/story/chatbots-holiday-shopping-gifts/ \"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.","freeMarkdown","kind1EventId","kind30023EventId","67d0e66c230cc5c56333091dd24702577b37ef94e588624aaaef976d649a2715","kind30023",{"_19":263,"_237":266,"_239":267,"_72":268,"_253":26,"_166":282,"_255":283},"8212f202126960e4353c5c40792487b52e0672d4cb0c783ae4cfe5ac20706ff51ce398aa008696edd19a790d0964ba78f4fe6513fa5a32a53fa34d35877c9cb2",30023,[269,272,273,276,277,279,280,281],[270,271],"r","https://fakepeter.syndichain.com/articles/abd924df-226d-4a64-b74a-d03cd2d99e29",[31,152],[274,275],"published_at","1763116200",[35,159],[278,41],"d",[189,153],[249,250],[252,26,16],"You Won’t Be Able to Offload Your Holiday Shopping to AI Agents Anytime Soon\nAsk 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](https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-ai-agents-shopping-guides-rufus/) experience to AI tools and usher in an era of agentic shopping. But while these [so-called agents](https://www.wired.com/story/the-prompt-ai-agents-how-much-should-we-let-them-do/) have started to become more commonplace, they are far from taking over as full-time virtual buyers.\n\nOpenAI, 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](https://www.wired.com/story/uncanny-valley-podcast-unpacking-ai-agents/) this holiday season may be disappointed.\n\n“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 generative media platform Fal. “There are big questions that have to be solved around a true functional experience.”\n\nIn the past few months, surveys of US consumers found that [60 percent](https://www.kearney.com/documents/d/asset-library-291362522/agentic-commerce-retail-disruption-pdf) plan to use AI to assist with shopping, [20 percent](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/survey-ai-and-agentic-commerce-gain-ground-but-adoption-hinges-on-savings-and-consumer-protections-302550149.html) say they would let an AI agent fully handle everyday purchases, and just [25 percent](https://ir.riskified.com/news-releases/news-release-details/global-study-73-shoppers-using-ai-shopping-journey-merchants) say they would prefer to shop without the help of AI. Long-term projections are rosy. McKinsey [estimates](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-agentic-commerce-opportunity-how-ai-agents-are-ushering-in-a-new-era-for-consumers-and-merchants) that up to $1 trillion in sales will be generated through agentic shopping by 2030 in the US alone.\n\nTo help set this future in motion, OpenAI [partnered with Walmart](https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2025/10/14/walmart-partners-with-openai-to-create-ai-first-shopping-experiences) to soon allow ChatGPT users to buy Walmart products right within the chat window. Both [OpenAI](https://newsroom.paypal-corp.com/2025-10-28-OpenAI-and-PayPal-Team-Up-to-Power-Instant-Checkout-and-Agentic-Commerce-in-ChatGPT) and Perplexity have announced deals with PayPal and [Shopify](https://www.shopify.com/blog/expanding-your-ai-horizons-summer-edition-25), which hosts online stores for brands. And this week, [Google introduced](https://blog.google/products/shopping/agentic-checkout-holiday-ai-shopping/) AI agents that can fill out online checkout forms and call stores to inquire about pricing.\n\nSome 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.\n\nSocial commerce—or shopping through platforms like TikTok and Instagram—[hasn’t been a smash hit](https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-shop-sales-global-ecommerce/) 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.\n\nRetailers 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](https://www.wired.com/story/fast-forward-chatgpt-hunger-energy-gpu-revolution/) when executing online orders. All of that could boost profits for both sides—if they can come to terms.\n\nIn 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. ”\n\nA 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.\n\nOpera 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.”\n\nDeal Talks\n----------\n\nAs 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”](https://help.openai.com/en/articles/12440090-instant-checkout-buy-directly-from-merchants-through-chatgpt) from partners such as Etsy for Instant Checkout purchases.\n\nBut 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.\n\nExpedia’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 partners 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.”\n\nThis holiday season, users may turn to chatbots [to help select gifts](https://www.wired.com/story/chatbots-holiday-shopping-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.\nOpen original article:\nhttps://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-dealmaking-to-make-agentic-shopping-a-reality/ fakepeter\n\n\n\nfakepeter",1763667214,"publishedToNostr","htmlContentKind30023","

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.

Deal Talks

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You Won’t Be Able to Offload Your Holiday Shopping to AI Agents Anytime Soon

Articles