When ChatGPT first appeared, it made headlines by answering questions, writing code, and generating images or even videos. None of that seemed related to shopping. Sam Altman and OpenAI focused on high-growth sectors such as productivity, programming, content creation, customer service, and healthcare—not consumer commerce.

But things are shifting. In late 2024, OpenAI’s leaked strategic roadmap barely mentioned retail. A year later, Stripe—the world’s #1 Payment Service Provider—invited Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s Chief Product Officer, to speak at its Sessions conference. This was no coincidence: commerce is starting to matter in the AI landscape.

What do AI models already know about products?

Ask ChatGPT (or its competitors) about any well-known manufactured product and you’ll be surprised: detailed descriptions, reviews, visuals, FAQs. Run the same query on Gemini, Copilot, Grok, Perplexity, Claude, Meta AI or Siri, and you’ll find that they all know your products.

This knowledge comes from massive data scraping: brand websites, online retailers, professional articles. Some trusted sources are missing, though. Why? Because retailers often block AI bots with tools such as Datadome or Cloudflare.

Why isn’t AI shopping widely adopted yet?

Although AI already knows a lot about products, consumers rarely use it for shopping. Three main barriers explain this gap:

• Discoverability: Few people know that AI can provide rich, translated, and personalized product content just by asking a question.
• Accessibility: Which AI service should shoppers use? How do they identify a product? While most AI assistants have apps and can scan barcodes, they still fail to recognize this as a shopping gateway. Commerce simply wasn’t the initial priority.
• Usefulness: No “killer app” exists yet. Adoption will come from combining rich product data, ease of interaction, relevant answers, multiple formats (text, voice, images, video, even avatars), and deep conversational capabilities. That mix will make AI irreplaceable for commerce.

What’s changing with agentic checkout?

ChatGPT-5 introduces agentic APIs that support agentic checkout, thanks to integrations with Shopify and Stripe. This is a breakthrough: even though Stripe standardizes payment and Shopify powers millions of stores, agentic checkout could extend beyond their platforms.

What promising approaches are emerging in AI shopping?

Sadly, such news needs to be understood in its limited scale: AI shopping is restricted to ecommerce only. There is no hope of seeing Gen AI supported shopping in physical stores anytime soon. One bright spot on the horizon is Ask Mona’s approach. They aim at providing direct access to curated brand information using a Gen AI engine such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude. They promise to deliver a premium experience, although not going as far as supporting checkout as well. Gen AI benefits will take some time to materialize: it is a start.