If you have that one person on your list who is impossible to shop for, or you just don’t feel like doing it, you can now farm the task out to ChatGPT. On Monday, OpenAI announced its new shopping research feature, which it claims can create a personalized buyer’s guide based on your inputs. The feature is available in ChatGPT for users on Free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans.
While ChatGPT’s capabilities to sift through product descriptions and provide regurgitated recommendations from its training inputs aren’t new, the company has introduced a new interface for the holiday season that will see the chatbot ask clarifying questions in a quiz-style interface. If you ask it for help finding a new TV, for instance, it’ll ask you to provide some details about your budget, style, and the room where you’re going to put it. It’ll then serve you some offerings that you can reject or ask for more options. By the end, you should have a list of products that fit your specifications; unless the bot hallucinated some slop or otherwise screwed up.
The new interface is supposed to pop up automatically if you ask a shopping-related question of ChatGPT’s GPT-5 mini model, but users can also hop into the mode by selecting ‘shopping research’ from the (+) menu in the app or on desktop.
For now, the mode will reportedly offer “organic” results that are pulled from publicly available retail sites. The company says ChatGPT will read “product pages directly, citing sources, and avoiding low-quality or spammy sites.” A spokesperson for OpenAI said the company will not take a commission from sales “at this time.”
The shopping sector is one that AI companies certainly want to figure out how to monetize. Earlier this year, OpenAI announced a feature called Instant Checkout that allows users to make purchases from Etsy sellers without leaving the chat, and promised similar partnerships would be on the way with several Shopify merchants. The company has also been working with payment processor Stripe on a protocol for processing AI-driven transactions.
Earlier this month, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said one of the company’s paths forward to profitability will come from its presence in commerce, with plans to take a cut from both its role in the discovery process that drives users to a product and from a completed transaction. It’s not that far of a step to sponsored listings, which surely aren’t far off as the company looks to generate some revenue that’ll counteract its extremely red balance sheet, which has over a trillion dollars in promised spending.
Welcome to the future of commerce, it’s not so different from the present.
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