The AI Shopping Spree Has Begun

Nothing quite says "I love you" like having ChatGPT pick out and purchase hand-crafted goods from Etsy for your loved ones. That’s a future now made possible by ChatGPT’s latest feature, which allows the AI agent to search and purchase on your behalf.

I’ll admit that I’ve used ChatGPT and Perplexity to help me brainstorm gift ideas for my brother, with middling results. I can only give him so many 90s themes LEGO sets. That said, I’m more in the camp of using AI to jump-start my own thought process, not having it start and finish a task without my input or human perspective.

I’m curious to see how willing people are to let OpenAI and other AI agents make purchasing decisions on their behalf.

📰 Article
Buy it in ChatGPT
OpenAI 
OpenAI thinks that people want ChatGPT to buy them things. They announced a new feature of ChatGPT that initially lets users buy items directly from Etsy sellers within ChatGPT. They'll be rolling out to include Shopify sellers soon as well. ChatGPT has partnered with Stirpe to handle the payments and securely passes through payment information to the merchant.

🎥 Watch the release video.

👨‍💻 Protocol
Agentic Commerce Protocol
OpenAI + Stripe
The power behind ChatGPT's Buy It functionality is the agentic commerce protocol (ACP). Think of it as the model context protocol (MCP) specifically for allowing AI agents to make purchases on behalf of users. With buy-in from big players like OpenAI and Stripe it looks like this will start to roll out to more ecommerce platforms soon.

📰 Article
AI x Commerce
a16z
Is the Agentic Commerce Protocol going to be what dings Google's revenue by moving high purchase intent queries from Google to AI platforms? This article is a really compelling read on how AI could impact the different types of purchases people make online and its interesting to see how the agentic commerce protocol fits in the mix.

📰 Article
Alexa+
Amazon 
Amazon has been quietly rolling out its AI-infused version of Alexa. Well, quietly in that it hasn't seemed to get the same fanfare as releases from the hot names in AI right now. It will be interesting to see how Alexa+ gets adopted given the footprint of Alexa devices out there. Not to mention they just announced a new round of devices. I'm sure making purchases directly from Amazon will be a big use case for Alexa+. I can't wait for Alexa to mishear me and order toilet paper en masse.

📰 Article
Chatbot Cheatsheet: A guide to the AI assistants from Walmart, L’Oréal, Amazon and more
ModernRetail
Retailers already begun rolling out their own chat bots to help customers find answers and complete purchases. Will we gravitate to a future where ChatGPT talks to Sparky to figure out how to order our groceries from Walmart? Stay tuned.

Thanks for reading,
Jason