Transcription
Thanks to some new developments, you are going to be able to buy things directly from within ChatGPT. But is anyone actually going to want to do that? That's what we are discussing today. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief.
It has just been an absolute barrage of updates and new announcements this week. And frankly, I don't think we're slowing down anytime soon. But today, we're finally catching up on an interesting announcement from Monday. ChatGPT has announced a new ability to buy things from within ChatGPT and an agentic commerce protocol to support it.
Now, I think it's important to put this in the context of the broader shift in the business model of the internet that AI is generating. For a very long time, the core business model of the internet has been the relationship between search and websites, where you could either consume stuff and get served ads, or buy stuff and give them your money. Basically, the way that people entered the world of the internet was via search. And from search, they would be directed to websites, which, depending on the nature of those websites, would either sell them stuff or serve them ads. And even as social started to become a force and people were spending more time in those channels, that relationship was still largely intact. It just shifted around the players a little bit.
AI represents a fundamentally different consumption pattern for information on the internet. More and more people are opting to use some version of ChatGPT or even in Google AI Overviews to get the information they want quickly, rather than having to click around to a bunch of websites to get it. Now, there is a lot of debate right now around just how dramatic the impact is. Surveys and studies are telling slightly different stories, and certainly the AI companies are trying to say that this is all value accretive. But it does seem like for some portion of people, AI summarization, be it in the traditional channels like the AI Overviews of Google or the new channels like ChatGPT, is replacing those old patterns. It's enough of an issue that some in the industry are coming up with their own answers. Cloudflare, for example, is now blocking AI web scrapers by default and trying to create a whole new system whereby AI companies can explicitly pay companies to access their content.
And yet, if the destruction part of this creative destruction is clear, where less clicking around Google links means less ultimate payment and revenue for publishers, the creative part is also starting to come into focus. AI traffic, as you might imagine, is growing in spectacular fashion. A study from Previsible found a 527% increase in AI-referred sessions between January and May 2025. You might have seen SEO people talking about Generative Engine Optimization or GEO instead of SEO. And so, even as one type of pattern changes, another is being born, and that new pattern creates opportunity as well.
And that is the context into which these new agentic shopping features come. In announcing their new instant checkout and the agent commerce protocol, OpenAI wrote, "US users can now buy directly from US Etsy sellers right in chat with over a million merchants like Glossier, Skim, Spanx, and Vory coming soon." With a big, bold announcement, they say this marks the next step in agentic commerce, where ChatGPT doesn't just help you find what to buy. It also helps you buy it. For shoppers, it's seamless. Go from chat to checkout in just a few taps. For sellers, it's a new way to reach hundreds of millions of people while keeping full control of their payments, systems, and customer relationships. Right now, the feature only supports single-item purchases, but they say multi-item carts, as well as expanded merchants and regions, are coming soon.
Fortune gives an example of how this might work in practice. They write, "When a ChatGPT user asks a shopping-related question, such as the best hiking boots for me that cost under $150 or possible birthday gifts for my 10-year-old nephew, the chatbot will respond with product suggestions." Under the new system, if a user likes one of the suggestions, an instant checkout is enabled. They'll be able to click a buy button in the chatbot response and confirm their order, shipping, and payment details without ever leaving the chat.
Now, as you might imagine, people immediately jumped to the idea that this was going to be another vehicle for advertising. Considering that the Sora app content feed and ChatGPT Pulse's hyper-personalized newsletter thing came out last week, there are a lot of people looking over at OpenAI saying ads have to be on their radar in a big way. Still, at least for now, OpenAI said that their product results are "organic and unsponsored, ranked purely on relevance to the user." They also say that merchants can't pay additional fees to be ranked higher because ChatGPT subscribers who already pay have their credit card information already there. They can use that same card or store an alternative payment method.
Now, this is definitely rolling out very slowly. In fact, I've seen almost no one talk about the actual experience. One that I was able to find came from Glen Gabe, who wrote, "I just triggered a product from Etsy with instant checkout possible in ChatGPT. It was pretty slick and very easy to buy. Uses your credit card on file, but you can pay via another source. I didn't complete the purchase since I was just testing it out, but this could be a big way for OpenAI to drive affiliate revenue. That's if people are comfortable buying this way without visiting the site and reviewing everything there." Note, you can visit the site via ChatGPT. There were several links to see the reviews, visit the product page, etc.
Now, alongside the new feature, OpenAI discussed the infrastructure that underpins it. Stripe is the major partner for the feature and the technology, which consists of two main elements. First, there is the Agentic Commerce Protocol, or ACP. The protocol sets a standard format for communications between buyers and merchants with agents in the middle. The idea, of course, being to facilitate fully programmatic commerce. They write, "When someone places an order, ChatGPT sends the necessary details to the merchant's backend using Agent Commerce Protocol. The merchant accepts or declines the order, processes the payment via their existing provider, and handles fulfillment and customer support exactly as they do today." ACP allows merchants to define the key features of each item as machine-readable code. And on the purchaser side, ACP allows their agents to define all the relevant details of an order. ACP is being released as a fully open standard, so it can be adopted by any merchant or payment provider. And if a merchant already uses Stripe to process payments, they can enable ACP with just a single line of code.
Now, the other half of the system is a new API for agentic payments called Shared Payment Tokens. This is the mechanism that allows an agent to transmit payment details, including verifying usage limits as well as expiration windows. Shared Payment Tokens are also compatible with any payment services provider.
Shopify continues to be on the cutting edge, with CEO Toby Lütke saying that they've had a hard time keeping this announcement quiet. Stripe's Patrick Collison reinforces that there is a big change afoot. At the end of his announcement tweet, he said, "It's clear that internet purchasing modalities are going to change a lot, and we're excited to start to lay some of the foundations." Vayner Commerce President Zuben Malawi said, "Google and Amazon have been the toll booths of online shopping for 20 years. OpenAI's new 'buy it in ChatGPT' signals a different future. This isn't about checkout. It's about who controls consumer intent." For two decades, he continues, "Google sold clicks off intent. Amazon sold shelf space off intent. Control discovery, control margins. That was the model. ChatGPT collapses it. Search, click, cart, checkout becomes one conversation that rewrites the playbook. Instead of ranking on Google's Page One or winning Amazon's Buy Box, brands must rank in the AI's answer set." Basically, he's saying there is a new gatekeeper in town, and that gatekeeper is ChatGPT.
Bullmetrics co-founder Morgan Linton writes, "I'm too excited about agentic shopping. I think it's a foundational change that's going to completely transform how all of us shop." So much so, in fact, that he started a new Substack just for this. In the first post, he writes, "This week, OpenAI made a big announcement. One I think will make this week the tipping point for a foundational change in how consumers buy everything. I know that sounds dramatic, and while it is, like most change, it won't happen overnight. Consumer habit changes, in particular, take time." Morgan argues that this represents two big shifts for consumers. The first is that consumers now basically all have an agentic personal shopping assistant. And the second is that they never have to visit the retailer's website. Morgan basically thinks that the previous experience of browsing products in a catalog-like interface and then ultimately entering credit card information is ultimately going to feel draconian and old.
Cal Short thinks that there are some big market implications. He says, "Saw this two months ago and chucked $100k into SHOP, which is of course the Shopify stock." He continues, "I think there's a few big movements this creates. One, AI is the new marketplace. Amazon loses clicks. Two, Google will be forced to respond with G-Shopping. Three, Shopify revenue from merchant benefits long-term."
Nathan Lambert, like Morgan, thinks that this is a big deal. In fact, he thinks it's a bigger deal than Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which came out on the same day. He also wrote about this on his blog. In that post, he writes, "The questions have long been whether AI models actually have the precision to find the items you want, to learn exactly what you love, and to navigate the web to handle all the corner cases of checkouts." But he says, "I'm cautiously optimistic about this. Finding great stuff to buy on the web is as hard as it's ever been. Users are faced with the gamification of Google search for shopping and the 'Amazonification' of the physical goods crowding out Amazon. Many of the best items to buy are found through services like Meta's targeted ads, but the cost of getting what you want should not be borne through forced distraction. OpenAI will not be immune to the forces that drove these companies to imperfect offerings. But they'll come at them with a fresh perspective on recurring issues in technology. If this works for OpenAI, they have no competitor. They have a distribution network of nearly a billion weekly users and no peer company ready to surveying models at this scale. Yes, Google can change its search feed, but the thoroughness of models like GPT-5 thinking is on a totally different level than Google search. This agentic model is set up to make ChatGPT the one agentic app across all domains."
Now, certainly, the market liked it on the announcement. Shopify was up 6% and Etsy was up 16%. And so the question really does become, is this just a normal part of the ChatGPT experience? On the one hand, it feels like you're going to see a ton of grumbling and scuttlebutt, as you always do with new features, where people who have anything that whiffs of an ad or an attempt to part them for more dollars in their wallet, see it as something annoying and infringing on the pure experience that they want out of their chatbot. But for others, it's going to seem extremely convenient. It's going to allow them to, to Nathan's point, not have to click around endlessly to find the things that they're looking for, to be able to power more of their lives from within this core experience that they're already using, and basically just have a simpler, more fluid shopping experience.
Now, my strong instinct is that this doesn't change everything all at once. It's important to remember when we think about the potential impact that the catalog-style browsing isn't just a concession to UI, it's also an experience in and of itself. A cheesy but very real example: You better believe that around August of every year, I check out what's new in Grandin Road's Halloween Haven. And this is not an experience that I want to short-circuit. I want to go see every single thing they have, new and old. And look, now that we're in October, there's some crazy savings. I am definitely going to get the Fountain of Mortal statue for our front yard. But the point is that there is more to shopping than just efficiency. And I believe that the very valuable efficiency of "buy it in ChatGPT" will become a part of the overall commerce tapestry.
Now, one little interesting substory is that ACP is actually the second agentic shopping protocol released over the past month. A few weeks ago, you might remember that Google announced their own version called AP2. AP2 was launched with Coinbase as the tech partner and over 60 merchant and payment partners. That list included Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Union Pay, World Pay, and Revolut. So, a wide cross-section of global providers. Shopify wasn't mentioned in the press release, but Etsy was also on board with that one. Google explained a lot of the design considerations when it came to agentic shopping. They noted that there are three big problems that AP2 seeks to solve: authorization, authenticity, and accountability.
For authorization, agents need a way to prove that a specific user gave it authority to make a purchase. For authenticity, agents need to be able to prove that an order matches the authorization they've been given. AP2 allows orders to be defined both strictly and generally. For example, a user can tell the agent to buy a specific pair of shoes for a specific price, or they can define a budget and ask for a general type of purchase, such as a pair of jeans. In either case, the agent can communicate this intent to the merchant system to prove the request matches the user's instructions. Finally, accountability deals with acknowledging where the liabilities lie if there is a fraudulent or incorrect transaction. Human users could always claim that they didn't approve the purchase and claim a chargeback, making the entire concept of agentic commerce fail.
Now, what's interesting about this to me is that in almost every other area of agents so far, companies have seemed to behave as though it mattered more to move together on common standards than it did to try to own the standards. And yet, from where I'm sitting, AP2 and ACP look pretty directly competitive. Format wars, when it comes to these types of protocols, are not really great for consumers. They slow things down. They make things more annoying. And so, I will be keeping an eye to see on how that engages. But it is certainly the case that the fact that there are two agentic payments protocols released in a very short period of time is further evidence that this change is coming to shopping, whether we wanted to or not. So buckle up, get ready, and start buying stuff in ChatGPT.
That's going to do it for today's episode. I appreciate you listening or watching, as always, and until next time, peace.