OpenAI Enhances Product Discovery With Visual Shopping

OpenAI has added new features that it said will enhance the experience of shopping within ChatGPT.

The updates include more visual shopping in ChatGPT and support for product discovery by the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), which will bring additional information into ChatGPT, the company said in a Tuesday (March 24) blog post.

OpenAI is rolling out these updates to all ChatGPT free, Go, Plus and Pro users this week, according to the post.

With the enhancements to ChatGPT, users can browse products visually; upload images to find similar items; compare options side-by-side, including prices, reviews and features; get detailed, up-to-date information; and refine results conversationally, per the post.

“For users, this turns shopping from a fragmented, time-consuming process into a single, seamless experience,” OpenAI said in the post. “For merchants, it brings higher-intent shoppers who are closer to making a decision.”

ACP powers this shopping experience by enabling merchants to share product feeds and promotions, and by supporting multiple delivery paths so that merchants can participate with the systems they already use, including those from Salesforce and Stripe, according to the post.

ACP was co-developed by OpenAI and Stripe and open-sourced from day one.

OpenAI also said in the post that it is focusing on product discovery and is allowing merchants to use their own checkout experiences. Merchants can experiment with native experiences on ChatGPT while also developing ChatGPT apps.

Walmart is introducing an in-ChatGPT app experience that takes users from discovery in ChatGPT to checkout in a tailored Walmart experience, per the post. This is now available in web browsers and will soon be added to apps.

Daniel Danker, executive vice president, AI acceleration, product and design at Walmart, said in the post that the retailer and OpenAI have been learning about the potential of agentic commerce as they partner on this project.

“Today’s launch brings Walmart directly into the ChatGPT experience, combining leading conversational AI with the decades of retail expertise we’ve built serving consumers,” Danker said in the post.

OpenAI announced in October that it enabled ChatGPT users to chat with third-party apps while in conversation with the chatbot. The company did so by launching a feature called Apps in ChatGPT, together with an Apps SDK that allows developers to build these kinds of apps.

In December, OpenAI opened its ChatGPT App Directory, which is a marketplace of third-party apps that run directly within the ChatGPT interface.