By Adam Levine
Humanoids, self-driving, and autonomous agents may be the next frontier for artificial intelligence, but, for now, AI providers would be happy to make shopping the next big AI trend.
With an announcement last week, Microsoft joined OpenAI and Alphabet in offering a shopping checkout experience inside their AI chatbots. These are at an early stage, with limited retail partners on board so far, and there is a big hurdle to making these one-stop shopping apps. But it's part of a plan to make chatbots full-fledged platforms.
OpenAI's ChatGPT was first to announce this feature, called Instant Checkout, in September. A user can talk to ChatGPT in natural language to help decide what to buy, and just a few clicks later the transaction is completed without leaving the chatbot. It's a simple checkout flow.
OpenAI partnered with Stripe for payments, and the goods are provided by Walmart, Etsy, and Shopify. Users can pay via digital wallets from Apple, Google, and Stripe, or use traditional credit cards.
For now, though, the experience remains haphazard and lacks standardization. Walmart doesn't allow the digital wallets at checkout, which slows down the simple payment process a user gets in an Etsy or Shopify transaction. Only some Etsy and Shopify retailers have opted in.
ChatGPT's shopping searches cast a wide net and don't favor its Instant Checkout partner vendors unless you nudge it in that direction. I asked it to find me a ceramic bowl to give as a housewarming gift, and one Etsy result came up among eight. When I asked for a bowl that was one-of-a-kind, it was all Etsy results.
Google's implementation has a similar simple discovery and payment flow, and it also suffers from a narrow range of retail partners -- only Wayfair, Chewy, Quince, and some Shopify stores at present. Google's added wrinkle is a price-drop feature that will watch an item for the user and send a notification if a vendor lowers its price. Only Google Pay is supported at checkout.
Google took what may be a big step toward broader implementation of AI shopping this past weekend at the National Retail Federation's conference. Along with a more expansive group of retail and payments partners, Google announced its Agent Payments Protocol, an open standard that the company hopes will accelerate and regularize AI shopping across retail sites. If widely adopted, it would provide retail sites with one standardized way of interacting with numerous AI shopping tools.
Microsoft's own implementation is just starting to roll out, but its demonstrations mirror what we've seen from OpenAI and Google: natural language conversations and fast checkout. The launch partners are PayPal and Stripe for payments, and Shopify for retail. Shopify has secured a role in all three AI-shopping related efforts.
The thin list of retailers who are working with AI chatbots calls attention to the elephant in the room: Amazon.com, the largest online store. Amazon is unwilling to allow another platform to sit between it and its customers, and it is resisting being subsumed within a chatbot.
Amazon has sought to prevent AI-automated browsers like Perplexity's Comet from shopping on Amazon. In October, it sent a cease and desist letter to Perplexity.
"We've repeatedly requested that Perplexity remove Amazon from the Comet experience, particularly in light of the significantly degraded shopping and customer service experience it provides," Amazon said in a statement at the time.
Instead, Amazon has its own new feature called Buy for Me. Much in the same way that Comet operates, Buy for Me is an agent, or software that uses AI models to accomplish a complex series of tasks from a simple prompt. It can shop for goods listed on non-Amazon sites. Just as Amazon has tried to ban Comet, other retailers have rebuffed Amazon's automated system acting on the behalf of their customers.
Barron's publisher Dow Jones is suing Perplexity for copyright infringement. Barron's parent company, News Corp, has a content deal with OpenAI.
OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft are all aiming to make AI more than just an application on your phone. They want to build platforms like iOS and Android, with OpenAI already talking about all new AI-first devices.
E-commerce once pitted Amazon against department stores. Now, it's Amazon versus OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft. The winners could decide the future of far more than shopping.
Write to Adam Levine at adam.levine@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 13, 2026 02:00 ET (07:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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