OpenAI and the race for AI-driven commerce (techcrunch.com)

At its developer day, OpenAI unveiled “apps” for ChatGPT and highlighted Instant Checkout — together building a full stack for so-called agentic commerce: front-end app integration inside the chat UI plus payment plumbing that plugs into Shopify, Etsy and Stripe. The demo showed ChatGPT discovering and invoking services (Spotify, Figma) and, in partner previews, booking rides (Uber), trips (Expedia), home services (Thumbtack), groceries (Instacart), food delivery (DoorDash) and big-box orders (Target). Technically this combines in-chat API invocation, a payments/checkout layer, and agentic behaviors (APIs that let an agent act or purchase on a user’s behalf), enabling both passive search and active, automated buys. The significance for AI/ML is twofold: product and platform. If adopted, ChatGPT can become a super-aggregator that funnels discretionary spend, gives OpenAI powerful recommendation signals, and creates a lucrative take-rate business beyond subscriptions — putting it in competition with Google, Amazon and major retailers. Competing specs (Google’s AP2), industry reports (Adobe, Mastercard) acknowledge the trend, but adoption is the open question: users have yet to experience fully agentic shopping and issues around trust, UX, data use, and merchant economics will determine whether conversational shopping becomes mainstream or stays a niche feature.