Walmart has partnered with OpenAI to make its products, as well as those from its Sam’s Club wholesale warehouse, available for purchase within ChatGPT. The AI-first shopping experience is designed to shift the purchasing interface “from reactive to proactive as it learns, plans and predicts, helping customers anticipate their needs,” according to Walmart. The transition is expected to take place over the next few months, allowing customers to purchase nearly every product on the Walmart and Sam’s Club websites through the chatbot, except for fresh food. Benefits like points and free shipping will continue to apply.

The Wall Street Journal couches the move as “a signal by the biggest U.S. retailer that online shopping is going to become a different experience from the retail websites we are used to,” and says investors like the idea, driving Walmart stock up by 5 percent Wednesday on the news.

“Walmart is moving aggressively to be the retail partner of choice in a future in which shoppers use AI to find products,” WSJ writes, and in doing so is “making a big concession: By allowing the transaction to happen within ChatGPT, the retailer is sharing access to purchase data.” Those insights are a powerful trove of consumer and product data at the scale of Walmart, the nation’s largest retail chain.

The partnership “builds on the multiple ways Walmart and Sam’s Club are already using AI, like enhancing product catalogs, improving customer care resolution times and promoting AI literacy among associates,” Walmart notes in a statement.

In July the company unveiled its AI shopping assistant Sparky, which will continue to be part of its website shopping experience, but the partnership with OpenAI is different in that it introduces native AI shopping to Walmart customers.

“For many years now, e-commerce shopping experiences have consisted of a search bar and a long list of item responses. That is about to change,” Walmart President and CEO Doug McMillon said, calling native AI shopping “multi-media, personalized and contextual.”

MediaPost reports the “agentic commerce” experience uses “AI and conversations to predict, plan and learn what consumers want,” turning ChatGPT into “a personalized shopping assistant that no doubt in the future will link to the retailer’s delivery service.”

Visa, Mastercard and PayPal moved into the agentic commerce space in May.

Related:
Why Walmart and Target Love ChatGPT but Amazon Is Banking on Rufus, Forbes, 10/8/25
Visa Intros Agentic Shopping Protocol as AI Shopping Surges, ETCentric, 10/17/25