A battle is brewing over the future of online shopping

You can already buy almost anything with the click of a mouse. Now tech giants are preparing for an AI helper to do even that for you one day.

Google, Amazon and OpenAI are racing to add new AI-powered shopping tools to their services, all aiming to play a critical role in one of the fundamental things people do online: shop.

“If you can become really core to that, then you’re able to monetize that attention in a lot of different ways,” said Jeremy Goldman, senior director of marketing, retail and tech briefings at eMarketer.

And whether they succeed could potentially determine the winners and losers of the next era of the web.

The shift to online shopping

Shopping is one of the main things people do online, Goldman said. And with consumers increasingly using AI to make purchases, stalwarts like Amazon and Google are defending their turf against upstarts like OpenAI and Perplexity.

As of September, US-based users can buy Etsy products directly from ChatGPT, keeping them in the chatbot for longer. OpenAI and Walmart announced a similar partnership in October. And Perplexity’s Comet web browser lets users set up AI agents to handle tasks like shopping on Amazon. (The online shopping giant sent a cease-and-desist letter to the AI startup.)