As OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Stumbles, Walmart Shows What Version 2.0 Might Look Like

When OpenAI launched Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT last year it started by letting users buy products from Walmart, Shopify, and Etsy without leaving the chat, and the industry treated it as the beginning of a new era. Shopify President Harley Finkelstein called it the "new frontier" for online retail.

Several months later, the results tell a different story. Walmart's conversion rates on Instant Checkout were three times lower than routing users to Walmart's own site. Etsy acknowledged that purchase volume was "relatively low." OpenAI's scraping of retailer websites meant product information like stock levels, shipping costs, and delivery timing was frequently inaccurate or outdated. Now OpenAI and its retail partners are back with version 2.0.

• From disintermediation to partnership: The original Instant Checkout model tried to own the entire transaction inside ChatGPT. The AI scraped product data, presented options, processed payment, and handled the checkout. The retailer was, functionally, a supplier. The customer relationship belonged to OpenAI. But Version 2.0 inverts this. OpenAI is now building dedicated retailer apps inside ChatGPT that route users to the retailer's own checkout environment, preserving the brand's control over the customer experience and transaction data.

Walmart's new ChatGPT app supports customer account linking, loyalty program integration, and Walmart's own payment infrastructure. As Daniel Danker, Walmart's EVP of AI acceleration, said in the official press release, "Today's launch brings Walmart directly into the ChatGPT experience, combining leading conversational AI with the decades of retail expertise we've built serving customers."

• Top tier retailer lineup: OpenAI's updated Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) now lists Target, Sephora, Nordstrom, Lowe's, Best Buy, The Home Depot, and Wayfair among retailers that have already integrated for discovery.

Elsewhere, Google is building a parallel ecosystem. At NRF in January, CEO Sundar Pichai unveiled the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) as an open standard co-developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart. Google also launched Business Agent, a feature that lets retailers like Lowe's, Michaels, Poshmark, and Reebok deploy branded AI assistants directly inside Google Search.

Two platforms. Two protocols. Same conclusion: the future of AI-mediated commerce runs through retailers as opposed around them.

• The data quality problem: When OpenAI scraped retailer websites to populate product listings inside ChatGPT, the data was often stale with wrong prices, out-of-stock items, inaccurate shipping estimates. This isn't surprising. Retailer product data is complex, dynamic, and optimized for the retailer's own platforms, not for third-party AI agents to crawl. Dedicated retailer apps with real-time API access work precisely because it gives the retailer control over what data the AI sees.

• The trust transfer problem: Consumers trust their retailer. They trust the checkout experience they know. When Instant Checkout moved the transaction to an unfamiliar environment inside ChatGPT, that trust didn't transfer. Walmart's 3x lower conversion rate is a measurement of the trust gap.

Every retailer that participated in Instant Checkout faced the same uncomfortable question: who owns this customer? If a shopper discovers your product through ChatGPT, buys it through ChatGPT, and never visits the brand's site, the CRM doesn't know they exist, the loyalty program can't enroll them and post-purchase messaging can't reach them. It's a sale without a relationship.

Version 2.0 solves this by keeping the retailer at the center of the transaction. For a CMO at a retail or commerce brand, agentic commerce is no longer hypothetical, but being built right now by the two most powerful platforms in the world, with the biggest retailers in the world as launch partners.

• Owned-channels are the most competitive asset: The retailers that will succeed in agentic commerce are the ones with robust loyalty programs, clean product data, reliable checkout experiences, and deep customer relationships. Version 2.0 doesn't disintermediate those assets.

•  First-party data is the moat:In an agent-mediated world, the brands that know their customers directly through SMS subscribers, email lists, loyalty members, app users — can deliver personalized experiences that no third-party AI can replicate. When Walmart integrates its loyalty program into its ChatGPT app, every purchase inside the AI enriches Walmart's customer data.

The implication is clarifying for CMOs. The brands that win in agentic commerce will be the ones with the strongest customer relationships, the cleanest data, and the deepest owned-channel infrastructure. The AI is the distribution, the customer relationship is the product.