The holiday shopping season is here. Will consumers ask AI to be their Santa?

It’s more possible than ever after a series of rollouts this year have brought shopping features directly into AI platforms. The latest, announced yesterday, is OpenAI’s launch of a new “shopping research” feature within the ChatGPT app that asks questions about budget, style, and use cases to deliver users a “personalised buying guide”, just in time for the Black Friday weekend. It builds on OpenAI’s previous shopping features, announced in May, and comes a week after the company’s biggest search competitor, Google, rolled out a suite of new shopping-focused updates within its AI Mode, boosted by its new upgraded conversational AI model, Gemini 3.

ChatGPT's new “shopping research” feature Photo: Courtesy o

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