OpenAI just announced that consumers can now buy products directly inside ChatGPT. At the same time, big-box retailers like Walmart are already seeing one in five referral clicks come from ChatGPT. In a matter of months, AI agents have gone from a fun novelty to a business necessity, marking one of the fastest shifts in consumer shopping behavior since the rise of the internet.
But ChatGPT shopping isn’t just a new sales channel—it’s a stress test that exposes a hard truth: AI runs on data, and most retailers’ data isn’t ready.
