Agentic Shopping News for the Week of 7/20-7/26 (week 30/52)

Busy week: Huge ChatGPT News Week, New Agentic Shopping Data and Predictions, Walmart's EVPs and Super-Agents, and Two Great Weekend Reads/Watches

Jul 26, 2025

Big ChatGPT News Week

It was AI week in DC (powered by the All-in podcast) and Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) was out talking ChatGPT. Lots of new info was dropped and we have it all summarized here for you.

First, he told Axios that ChatGPT is now processing 2.5B prompts/day. The last datapoint was in December 2024 and was 1B:

ChatGPT 5 coming in August

Through a variety of sources from Sam tweets and statements, Microsoft leaks, and a Copilot model selector that was seen in the wild, it’s basically well known that ChatGPT is coming out in August. It’s not clear if that’s next week or in 4 weeks, but soon we’ll all get to see the next big frontier model that OpenAI has been cooking since 4o came out in May of 2024.

What we know are there are three big areas of focus for ChatGPT-5:

Simplified - Instead of having a model and mode (agentic/deep research/web search0selector, ChatGPT-5 will pick the right model and mode for you.
More memory, more context window - Gemini is currently ahead of ChatGPT with a 1m token context window. The expectation is ChatGPT will close that gap.
Coding - Anthropic with Claude and Claude Code plus Cursor seem to be pulling away in this vertical from ChatGPT, can ChatGPT-5 catch them up?

Open questions we have and we’ll be watching this closely:

Agentic Shopping Improvements - Currently we have ChatGPT Shopping at Level 2, is this when they make the move to Level 3?
Rumored ChatGPT Hosted Checkout - The timing between the 7/16 leak that ChatGPT is working on a hosted checkout and ChatGPT’s release - is that a signal that we’re going to see an even bigger leap forward for shopping in ChatGPT 5, or will that come in an update later in the Fall?

Want to learn more? Here are some more articles that go into ChatGPT-5: (none paywalled): Tech Times, TechRadar, Reuters.

SimilarWeb Updates Their GenAI Data Set: ChatGPT Dominates

SimilarWeb is a company that, through a variety of mechanisms measures the traffic that various websites are seeing and other second-order aspects of that traffic.

They have a monthly GenAI report and updated it this week. It’s no surprise that ChatGPT continues to dominate:

I do find this chart a bit deceptive - it’s a 7 month trend, so keep that in mind and the growth from 180m DAUs to ~250m - that’s a lot harder than it looks on the slope of this curve.

This next chart looks at marketshare over a 6 month trend.

In this view, ChatGPT is losing a little bit of share, primarily to Google, but then you see Deepseek, Grok, Perplexity, Microsoft and Claude together taking share. Eyeballing it, it looks like ChatGPT has gone from 86% to 75%. It will be interesting to see if ChatGPT-5 can give it a boost.

New Huge Agentic Shopping Predictions

Wall St. analyst Bernstein came out with a report (I’m not clear to distribribue so including an article that references it)

“A killer AI consumer use-case is an agent which can help us navigate the drudgery of online shopping and find the right item/service, authentic reviews, price, offers, and fill out forms,” Bernstein wrote.

They estimate this shift could lift retail e-commerce growth by 1.5 to 2.5 percentage points annually.

Bernstein sees this development as part of a broader transformation. “Agentic commerce can unlock new commercial models, transform existing ones and fundamentally change how we spend our time online,” the analysts said.

I know what you’re thinking 1.5%, YAWN! Yes, it doesn’t seem ‘big’, but 1.5% to 2.5% incremental growth in e-commerce is actually quite significant. According to the USDC data, e-commerce in Q2 2025 is growing at 6.8% y/y . Let’s pick the middle point of 2% in the prediction- that would move us to 8.8%.

We’re talking about a component of retail that is $1.2T in scale (2024). An incremental 2% is $240B. That’s an entire Costco or ~2 Targets that will be new growth for Agentic commerce.

Fun with math!

Looping back to the ChatGPT checkout discussion - let’s tie this together:

ChatGPT has 75% share, let’s say they capture 75% of that $240B or $180B
Let’s assume they have a 10% take rate on that plus 2% payment or 12%, that’s $21.6B. ChatGPTs current revenue is in the $10-12B ARR range, this would be a way to TRIPLE their revenue.

This exercise shows why all incentives are aligned for GenAI engines to embrace not only Agentic Shopping but to “pull up” the checkout into the GenAI layer and capture the bulk of the economic value they are creating by helping retailers and brands sell more.

What’s better than 2%? …..25%!

Speaking of new data points, Alex Criss, CEO of PayPal wrote a piece for LinkedIn highlighting their commitment to Agentic Shopping and he also pointed out that they believe the analysis that 25% of ecommerce spend will be driven by Agentic Commerce by 2030.

Final Datapoint: Pew: Google’s AIOs cut traffic by 50%

Pew Research is out with a report this week that shows that when users are not shown AIOs, they click to a website 15% of the time. However when AIOs are shown, that decreases to 8%.

Walmart Making Big Moves in AI: Adds 2 EVPs and 4 Super Agents To Team Walmart

Walmart was very active in the Agentic Commerce news this week with three big stories.

Walmart hires Instacarter to be EVP AI Acceleration

Walmart CEO, Doug McMillan, announced on LinkedIn that they have hired Daniel Danker, formerly Chief Product Officer at Instacart, to be EVP of AI Acceleration at Walmart.

Walmart Opens up EVP of AI Platforms Role

McMillan also announced they have opened up an EVP of AI Platforms Role that will report to the CTO - no announcement on who will fill that one yet. It seems like Instacart is the go-to hiring source for AI/Commerce talent these days!

Walmart Announces Super Agents

Walmart also announced they via an exclusive at WSJ ($ub reqd) that Reuters picked up here (no sub) that they are focusing on 4 super agents: customer-focused, employee-focused, engineering-focused and seller/supplier-focused.

…the retail giant is taking a step back and consolidating all those agents into four discrete interfaces it calls “super agents.” One is for customers, one is for employees, one is for engineers, and one is for sellers and suppliers, the company said. The super agent for each group will tap the capabilities of a number of behind-the-scenes agents, all in a single unified experience.

We’ve experienced something similar as we build at ReFiBuy. You start with agents that are good at micro, very specific tasks, then you start building a ‘layer up’ at an orchestration layer and so forth. It’s not un-like a human org-chart type extraction with increasingly specific job descriptions, functions and lanes.

Two Great Pieces To Finish With…

This 9 minute Youtube video is a great short overview of two of the Agentic browsers: Dia and Comet. If you want to go deeper on Perplexity Comet check out my longer live demo here.

Finally, saving one of the best for last, Melina Flabiano. Melina is back on her Curious Commerce substack (highly reco’d sub!) after a break and has some great thoughts on GenAI and product discovery (what I call the Research phase of the shopper’s journey). She puts ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini through the paces, but also a the startup, Daydream which has a fashion focus (stay tuned for more on Daydream from Retailgentic).