BREAKING: Target App Launches on ChatGPT! (Live demo)

Busy 3 days before 🦃 and ChatGPT launches 2, count them 2 Agentic Commerce features! Today we have access to the Target app and walk you through the newest feature.

Pre-Thanksgiving Launch Tracker

Here’s where we are and 2 days left to go:

✅ ChatGPT Surprise (ChatGPT Shopping Research launched Monday 11/24 - details and exclusive live walk-through/analysis here)

✅ Target App launches in ChatGPT

❓Walmart on ChatGPT?

❓Salesforce SCC on ChatGPT (watching Pandora, Adidas, Michael Kors and Loreal)

❓Perplexity/PayPal ‘Instant Buy’?

❓Microsoft Copilot agentic commerce - coming out for season or no?

❓ Any (more) surprises, if we’re gonna have (any more) big surprises, it’ll be this week

As is our Retailgentic custom, we’ve been playing with the Target App/ChatGPT integration and here’s some highlights.

Target/ChatGPT Walk Through

First of all to install the Target app, I could only get it to work on a Pro account and I did it with this prompt: ‘Hey @target you there?’ - it said ‘yes i am’ and underneath a banner popped up and said ‘link Target App’ - I clicked that and it thought for a second and we were done. It felt like some kind of server-to-server auth went on - perhaps a MCP-like secure connection? From this point forward the app is live in my account.

You can tell it’s ‘installed’ when you go to the + sign in the prompt window and look at ‘more…’ you should see it there, like this→

Now you can have a convo with it. It’s very hit-or-miss for me while they must be working out the kinks. For example, this invocation of the app works:

You can see the ‘target’ bullseye logo is indicating that the app is active and it puts this little interactive ‘app widget’ in the chat.

However, this worked last night at o’dark thirty, but isn’t working now:

As a software person, I can appreciate this is tricky and something on the Target side is jacked up - e.g. a permission of some kind, so to ChatGPT’s credit, it handles that well and has a plan B to tell me what to do.

Chattin’ with the Target store.

When this does work you kind of have two modes. You can tap into the Target widget and interact in there which is like using the iOS Target App -ish. Or you can stay in ChatGPT and go from there OR you can do all three.

In the demo (<9mins) I do a mix of shopping experiences (espresso machine and groceries)→

Conclusion

It’s very early, you can tell Target and ChatGPT put this one out quickly as it’s slow right now and has some glitches, but expect those all to get fixed rapidly as the holiday progresses. The use case that worked best is using ChatGPT as a shopping assistant and let it ‘drive’ the Target app - for example the recipe→ shopping list→target products consideration set is the best use case.

It’s going to be interesting to see which of these various Agentic Shopping experiences ChatGPT is experimenting with ‘stick’ - I’m still leaning towards the fully integrated Instant Checkout as the best experience, but the App and Shopping Research are fun concepts that have their places.

Remember -people shop a variety of different ways and have a multitude of preferences, as an industry we have to ‘meet them where they are’ and ChatGPT is definitely working hard to both understand that and deliver a variety of different ‘we are where you are’ experiences.