FLASH: TARGET + OpenAI Announce Target App Launching in ChatGPT Next Week (plus some other big pre-🦃 big news items)
Big news before Thanksgiving week: Fidji Simo ChatGPT Interview, Mastercard Data, Rufus Deep Dive Demo, The Aisle, ChatGPT Group Chats + Commerce, Gemini 3 and Retailgentic Program and Target!
This morning at 7am coinciding with their Q3 earnings, Target and OpenAI that starting next week in a beta mode, an official Target ‘app’ will go live in ChatGPT that will allows for: “Conversational shopping in ChatGPT, seamless checkout, and personalized recommendations.”
What’s not clear from these app integrations is if Target’s inventory will ALSO be included in ChatGPT Instant Checkout or will you have to always @target in ChatGPT to invoke the Target experience?
In the Target Q3 presentation they had this little ‘tile’→
Here it also seems like OpenAI will be powering a Sparky-like on-site chat and a gift finder. We’ll watch for those as and the launch of the Target app in ChatGPT and report what we find, and with always, LIVE demos!
That’s the BIG news, but there’s lots more…
Retailgentic Programming Note
Let’s start with some housekeeping. Some changes to our usual publishing schedule for the substack and the podcast for 🦃 day:
Retailgentic Substack: Thanksgiving Schedule
There won’t be a news summary this weekend or any more content this week other than podcast announcements**
**Unless….There’s some breaking news, which is unlikely, well unlikely-ish.
Then starting Black Friday (11/28) we’ll be posting the top news and CyberFive (BlackFriday→CyberMonday) highlights from data that comes out - particularly anything with an Agentic angle.
Regailgentic Podcast: Thanksgiving Schedule
Since many of you listen to the pod on your drives/commutes and Thanksgiving is famous for long drives we’ll have great pods this Thursday (11/20) and next Tuesday (11/25) so you have enough retailgentic Agentic Commerce in your queue to cover the holiday driving. Plus, if you want to educate the kids on the future, it’s a win-win!
If you need more content due to the inevitable Thanksgiving traffic, we ALSO just dropped Episode 332 of the Jason and Scot show with Kelly Goetsch to talk about a new ecommerce industry alliance they have created called Order Network eXchange→
Now on to some mid-week Agentic Commerce News:
Fidji Simo Interview From Wired
Wired is out this am (here / paywalled**) with a great long-form interview with Fidji Simo. It is a wide ranging interview that goes of some health issues Fidji is very open about that is new to me.
**For those of you that, like me, have moved on to Perplexity’s Comet browser, it includes a subscription to Wired, so I got to read it thanks to our friends at Perplexity! Thanks Aravind!
Fidji on Ads in ChatGPT/Shopping
The highlight of the article are these three questions:
Part of your mandate is figuring out how ads would work inside ChatGPT. How might that look, and what’s your timeline?
Advertising as a model works really well when you have a lot of commerce intent. We have a ton of it already, people coming and asking for shopping advice. The important thing before we ever consider ads is making sure that our commerce experience is fantastic and that people come and really explore all the products that they want and get great recommendations.
So you’re not at the point where if someone asks for shopping advice, they might get recommended a paid product?
No.
OpenAI has rich user data. It combines peoples’ work life, their most personal thoughts, their habits and product needs. That information is extremely attractive to advertisers. How are you thinking about data privacy as you scale?
Whatever we do is going to have to be extremely respectful of that. That’s why we haven’t announced anything on ads, because if we ever were to do anything, it would have to be a very different model than what has been done before.
What I’ve learned from building ad platforms is that the thing people don’t like about ads very often is not the ads themselves, it’s the use of the data behind the ads.
There you have it - no paid listings, PLAs, sponsored listings, or dilution to the product recommentations that would seriously erode ChatGPT’s valuable position as a very trusted source.
Mastercard /Harris Polls Study Shopper Behavior with AI
Mastercard and Harris polls are out with a n=4,007 survey of consumers before Holiday 2025 to capture any last minute trends, here’s the section on AI→
Surveys are tricky because of the wording. For example, we’ve seen surveys showing as high as 75-80% of people ‘using’ AI to assist in shopping. This question looks more specific around ‘gift-buying’ and comes in at 42%, but is at 61% for GenZ. The rest of the data confirms what we’ve been seeing all year - consumers trust Agentic Commerce, they are using it for personalization, deal verification and summarizing of a wide spectrum of reviews. The product longevity was a new one that I’ll be keeping an eye out for going forward, that’s interesting.
Speaking of price tracking…. Rufus enters the chat ;-)
Rufus - AutoBuy and Price Tracking Live Demo in Under 5mins
There’s been a fair amount of ink about this, but I thought, why is nobody showing the feature in action? Turns out it was a little hard to find, because it’s only in the mobile app and you have to make sure you have the latest and greatest Amazon app to get the Rufus Agentic update.
In a nutshell, it’s a feature that now uses Rufus to:
Track prices on any Amazon product
See the time trend over 30-90 days
Set a pricing alert to get a notification
And then if you want you can, you can have it ‘AutoBuy’ for you - when the product hits your price target, bing-bang-boom, it’s added to your card and checks out. You have 24hrs to cancel the order from there.
If this reminds you of the sequence Google’s been talking about, it’s pretty much exactly the same flow-wise, minus having all the constraints (gpay, guest checkout, only 3 merchants) because it’s ‘in system’ for amazon so every sku is available.
This video is under 5mins and we show it live in the wild!
Hidden GEM 💎→ ChatGPT Group Chats (and Agentic Commerce?)
I think this feature that OpenAI pretty quietly talked about and isn’t starting in the US is going to be the sleeper killer feature that is going to sneak up on people and double surprise you when it is a new driver of Agentic Commerce.
Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan?!
Here’s the launch post for ChatGPT Group Chats:
Ask 10 people pretty dialed in on AI and only .5 will have heard about this. It makes me wonder - why? I think the answer is they know this is going to be BIG, they are maxed out on capacity, but want feedback,so are launching in text-heavy, lower population markets to start.
Why am I so excited?
Let’s zoom in on that picture→
I’ve been dying for this feature since ChatGPT became a part of my daily routine a couple years ago. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a iMessage group chat, then gone to ChatGPT, done stuff and have to splat or link it back over.
For example, latest from family group chat - talking about a meal, I put some ChatGPT recipes in the family chat. How cool would it be to invert that - we’re chatting - all in ChatGPT, I ‘at’ ChatGPT, it answers and then we discuss and then someone says ‘chatgpt, ok go ahead and order all that and throw it in my instacart.
boom! 💣🔥
Chat-Commerce has long been a thing in Asian markets, could ChatGPT Group Chats be the unlock? I’d love one of our many readers in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan to hop on a livestream and give a live demo of the feature and then also run some fun agentic commerce use cases.
Think of ChatGPT instant checkout/Agentic Commerce Protocol as one little Lego block. They can now sprinkle that Lego Agentic Commerce block into a variety of different user experiences to create some really magical new use cases that are awesome - like ChatGPT Group Chat
Gemini 3 is Live!
Finally, if you are living under a rock hiding from AI news, you may not have seen that Google dropped Gemini 3, it has jaw-dropping performance compared to all previous models and I haven’t noticed a big surface level difference on the AI mode stuff yet, other than it’s crazy fast, but here’s a cool video to get you excited, especially if you are curious about the three body problem→
Up Next…
Tomorrow we have a great pod for you and we’ll be keeping an eye open for more big news drops!