The news: OpenAI will reportedly scale back in-chat Instant Checkout plans for ChatGPT, per the Information. 

Instead, the company is pursuing a model where users check out via third-party apps that plug into the platform. 

Why this matters: Deprioritizing in-chat checkout suggests consumer adoption of conversational commerce and agentic commerce is weaker than AI and payment companies anticipated.

However, this doesn’t mean that consumers aren’t using AI while shopping: 64% of consumers now use AI tools for product discovery, per generative engine optimization (GEO) firm The Rank Collective. 

This suggests that AI-based discovery is starting to disrupt traditional search, with nearly two-thirds (64%) of marketers saying that reduced use of traditional search engines like Google will be the top AI-driven shift impacting digital marketing, per a September 2025 survey from Funnel and Ravn Research. 

OpenAI’s pivot matches how consumers currently use AI—for discovery.

Looking forward: While shoppers may not be purchasing in-chat, payment providers still should seek out strategic partnerships with AI platforms. 

This positions them for future AI-based transactions while also giving key AI surfaceability to their merchants, many of which are currently invisible on platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot: Fewer than 15% of brands are structured to appear in AI-generated answers, per The Rank Collective. 

Payment platforms can increase their attractiveness to merchants if they can unlock agentic discoverability for storefronts—a key selling point PayPal is developing through tie-ups with Perplexity, Copilot, and Gemini.

Implications for payment providers: As OpenAI takes a step back from agentic commerce, other parties may rise to fill that vacuum. 

• Perplexity could double down on Instant Buy and try to make it the first seamless and well-adopted in-chat checkout. 
• Third-party AI shopping assistants Buyscout and Daydream or retailer agents like Amazon’s Buy for Me may be poised to pick up early agentic volume as these tools come into closer contact with consumers’ discovery phase.

Go deeper: Check out our coverage in the Retail & Ecommerce briefing to see what OpenAI’s move means for retailers.