A New Era of Consumer Behavior Begins

Walmart just changed how consumers use AI.

Earlier this week there were two AI stories of note, and both surround Open AI. The first is that OpenAI and Salesforce have entered a partnership which will allow you to access your Salesforce data inside of ChatGPT, use ChatGPT inside of Slack (which Salesforce owns) and even instant checkout, which brings us to the much bigger news.

How Walmart and OpenAI Are Redefining Retail

Walmart also entered a partnership with OpenAI that will allow consumers to check out products from Walmart and Sam’s Club directly from within ChatGPT. This is a watershed moment for consumer behavior and if you are in marketing this is the story to pay attention to.

These tectonic shifts in consumer behavior seem obvious in hindsight but might not have felt as revolutionary as history recounts them. Think about Henry Ford and the idea of vertical integration he took the ideas of Carnegie in the steel industry and applied it to the car which increased production, lowered cost, and scaled the automobile in the United States.

Lessons from History: When Innovation Scales the Masses

In the early 1990’s it was very difficult to get online. For context Tim Berneres-Lee had just introduced the idea of the World Wide Web in 1989 and according to the Pew Research Center by 1995 63% of the country either didn’t know what the internet was or how it worked. Enter America Online, between 1993 and 2006 AOL as it was known sent out over 1 billion floppy discs and later CDs to consumers solving the issue of “how” to get on the internet and instead getting the consumer to focus on why they needed to be there.

While AOL was fading in the zeitgeist, Facebook launched and by 2006 had just 12 million users. In 2007 that number ballooned to 50 million and then doubled in 2008 to 100 million users. What was the inciting consumer incident that helped speed up Facebook’s growth? Three words:

One More Thing…

In 2007 Steve Jobs stood on stage and announced the first iPhone which ushered in a shift in consumer behavior that we are still adapting to twenty-three years later. Which brings us back to Walmart and Open AI.

Why This Move Puts Walmart in Rare Company

This announcement signals three things. The first, is that this announcement puts Walmart in the rarified air of a business with a $1 trillion dollar evaluation and only one of three companies in that stratosphere that aren’t tech companies, Berkshire Hathaway and Saudi Aramco being the other two. The second is a question, where is Amazon in all this and why did this sit this out? But the third signal is the most important, if one of the largest retailers is going to sell goods directly out of ChatGPT this is going to accelerate adoption of consumer AI usage in same ways that the car accelerated cites, AOL accelerated the internet, and the iPhone accelerated the global connection of the social web.

What Marketers Should Take Away from This Shift

If you need more convincing, consider this: ChatGPT currently drives just 1% of Walmart’s referral traffic — its smallest source. Yet Walmart can see the tsunami forming on the horizon and has chosen to ride it rather than be swept away. By shifting from “reactive” to “proactive,” Walmart isn’t just experimenting with AI; it’s redefining how consumers engage with commerce itself. For marketers, the lesson is clear we must adopt the same mindset. With 58% of Gen Z already using AI to shop, this partnership doesn’t mark the beginning of mass adoption; it confirms it. As consumers start using ChatGPT to do their holiday shopping, our job is to study this shift in real time and align our travel strategies with where the customer is going next.