Understanding the new category of Conversational Commerce

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OpenAI recently flipped a switch that might be as significant as the iPhone launch.

ChatGPT can now accept payments.

Users in the U.S. can shop Etsy and Shopify merchants directly inside the app. No bouncing to Amazon. No loading new tabs. Just ask, compare, tap “Buy,” and checkout instantly with Apple Pay, Google Pay, or Stripe.

This is not just e-commerce.

You’re not browsing websites anymore. You’re delegating discovery, recommendation, and purchase to an AI Agent.

• Stripe calls this “building the economic infrastructure for AI.”

• OpenAI has open-sourced the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP).

• Google is racing to release its own Agent Payments Protocol (AP2).

In short, the world’s largest tech firms are fighting to own the rails of agent-to-agent commerce. If TCP/IP defined the internet, ACP could define the next economy.

Let’s dive into how this category began and how to prepare for the new future.

For decades, impulse buying drove retail profits.

You walked into a store for eggs and left with a candy bar, chips, and a soda. Those tiny “why not?” purchases turned razor-thin grocery margins into real money.

But when commerce moved online, impulse shopping all but disappeared.

Amazon trained people to shop with intent. To optimize for efficiency. To subscribe and save, not browse and stumble.

Conversational commerce can bring impulse back, but in a very different way.

In the AI era, the new endcap is the conversation itself.

When someone says to ChatGPT:

“I can’t sleep lately.”
“I feel disconnected from my team.”
“I’m burned out and need a reset.”

Those are problems.

And AI’s next move is to connect those problems to solutions—a trip, a course, a product, a coach—in real time.

You might be talking to ChatGPT about reconnecting with your parents. AI helps you process your feelings, then suggests taking a short trip together. In a few more messages, you’ve booked the hotels.

That’s impulse buying, but not the shallow kind.

It’s emotionally-driven, context-aware, and tied to what matters to you.

This is the first real fusion of conversation and commerce, and it doesn’t look anything like marketing as we know it.

Conversational commerce collapses the funnel.

You go from “not in market” to “buying now” in one sentence. When the conversation becomes the buying experience, the old questions (“What’s your top-of-funnel strategy?” or “What’s your conversion rate?”) stop making sense.

The only question that matters is:

Are you in the conversation or not?

Because if you aren’t, you can’t be found, recommended, or bought.

This is the part most companies will get wrong.