Topic
Sales, booking and support handled inside messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram, including invoicing and payment confirmation.
Google's Gemini-powered Ask Maps can now place restaurant orders through Square and Uber Eats, tripling a partner list that held only Toast in August. For a restaurant, the service that handles its orders now decides whether a Maps chat can end in a sale.
Reality
OpenAI rolled out Virtual Try On and Favorites worldwide, giving more than 1.2 billion weekly ChatGPT users a fitting room and a save list. Retailers should plan for shoppers who try on and shortlist in ChatGPT, even though OpenAI's last attempt at in-chat checkout underperformed.
Perspective Coverage
7 publishersReality
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky calls this week's AI search a first version and says the next three to six months go to exploring interfaces groups can share. Any team putting AI into a shopping flow now faces the same unsettled interface question.
Reality
DoorDash is running its AI ordering agent inside Apple's Messages app for 20,000 US pilot users on iOS, with checkout handled in the text thread. For now the channel is a bet on convenience and on DoorDash keeping its customer file, since it has released no basket figures for the pilot.
Reality
A dev.to writeup moves tool guards out of the prompt and into the executor, where a database check runs before dispatch. The same design fails open when the check itself breaks.
Reality