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OPENAI’S HOLIDAY GIFT.
A slower-than-average week in the run-up thanks to Thanksgiving week. OpenAI still found time to ship an improved Voice agent and slide into shopping season. ChatGPT Voice now lives inside the main chat window. People tap, talk, and stay in flow. Voice mode feels native now, not like a feature buried behind menus.
Then came a new kind of launch: Shopping Research, an agent built for the way people actually shop. Shopping Research listens like a human and thinks like a buyer. Ask for “a small quiet vacuum for a flat” or “a gift for a four-year-old who loves art”, and it builds a tailored guide in seconds. No listicles, no affiliate filler. Each result comes with trade-offs, short pros and cons, and reasons to choose one product over another. Results are organic and based on publicly available retail sites. Chats are never shared with retailers, but ChatGPT can make mistakes about product details like price and availability.
Conversations feel live. The agent asks clarifying questions about budget, style, or use. People can say “not that one” or “more like this”, and the set reshapes in real time. The more you use it, the more it learns what you actually mean by good value.
Shopping Research was available on ChatGPT Web, iOS, and Android for logged-in Free, Go, Plus, and Pro users. It shipped with a ‘present,’ just in time for Black Friday and the holidays; “nearly unlimited” usage across plans through the season.
Shopping Research runs on a fine-tuned GPT-5 mini model trained specifically on product reasoning. Accuracy already beats baseline ChatGPT. Electronics, homeware, beauty, and sports gear show the strongest results. Amazon blocks its crawlers, so half the internet’s catalogue still sits out of view. Expect a pause between messages. The agent reads, compares, and ranks before it speaks. Depth over speed.
SO WHAT?
Shopping Research is not a toy. It’s a developed working draft of agentic commerce. Once you trust a model to filter choices, you’ve handed over discovery. Whoever owns the guide, owns the shelf. Every correction, like, or rejection feeds OpenAI a clean intent signal; a graph of taste, value, and trade-off across millions of users. That’s data Google never collected in one place. A feedback loop that maps why people buy, not just what they buy. That’s search, collapsed into conversation.
For users, it means shopping feels less like searching and more like delegating. Tabs disappear. So do ads. The agent acts as a cool-headed researcher who knows when to stop scrolling. Accuracy still wobbles, so smart people use it to shortlist, not decide. The trade-off is trust. People must decide how much weight to give an assistant that explains its reasoning but still hallucinates on stock, price, and availability.
For brands and retailers, a new front page just opened - the ChatGPT shelf. Products need structured data, good reviews, and clean feeds to show up at all. Forget SEO. AI discovery now decides what even enters the conversation. Structured data, clean pricing and transparent stock will determine what shows up at all. Miss that, and the best offer in the world never leaves the warehouse. Those who treat ChatGPT as a distribution channel, not a curiosity, will own early reach. The move is OpenAI’s first full wedge into retail economics. Once Instant Checkout couples up, ChatGPT won’t just advise, it will transact; this is the quiet arrival of algorithmic merchandising. Products and services now need to impress an agent before they reach a person.
For OpenAI, the play is bigger. Shopping Research is a test run for a world where GPTs transact. Each refined recommendation, each follow-up question, trains the commercial layer beneath ChatGPT. The moment checkout connects, OpenAI will own a slice of the world’s retail intent, something even Amazon had to buy, not build. Regulators will circle soon enough. Once chat turns commercial, disclosure, bias and commission trails move from SEO footnotes to AI ethics. Trust shifts from brand logos to model behaviour. OpenAI is betting people will trade transparency for convenience, at least for now.
Expect agentic pipelines to reroute affiliate and search revenue straight through OpenAI’s ecosystem. That’s the real moat. Rising chatter asked whether Google is closing the gap. Unlikely. OpenAI serves over a million business customers, ships faster each quarter, and breaks ground on six 103-megawatt Stargate buildings in seven months. The moat isn’t narrowing, it’s deepening.
Field Notes
CONSUMERS
Do: Treat Shopping Research as a smart shortlist engine, great for ideas, not receipts.
Don’t: Assume prices or availability are live; double-check before buying.
MARKETERS / BRANDS
Do: Optimise product data, reviews, and attributes for machine readability. Think “agent shelf presence.”
Don’t: Waste budget on SEO blind to AI, ChatGPT is now a discovery platform.
RETAILERS
Do: Keep feeds clean and accessible; allow OpenAI crawlers to index inventory.
Don’t: Rely on affiliate partners to represent your products accurately inside ChatGPT.
ENTERPRISE/STRATEGY
Do: Track how users move from chat to checkout and where intent drops off. Use insights to inform your omnichannel plans.
Don’t: Treat ChatGPT shopping as a novelty. Behavioural data here could reshape paid media strategies within months.
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COMPANY ↓
OpenAI, staff/leadership profiles, board & governance, mission & values, HQ & global offices, funding rounds & investors, financial health & revenue, partnerships & alliances, organisational structure & hierarchy, regional presence & expansion
OpenAI announced that with over 1 million business customers directly using OpenAI, they’re expanding data residency access to business customers worldwide. /OpenAI
OpenAI and Virgin Australia announced an Australian airline first collaboration to redefine air travel. /@gdb + virginaustralia
OpenAI announced a collaboration with Emirates Group to accelerate AI adoption and innovation. /@gdb + governmentofdubiamedia
OpenAI informed users about a recent security incident at Mixpanel, a data analytics provider. /OpenAI
OpenAI shared an update on Stargate and the speed of delivery - in barely 7 months, they have simultaneously built six 103MW buildings. /OpenAI
OpenAI confirmed that Andrea Vallone, the head of an OpenAI safety research team that worked on ChatGPT's mental health responses, is set to leave at the end of 2025. /WIRED
TECHNOLOGY ↓
ChatGPT ecosystem, DALL·E tools, Whisper audio, product roadmap, prototypes, developer access, integrations, extensions, research, innovations
OpenAI introduced shopping research in ChatGPT, a new shopping experience that helps users find the right products for them. /OpenAI
OpenAI made usage for shopping research in ChatGPT, ‘nearly’ unlimited for all plans through the holidays. /OpenAI
OpenAI rolled out Instant Checkout for @Shopify merchants starting with Glossier, SKIMS, and Spanx. /OpenAI
OpenAI’s ChatGPT Android app version 1.2025.322 beta showed mentions of a new "Personal shopper" (shopping agent). /@btibor91.blaho.me
GPT-5 Pro topped the Creative Writing Benchmark, upping GPT-5.1 and GPT-5. /OpenAI
OpenAI announced that ChatGPT Voice now works inside chat with no separate mode needed. /OpenAI + OpenAI
OpenAI announced that users can now chat with apps in ChatGPT. /OpenAI
OpenAI rolled out improvements to Sora 2 with less “flickering” amongst other changes. /OpenAI
OpenAI introduced Sora styles, a new way to co-create with Sora by choosing from 6 different styles to reimagine a prompt. /OpenAI
OpenAI rolled out a storyboard update for Sora 2. /OpenAI
OpenAI released Atlas updates, including ‘a special treat for developers: the DevTools panel can now be docked to your browser tab’, the ability to turn off safe search, and better responses that incorporate browser memories. /OpenAI
Colin Jarvis, FDE lead at OpenAI, demonstrated how @OpenAI ’s FDE team transforms complex, multi-team enterprise processes into end-to-end AI systems for Altimeter Capital [VID]. /@colintjarvis + YouTube
OpenAI’s Codex team were working on a few experimental projects and requested input from users for improvements. /OpenAI
OpenAI shared ‘What makes a great ChatGPT app: How to build capabilities that make conversations better’, a new guide on capability selection and conversation - & discovery-first design. /OpenAI
OpenAI enabled new MCP access connectors for ChatGPT Enterprise, Edu, Business, Pro and Plus customers with connectors enabled. /OpenAI
OpenAI shared real examples that outline how AI agents are contributing to the software development lifecycle in ‘Building an AI Native engineering team’. /OpenAI
OpenAI launched an update for ChatGPT builders, the ‘New Apps SDK UI component library — ChatGPT-native building blocks to help teams move faster on UI’. /OpenAI
OpenAI included new references in the ChatGPT Android app 1.2025.329 beta, including: "ads feature" with "bazaar content", "search ad" and "search ads carousel." /@btibor91.blaho.me
OpenAI activated a preview of the new directory of apps in the ChatGPT web app (probably a work in progress). /@btibor91.blaho.me
STRATEGY/IMPACT ↓
Public Policy, CSR, ESG practices, ethics & AI safety, risk management, competitive strategy, thought leadership, industry impact, market positioning & competitive strategy
In an interview with Laurene Powell Jobs, Sam Altman and Jony Ive said they are prototyping OpenAI's device and that it could arrive in “less than” two years. /The Verge
Gabriel Petersson, a self-taught coder and now an AI Sora Researcher at OpenAI, shared his story and the most important traits to thrive in the age of infinite leverage with the podcast ‘Extraordinary’ [VID]. /@0xSigil + YouTube
Kevin Weil, VP Science at OpenAI, shared the news that the White House have just launched the Genesis Mission - a national effort to accelerate scientific discovery using AI. /OpenAI
MISCELLANEOUS ↓
Legal, scandals, industrial action, revenue, profiles, public policy, CSR, ESG, corporate culture, ethics, risk management, Sam Altman investments, +
OpenAI were served a temporary restraining order blocking the company from using the word “cameo” for Sora features, following a trademark lawsuit by video app Cameo. /CNBC
OpenAI shared its approach to mental health-related litigation. /OpenAI
OpenAI filed a response that denied liability in a lawsuit alleging ChatGPT gave a teen who died by suicide information about suicide methods, arguing that he misused ChatGPT. /NBC News
What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality. /NYT
How OpenAI partners amassed $100bn debt pile to fund its ambitions. /FT
RESOURCES ↓
POVs, data visualisations & dashboards, key insights & metrics, industry reports & white papers, competitive analysis, recommended reading & book lists, analysis pieces & case studies +
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