{"id":159428,"date":"2025-11-25T20:39:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-25T20:39:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/159428\/"},"modified":"2025-11-25T20:39:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-25T20:39:09","slug":"openai-and-perplexity-are-launching-ai-shopping-assistants-but-competing-startups-arent-sweating-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/159428\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI and Perplexity are launching AI shopping assistants, but competing startups aren’t sweating it"},"content":{"rendered":"

With holiday shopping on the horizon, OpenAI<\/a> and Perplexity<\/a> both announced AI shopping features this week, which integrate into their existing chatbots to help users research potential purchases.<\/p>\n

The tools are markedly similar to one another. OpenAI suggests that users could ask ChatGPT for help finding a \u201cnew laptop suitable for gaming under $1000 with a screen that\u2019s over 15 inches,\u201d or they can share photos of a high-end garment and ask for something similar at a lower price point.<\/p>\n

Perplexity, meanwhile, is playing up how its chatbot\u2019s memory can augment shopping-related searches for its users, suggesting that someone could ask for recommendations tailored to what the chatbot already knows about them, like where they live or what they do for work.<\/p>\n

Adobe predicted that AI-assisted online shopping<\/a> will grow by 520% this holiday season, which could be a boon for AI shopping startups like Phia<\/a>, Cherry<\/a>, or Deft<\/a> \u2014 but with OpenAI and Perplexity pushing further into AI shopping experiences, are these startups in danger?<\/p>\n

Zach Hudson, CEO of the interior design shopping tool Onton<\/a>, thinks that AI shopping startups with a specialized niche will still provide a better experience to users than general-purpose tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity.<\/p>\n

\u201cAny model or knowledge graph is only as good as its data sources,\u201d Hudson told TechCrunch. \u201cRight now, ChatGPT and LLM-based tools like Perplexity piggyback off existing search indexes like Bing or Google. That makes them really only as good as the first few results that come back from those indexes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Daydream CEO and longtime e-commerce executive Julie Bornstein agrees \u2014 she remarked to TechCrunch over the summer<\/a> that she always viewed search as \u201cthe forgotten child\u201d of the fashion industry, since it never worked particularly well.<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\u201cFashion\u00a0\u2026 is uniquely nuanced and emotional \u2014 finding a dress you love is not the same as finding a television,\u201d Bornstein told TechCrunch on Tuesday. \u201cThat level of understanding for fashion shopping comes from domain-specific data and merchandising logic that grasps silhouettes, fabrics, occasions, and how people build outfits over time.\u201d<\/p>\n

AI shopping startups develop their own datasets so that their tools are trained on higher-quality data \u2014 something that\u2019s easier to achieve when you\u2019re attempting to catalog fashion or furniture, rather than the sum of all human knowledge.<\/p>\n

In Hudson\u2019s case, Onton developed a data pipeline to catalog hundreds of thousands of interior design products in a cleaner manner, helping to train its internal models with better data. But if AI shopping startups don\u2019t pursue that level of specialization, Hudson thinks they\u2019re bound to be overshadowed.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re using only off-the-shelf LLMs and a conversational interface, it\u2019s very hard to see how a startup can compete with the larger companies,\u201d Hudson said.<\/p>\n

The advantage for OpenAI and Perplexity, however, is that their customers are already using their tools \u2014 plus, their large presence lets them ink deals with major retailers from the get-go. While Daydream and Phia redirect customers to retailers\u2019 websites to complete their purchases \u2014 sometimes earning affiliate revenue \u2014 OpenAI and Perplexity have partnerships with Shopify and PayPal, respectively, allowing users to check out within the conversational interface.<\/p>\n

These companies, which depend on mammoth amounts of expensive compute power to operate, are still trying to figure out a path to profitability. If they take inspiration from Google and Amazon, then it makes sense to look toward e-commerce as an option \u2014 retailers could pay them to advertise their products within search results. <\/p>\n

But eventually, that could just exacerbate the existing issues that customers have with search.<\/p>\n

\u201cVertical models \u2014 whether in fashion, travel, or home goods \u2014 will outperform because they\u2019re tuned to real consumer decision-making,\u201d Bornstein said.<\/p>\n

Additional reporting by Ivan Mehta.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With holiday shopping on the horizon, OpenAI and Perplexity both announced AI shopping features this week, which integrate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":159429,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,89458,61,60,89459,1682,22905,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-159428","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-daydream","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-onton","15":"tag-openai","16":"tag-perplexity","17":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159428\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/159429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}