Unwieldy Gift List? ChatGPT Is Now Your Free Personal Shopper

Many of us kicked off our holiday shopping this past weekend. From Black Friday to Cyber Monday, the deals are seemingly endless. Gone are the days of pitching a tent outside Best Buy to beat the stampede of buyers racing towards the best deal. At this point, prices may even get better as the end of the year approaches, creating a non-stop cycle of bargains.

However, with so many options out there, comparing gift ideas and searching for the best bargain can be overwhelming. The good news? ChatGPT can now be your personal shopper.

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OpenAI recently rolled out a new “shopping research” tool for ChatGPT, and it’s now available to all users — including those on free accounts — with “nearly unlimited usage” across all plans through the holidays. Any shopping prompt will trigger the feature, or you can select ‘shopping research’ from the plus (+) menu.

The new tool is “powered by a version of GPT-5 mini trained with reinforcement learning specifically for shopping tasks,” OpenAI says. “We trained it to read trusted sites, cite reliable sources, and synthesize information across many sources to produce high-quality product research.”

In this mode, ChatGPT will help you find the right gift by analyzing your past inquiries, asking questions, and reviewing available information from the web, such as quality scores, reviews, and, of course, pricing and availability. It’s particularly useful if you’re shopping for something more complex, like electronics, where certain specifications will best fit your use case.

Shopping research will allow you to discover products, compare them side by side, and even find similar items at a better price. For now, purchases still require a click-through to the seller’s website. In the future, OpenAI plans to introduce an Instant Checkout feature.

We’re still living on the bleeding edge of AI applications, and ChatGPT’s shopping research is no different. The tool may still make mistakes about prices and availability, so rely on the retailer’s site for the most accurate information. This is just the beginning of the AI shopping experience. If you enjoy shopping and researching products, give it a whirl and see how it compares to your own old-fashioned internet research and gift ideas.