Best Buy Says Purchases Now Complete Inside ChatGPT, Paired With Ask Blue in a Two-Front AI Channel Design
Best Buy told investors its OpenAI commerce integration is complete and Ask Blue is rolling out. What completing a purchase inside ChatGPT means after OpenAI retired Instant Checkout, and how retailers should split discovery and conversion.
Key Takeaways
- On August 27, 2026, Best Buy told investors that its commerce integration with OpenAI is complete and that a conversational assistant called Ask Blue has begun a phased rollout
- Because OpenAI retired in-chat checkout in March of the same year, the phrase "complete purchases within ChatGPT" needs to be read carefully
- Assigning discovery to external AI channels and comparison plus conversion to your own conversational layer is becoming the practical design for online retailers
The venue where companies report AI progress has shifted noticeably over the past year. Not press releases, not conference keynotes, but quarterly earnings calls. Once the audience is analysts and investors, the words carry accountability.
Best Buy's August 27 call was a clean example. Jason Bonfig, who becomes CEO on November 1, laid out two AI developments side by side. One is a connection to an external platform. The other is a conversational assistant on the company's own site. How they are paired reveals the underlying design thinking.
Results and AI Progress Delivered on the Same Stage
Best Buy is reaching customers in new ways, both in stores and online, executives said Thursday (Aug. 27) during the specialty consumer electronics retailer's quarterly earnings call.
www.pymnts.comThe second quarter of fiscal 2027, ended August 1, was strong. According to the earnings release, revenue reached $9.779 billion and comparable sales rose 4.1% year over year. Domestic comparable sales grew 4.5%, and domestic online revenue was $3.00 billion, or 33.1% of domestic revenue (up from 32.8%). The company also raised full-year comparable sales guidance from a range of negative 1.0% to positive 1.0% up to 1.9% to 3.0%.
Growth came from computing, home theater, and a set of emerging categories including AI glasses, trading cards and health rings. Traditional gaming declined. That mix matters more than it looks. Categories that require explanation are the ones growing, and this is precisely the moment Best Buy is automating parts of the sales conversation.
Against that backdrop, Bonfig announced the completed commerce integration with OpenAI.
We view this as an important step in expanding our digital ecosystem and positioning Best Buy at the forefront of emerging AI-enabled commerce experiences.
The numbers investors would most want, however, are absent. Revenue from AI channels, order counts, and how much any of it contributed to domestic online growth are all undisclosed. Both the call and the release keep AI commentary qualitative. That is progress from the point six months earlier when the company declared its OpenAI and Google partnerships on the Q4 call, but it stops short of the next stage, which is disclosing contribution.
How Much Room Is Inside "Complete Purchases Within ChatGPT"
This is the passage that deserves the most care. Best Buy said customers can discover products, receive recommendations and complete purchases within ChatGPT. Read literally, that means payment happens without leaving the conversation.
OpenAI's own posture, though, has already changed. On March 24, 2026, alongside an announcement about stronger product discovery, the company effectively withdrew from Instant Checkout, its in-chat payment flow. Its stated reasoning: the initial version did not offer the level of flexibility it aspired to, so merchants would use their own checkout experiences while OpenAI focused on discovery. We have covered the reasoning behind that reversal separately.
One episode is telling. When Shopify described Agentic Storefronts to its merchants using the phrase "complete purchases inside ChatGPT," OpenAI publicly corrected the wording. Speaking to Modern Retail, the company said the phrase meant making products discoverable for purchase inside ChatGPT, not that purchases themselves complete through Instant Checkout. In practice, buyers move to the merchant's own storefront via an in-app browser or a separate tab.
Best Buy's phrasing is therefore close to language another company used months earlier and had officially amended. Best Buy has not disclosed the mechanism, whether a dedicated app inside ChatGPT or a handoff to its own site. For now, where the payment actually occurs is undisclosed.
What is established is the connection itself. In OpenAI's March expansion of the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) into discovery, Best Buy was named among the first wave of retailers alongside Target, Sephora, Nordstrom, Lowe's, The Home Depot and Wayfair. The discovery layer is confirmed. Everything past it lacks resolution.
| Company | Product discovery in ChatGPT | Where the purchase completes |
|---|---|---|
| Best Buy | Connected via ACP discovery (first wave) | Earnings call says within ChatGPT. Mechanism undisclosed |
| Walmart | Via a Walmart app in ChatGPT (separate from the ACP discovery list) | Walmart app inside ChatGPT, with account linking, loyalty and payment |
| Shopify merchants | Connected by default via Agentic Storefronts | Merchant's own storefront, via in-app browser or a separate tab |
| Target, Nordstrom, Wayfair and others | Connected via ACP discovery | Merchant's own site. Target also runs a dedicated app |
Walmart's setup is currently the clearest. The company built an in-ChatGPT app experience backed by Sparky, handling account linking, loyalty and payment inside its own environment. Discovery in ChatGPT, transaction at home. With the boundary drawn, both responsibility and measurement stay legible.
Why Ask Blue Sits on Best Buy's Own Side
When an external channel's specification moves this much, keeping a conversation surface of your own is a reasonable hedge. Ask Blue draws on product knowledge, support resources, customer reviews, availability and pricing, and handles product comparisons and compatibility checks. The rollout is phased and has just begun.
Ask Blue will help customers figure out what tech is right for them. Depending on the need, Ask Blue can guide a customer to self-service resources or connect them to a live specialist.
That last clause is where a first-party assistant separates from a general one. ChatGPT can compare products, but it cannot hand a shopper to a Geek Squad agent in a store. Best Buy has a national store network and specialist staff, which gives it an exit route when a conversation stalls. Owning the boundary between what AI handles and what gets passed to a person is the concrete payoff of running your own channel.
The store strategy points the same way. More than half of the 50 Meta Lab @ Best Buy spaces announced on June 8 are installed, each roughly 900 square feet, staffed by employees trained exclusively on the Meta ecosystem, featuring AI glasses and VR. Given that AI glasses are among the growing categories, staffing explanation-heavy products with people lines up with the numbers. Bonfig called the smaller-format stores customer acquisition engines: relationships start with a store visit, then move to the app, digital channels and membership programs.
Discovery to external AI, consultation and conversion to the owned site, final human judgment to the store. Three layers, three assignments.
The Order of Operations for Running Two Fronts
If you want to reproduce this stance, sequencing matters. On the external channel, what you actually need is product data quality. ACP's discovery layer works from feeds pushed in advance, so stale prices or inventory create a gap between what the AI shows and what your site says. The comparison card inside ChatGPT is built from the data you sent. Feed freshness and attribute coverage decide the outcome well before protocol implementation does.
On your own conversational layer, define the scope of information first. Everything Ask Blue touches, product knowledge, reviews, availability, pricing, compatibility, already exists in current systems. The implementation work is making that information retrievable in conversational context rather than training something new on it. Build the escalation path to a human into the design from the start.
Measurement will not cooperate. Paid ChatGPT accounts do not pass referrer data, and in-app browser sessions are frequently logged as direct traffic. The bias structurally understates AI channel contribution. It would be unsurprising if that difficulty is part of why Best Buy has not disclosed contribution figures.
Skepticism remains warranted. Gartner analyst Bob Hetu told CNBC that OpenAI underestimated how difficult enabling transactions would be, adding that it is not easy for retailers either. Six months after launch, Instant Checkout still offered limited product selection and did not always show current item information. How many consumers actually want to finish a payment inside a chat window is also unproven.
Conclusion
Best Buy's announcement marks the move from declaring a connection to reporting an operation. It also shows that the substance of that operation is still described only at the resolution of language.
Watch for whether AI channel revenue or order metrics appear in future earnings materials. The moment numbers arrive, this area becomes an investment question. Until then, the sensible posture is to assume the current split, discovery on the AI side and transaction on yours, and to spend the interval getting product data and conversational design in order.
