OpenAI’s plan to transform ChatGPT into a shopping platform is struggling with a fundamental problem: product data is messy. In-app checkouts announced in September are not yet widely available to the millions of Shopify merchants promised access.
OpenAI, Shopify, and Stripe are working to standardize how merchant information flows to AI agents, but the hands-on effort required for each merchant is slowing rollout. The challenge isn’t the AI—it’s the underlying data infrastructure.
Product catalogs across millions of merchants contain:
The solution requires a middle layer—a context graph that acts between the catalog and the AI agent with clean, validated product data. This is the infrastructure challenge beneath the consumer-facing AI experience.
For platform businesses betting on AI commerce, data quality becomes the bottleneck. The companies solving the data standardization problem will enable the AI shopping future; those waiting for AI to solve messy data will wait indefinitely.
Strategic Implication
AI commerce depends on data infrastructure that doesn’t exist at scale. The race isn’t just to build the best shopping AI—it’s to build the data layer that makes AI shopping possible.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
