Meta tests an AI shopping assistant, taking on ChatGPT and Gemini

The AI assistant war has reached the territory where the really big money is: e-commerce. Meta Platforms is testing a product research feature in its Meta AI chatbot, aiming to compete directly with the shopping tools that ChatGPT from OpenAI and Gemini from Google already offer. Bloomberg reported the news, citing its own sources.

At first glance, the story may look routine: one more company adding one more feature to one more chatbot. Look closer, though, and it becomes clear why shopping has become a battleground for the biggest tech corporations. The global e-commerce market is valued in the trillions of dollars, and whoever captures the moment a purchase decision is made, when a user is choosing between three pairs of headphones or comparing smartphone specs, gains control over a huge stream of advertising and affiliate revenue.

For Meta, the move looks especially natural. The company already owns a powerful commercial infrastructure: hundreds of millions of people use Facebook Marketplace every month, Instagram Shopping has turned the social network into a storefront for brands, and in a number of countries WhatsApp has become a full-fledged sales channel. Until now, however, these tools have existed separately from the company's AI assistant. Integrating shopping into Meta AI could become the link that closes the loop: a user sees a product in their Instagram feed, asks the chatbot about specs and alternatives, gets a personalized recommendation and buys, without leaving the Meta ecosystem.

Competitors are not standing still. In early 2026, OpenAI is actively expanding ChatGPT's commercial capabilities, having added product comparison features and integration with major retailers. Google has gone further, combining Gemini with Google Shopping and search advertising, essentially building an AI layer on top of its traditional ad machine. Each player has its own strengths: OpenAI is betting on conversation quality and depth of analysis, Google on the scale of its search data and its ad infrastructure. Meta's strength is the social graph and preference data from nearly four billion users across its platforms.

Technically, building a good shopping assistant is much harder than it looks. A chatbot must do more than find products: it has to understand the context of a request, respect the user's budget, compare specifications from different sources, tell promotional descriptions from genuine reviews, and stay neutral without turning into an advertising tool for specific brands. That last point is especially important, and especially problematic for Meta, whose business model has historically been built on advertising. How do you reconcile an AI assistant's objective recommendations with the interests of advertisers who pay to promote their products? Neither company has an elegant answer to that question yet.

There is another important factor: user trust. Research shows that people still view AI recommendations with some skepticism, especially when it comes to spending money. Meta will have to convince its audience that its AI assistant is looking for the best option for the buyer, not for the advertiser. Given that Meta has repeatedly been at the center of scandals over the handling of user data, the task becomes even harder.

The consequences for the market could be large. If the biggest AI platforms successfully roll out shopping features, it would hit traditional product aggregators, review sites and even search engines in their classic form. Why open ten tabs and read reviews when you can ask an AI assistant one question and get a structured answer? Amazon, Alibaba and other marketplaces are also developing their own AI assistants, but they lack the social context Meta has.

The race for the user's wallet through an AI interface is only beginning. Meta is entering it late, but with a serious set of advantages. The question is whether the company can convert its social data and commercial infrastructure into a genuinely useful tool, or whether the shopping feature will become just another channel for serving ads in new packaging. The answer will determine not only the fate of Meta AI, but also how billions of people shop in the coming years.

*Meta has been designated an extremist organization and is banned in Russia.