Checkout conversion is the wrong metric. Walmart's funnel has 20 years of A/B tests behind every button placement, so of course a brand-new chat interface loses there. The interesting question is whether chat wins at discovery, not checkout

How many people tried for the novalty with no intention of purchasing? It being a thousand times worse conversion wouldn't matter if they are additional sales???

I think they're thinking about this wrong.

I get all my groceries deliver to my doorstep via Walmart delivery pass. The thing I'm really missing is having AI curate meal planning to my family's preferences. I already feed ChatGPT my family' preferences (e.g. Kid A doesn't eat X Y Z and liked meal A B C, kid B likes ...) and ChatGPT is helping me build meal plans. With my preferences we can quickly nail down a meal plan for the week.

The slowest part of my meal planning is going through Walmart's slow site where each page load is 2-3 seconds and it takes several page load per item. Once it can translate my meal plan into a grocery checkout from Walmart I'm all set.

So they are comparing to the conversion rate of people who click on a link in the chat and go to Walmart's website to view the product? Wouldn't that be a really strong intent-to-buy signal?

The better comparison might be conversion rate for those who searched on Walmart.com vs those who searched within ChatGPT. Or maybe that is what they're comparing and I misunderstood?

Last year they couldn't draw fingers on hands properly, this year they can't convert at checkouts, I wonder what they'll be failing to do a year from now.

This tracks with the broader AI productivity paradox data. BCG's March study found AI oversight causes 33% increased decision fatigue in workers — but workers who used AI to reduce repetitive work reported lower burnout.

The variable isn't whether AI is present. It's whether AI makes decisions well. A checkout flow where the AI makes worse purchase decisions than a static website is the consumer-facing version of the same problem enterprises face with AI agents: capability without governance = worse outcomes, not better.

It's probably stuff like this along with investor pressure that will make AI companies slowly make their AIs more profit maximizing (and the long term reason ilya etc was so against even going down that path)

The shift to AI is currently a boon to consumer. Penny’s has obviously done this, as they have had a $119 Man U jersey ring up at $19 for a week now, with many of my mates having bought one. It’s unbelievable that anyone thinks gutting human oversight builds a better company.

This seems to be comparing apples to oranges. The intent of the users inside ChatGPT and on the website would be vastly different. Comparing them doesn't make much sense sans other variables (= better understanding the intent)

The first comment is probably spot on. I'll add one thing:

Speed is your greatest feature. LLMs are slow. Loading 450mb of javascript to the client just to buy a bag of Doritos is slow.

Server side rendering owns here.