Walmart Inc.’s new partnership with OpenAI pushed its stock price to a record high on Tuesday, creating the possibility of the retailer reaching a trillion-dollar valuation.
After Walmart released the news on Tuesday, its share price jumped 5%.
The upward trend continued on Wednesday, with Walmart shares closing at $109.03, up $1.82, or 1.7%, on the New York Stock Exchange.
Walmart’s shares have ranged between $79.81 and $109.56 in the past year.
The Bentonville-based retailer’s market capitalization now tops $869 billion.
Cracking the trillion-dollar threshold would vault Walmart into a rare group of stocks, one that remains overwhelmingly dominated by technology names, Bloomberg News reported.
Of the 11 other stocks that are currently worth $1 trillion, only Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and Saudi Aramco sit outside of the tech sphere.
Citigroup Inc. analyst Paul Lejuez said the OpenAI pact highlights Walmart’s ability to “remain at the cutting edge of technology.”
Open AI last month partnered with the e-commerce shopping sites Etsy and Shopify, and the stock prices of both immediately “soared,” according to Yahoo Finance.
The deal between the companies means shoppers can browse for and order everything but fresh foods from Walmart and Sam’s Club on OpenAI’s ChatGPT instead of on the retailers’ e-commerce sites.
A feature to be added later this fall will also allow customers pay for each item in ChatGPT.
OpenAI said in a Sept. 25 post that it’s working to add multi-item carts to its Instant Checkout feature.
With Instant Checkout, OpenAI said, ChatGPT shows the most relevant products from across the web.
“Product results are organic and unsponsored, ranked purely on relevance to the user,” OpenAI said.
“Orders, payments and fulfillment are handled by the merchant using their existing systems,” OpenAI said. “ChatGPT simply acts as the user’s AI agent — securely passing information between user and merchant, just like a digital personal shopper would.”
A Walmart spokeswoman said that shoppers will be able to use ChatGPT much like a search engine. They type into it what they’re looking for, she said, giving as an example: “‘I’m thinking about purchasing black shoes for a wedding.’ It will then show you black shoes available for purchase, and those might be from Walmart.”
“You would complete the purchase directly within the ChatGPT platform,” she said.
The service is free for users, though OpenAI said merchants will pay a small fee on completed purchases.
Doug McMillon, Walmart’s president and chief executive officer, said that “for many years now, e-commerce shopping experiences have consisted of a search bar and a long list of item responses.”
“That is about to change,” he said.
Walmart said the ChatGPT shopping option will be available to its customers “soon.”
Informtation for this article was contributed by Janet Freund of Bloomberg News.
