This Omni Talk Retail Fast Five segment explores Klarna launching shopping directly inside ChatGPT and what it signals about the future of agentic commerce.

Chris Walton and Laura Kennedy discuss whether consumers truly want AI-powered shopping assistants, why payments and trust may matter more than AI itself, and which companies actually “have the right to win” in the next generation of digital commerce.

They also unpack how conversational shopping could reshape search, checkout, and customer behavior over time.

⏩ Tune in for the full episode here.

#Klarna #ChatGPT #AIShopping #AgenticCommerce #Ecommerce #RetailTechnology #Payments #ConversationalCommerce #RetailStrategy #OmniTalk

Klarna has launched a new shopping search app directly inside ChatGPT, allowing consumers to search for products, compare prices, check availability, and view offers from multiple retailers, all without ever leaving the AI chat interface.

According to payments, Klarna announced the launch of its shopping search app in ChatGPT on May 20 last week.

Shoppers can describe what they want in natural language, receive visual product results with real time prices and availability from participating merchants, and then be redirected to the merchant site to complete the purchase.

The app is powered by klarna's product search MCP server, a model context protocol server which connects ChatGPT directly to Klarna's commerce data.

That network includes more than 100 million products and 400 million merchant listings across 13 markets.

Chris, how significant is it that Klarna is putting its app into ChatGPT and is this just another expected generative AI experiment?

Oh, man.

Yeah, is it just another expected generative experiment?

I actually think this moves really interesting and I'm not surprised that I think that given the conversation that you and I just had about what Google did last week and the reason I say that.

So I interviewed for Hon Khan, who for, for my Investor Perspectives in Retail and the Consumer podcast.

It's coming out next week and he's from ubs.

He's a managing director at ubs and his job is to evaluate which tech he thinks he wants to bet on for the long run.

And he brought up, he brought up two points that I think were really interesting in that podcast and I encourage everyone to listen to it when we release it.

He said like, some of the advantages he looks for are scale and also like moats and the moat being payments.

And so for example, if I know my payment data can allow me to transact quickly via Klarna and that I want to pay via Klarna, that in and of itself could be a calculated step in my LLM discovery process.

And so Klarna, you know, is highlighting a marketplace of goods that are available.

It gives you great pricing data across all the retailers it works with.

So I don't know, Laura, that's a pretty compelling funneling point for me, which is why I, like, I've been very down on in App experiments in LLMs on this show, but for this one I'm, I'm kind of feeling a little bit different about it for that reason because like I could see like a, you know, somebody that likes to pay on installments or, you know, installment financing.

Like, yeah, show me everything that's available and let's make this work and give me the best for my budget.

I think that's pretty compelling, especially if Karna's marketplace is big enough and wide enough, which it might just be.

And they are super smart at Karna.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean I think this gets ultimately to exactly.

We were talking about, about the importance of payments and you know, the fact that our payment systems were built to keep robots out and now we're trying to reintroduce them.

And so the big recognizable payments related companies with consumer trust I think are really well positioned.

And you know, I think Klarna is increasingly one of those.

And you know, to your point about having the new, new technology solutions and then moats Klarna was, has been out there trying to build a platform, you know and kind of we've seen a lot of the payments companies.

You had Klarna, I think both Visa, definitely Visa and MasterCard maybe have thought about, you know, what, what does media look like as part of their solution if not it, you know, seems like a good idea because to your point, they have all this data on how people are spending money.

You know, I, I think the question that I just keep asking, once you're over the hurdle of the app within the LLM, which I will admit I still am skeptical about 100%, it's still, you know, which entity do consumers want to hand their payment authority to?

Klarna has scale both with the merchants and the consumers.

It makes me wonder if it is the wallet that consumers point their agents at.

You know, we still see a lot of strength for Buy Now Pay whether, you know, consumer advocates be damned.

It's still not great, but they still keep using it.

And so does it point toward a future then of where there's a few competing wallets?

You know, there's Google, there's Apple Pay, there's Klarna and then who, which one is your default?

You know, whether we get into agents or it's just humans transacting on LLMs, whatever your default is, you know, matters a lot.

And so you know, I, this leads to a tangent of I don't, I still don't know where Apple's going to land in this.

To me, they were in the first or second row and, and to keep our metaphor going because they, they can see across our phones.

Wouldn't it be great if you had an agent?

They could see everything I was doing.

But you know, we're, we're not doing that with Apple.

It seems that the focus seems to be on the hardware.

So.

But back from that, that tangent, it does seem like Klarna is fitting itself, trying to fit itself into that conversation about how, how payments work on these platforms.

Yeah, that's why I love doing this show, because you got me rethinking and playing devil devil's advocate on my own opinion too, Laura, because a part of me is like, well, if people wanted to do this with Karna, why wouldn't they just do it in the Karna app already?

Like, you know, why couldn't I just serve this if I'm Karna, couldn't I just serve this up easier for them?

And if I believe the consumer pro.

Proclivity is there, why aren't I just doing this already?

And so that's, that's.

And that, I think, goes back to what we don't know.

We don't know all the psychological reasons necessarily about why we choose to engage and actually consume products from the places we consume them from.

You know, which, you know, which is just something I'm going to start.

I think my big takeaway from this podcast as far as I'm gonna start thinking more about that because, yeah, like, why isn't this already happening if people want to do it?

And maybe we're just early on it.

I don't know.

But, yeah, I don't know.

What do you think?

Right.

Well, I think, I think then we give Klarna credit for maybe the mark.

I will fully admit, in the vein of saying things I don't know.

I don't know what traffic is like to Klarna's marketplace and, or what, you know, uptake is like.

I haven't seen.

They talk about it a lot publicly.

To their credit, they may be saying, okay, we have this marketplace and we are going to be where consumers are.

And I think that's where the best thinking brands and retailers are.

How, how they're orienting their, you know, investment in technology right now is just follow the consumer and, and follow what the consumer is trying to do.

Maybe not necessarily exactly where they spend their time, but I, I do think that's been an adage that through my career, you know, tried to follow it went back when CPG Brands said nobody will ever buy food on Amazon, not fresh food.

And we're still dealing with that.

But, like, nobody's going to buy their food on Amazon.

It's like, yeah, but 65% of them are there.

So, like, don't you want to be there in case they do want to buy that?

So, you know, I, that's where I guess I have to give Clara credit.

They're, they're just trying to be where, you know, everybody is.

And, and that seems to be what's guiding the successful retailers and brands right now.

Yeah.

Right.

And that always goes back to quote.

I always screw up the quote, too.

But, like, the near term technology, technological, always happens slower than we think it will, but the longer term happens faster.

Right.

I think that's also the point you're getting at here, which is like, we feel like we want this to happen fast, but it's probably just going to take time and there's going to be a lot of things we learn along the way.