(CNN) — You can already buy almost anything with the click of a mouse. Now tech giantsare preparing for an AI helper to do even that for you one day.

Google, Amazon and OpenAI are racing to add new AI-powered shopping tools to their services, all aiming to play a critical role in one of the fundamental things people do online: shop.

“If you can become really core to that, then you’re able to monetize that attention in a lot of different ways,” said Jeremy Goldman, senior director of marketing, retail and tech briefings at eMarketer.

And whether they succeed could potentially determine the winners and losers of the next era of the web.

The shift to online shopping

Shopping is one of the main things people do online, Goldman said. And with consumers increasingly using AI to make purchases, stalwarts like Amazon and Google are defending their turf against upstarts like OpenAI and Perplexity.

As of September, US-based users can buy Etsy products directly from ChatGPT, keeping them in the chatbot for longer. OpenAI and Walmart announced a similar partnership in October. And Perplexity’s Comet web browser lets users set up AI agents to handle tasks like shopping on Amazon. (The online shopping giant sent a cease-and-desist letter to the AI startup.)

AI and online agents are expected to be involved in $73 billion worth of global online sales, or 22% of all orders placed, from the Tuesday before Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, according to Salesforce data provided exclusively to CNN.

That statistic covers a wide swath of the internet, encompassing everything from a ChatGPT query to an AI-generated suggestion on a retailer’s website to a customer service agent whoupsells a consumer. But Salesforce also said traffic from AI assistants grew 119% year-over-year in the first half of 2025.

Amid that shift, Google announced a slew of new AI shopping features onThursday.

For example, after asking a few questions about what a shopperis looking for, Google’s AI agent will call local stores and ask whether retailers have the product in stock, along with information about promotions and pricing. Users will see the “Let Google Call” prompt under certain search results when the feature begins rolling out Thursday.

The search giant is also making it possible to shop within its Gemini chatbot app and is launching a new tool that lets Google order an item on your behalf with your permission once the product falls below a certain price. Google said more than a billion shopping-related queries come through its platformsevery day.

Amazon has also sprinkled AI-powered features throughout its shopping app in recent years, including its Rufus assistant for answering product-related questions and AI recommendations.

Rufus interactions are up 210% year-over-year, and those who use the chatbot are 60% more likely to complete a purchase, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said during the company’s October earnings call.

The web’s AI era

It’s easy to see how shopping plugs into people’s online lives. Maybe you’re using ChatGPT or Gemini to plan a party. Wouldn’t it be nice if the AI could create a shopping cart with all the favors, decorations and snacks, too?

“It’s early, but we really believe that these experiences just layer on,” said Vidhya Srinivasan, vice president and general manager of ads and commerce at Google, “and that they add to the way in which people can now seek information and do the things they need to get done.”

At research firm Gartner, retail and hospitality analyst Brad Jashinsky said the company’sretail clients are comparing AI to technologybreakthroughs like the smartphone, internet and personal computer.

When breakthroughs happen,“the established leaders routinely get disrupted, and it’s an opportunity for both startups, but also maybe companies that are not the established leader, to jump ahead,” he said.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean ChatGPT will become the next Amazon or Google overnight. Those platforms still have major advantages thanks to the ecosystems and services they’ve built around their products, like Amazon Prime. And 66% of Americans haven’t used ChatGPT, while 20% say they haven’t heard of it, according to a June report from the Pew Research Center.

Still, in the tech industry’s eyes, there’s a lot more at stake than just winning online shopping.

Big tech firms are asking if they want to be part of someone else’s vision for the internet – or create their own, said Goldman: “Do I want to be a… spoke in somebody else’s hub?”

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