In October 2025 Walmart announced that soon customers would be able to make purchases directly from ChatGPT. This move to AI-first shopping is a game changer. According to Walmart “the retail experience shifts from reactive to proactive as it learns, plans and predicts, helping customers anticipate their needs before they do.”
AI-shopping is set to go mainstream.
It’s not just another channel for companies to sell stuff. It is redefining the customer shopping experience and the sales and marketing strategies and tactics that companies use. Digital commerce is undergoing a seismic transformation, driven by unprecedented investments in artificial intelligence and a rapid evolution of technology. Just look at the scale of the AI investments in leading frontier markets like the US, and recent announcements of Open AI and Google that will redefine the way commerce will happen in coming years.
These forces are not only redefining the way consumers and businesses interact but also challenging established business models, including those used by telecom operators.
For commerce, it means an era where personalisation, speed, and seamless interactions are the new norm – and these interactions may happen in totally new channels.
Technology Evolution: Redefining the Commerce Experience
As technology continues to evolve at breakneck speed, digital commerce is moving beyond traditional online storefronts. The integration of AI into customer journeys leads to more intuitive, predictive, and interactive buying experiences. Businesses must now think beyond the website or app—they need to be present wherever their customers are, whether that’s through their favourite AI assistants, messaging platforms, immersive environments or AI glasses.
AI Experiences in Commerce: The Rise of Instant Checkout
One of the most significant innovations reshaping commerce is the advent of AI-powered features like OpenAI’s “Instant Checkout.” This technology enables customers to conduct the full purchasing journey from discovery of options for the need at hand, comparing the options, and moving to completing the purchases - all within the same conversational AI experience in ChatGPT and similar AI assistants. While this is initially happening with selected commerce ecosystems with integrations in place (e.g. Shopify), this is likely to get more momentum with wider integrations in digital commerce market. Given that ChatGPT is pushing the Instant Checkout to the market, it will not be a big surprise if Google will bring this purchasing capability as part of AI summary responses in search results at some point. This will raise the importance of the shift from SEO to AIO (AI Optimisation), to ensure brands and their offerings are visible in the AI engines most relevant to their markets.
Such capabilities not only increase conversion rates but also open doors to new commerce models and can change dramatically the competitive landscape for many brands —think shopping directly from a chat conversation, social media post, or search result page without ever leaving the platform. These AI-driven experiences are setting the stage for a future where commerce is integrated, invisible, and effortless. But also establishing new gatekeepers to reach B2C and B2B audiences.
Telecom Operators: Rethinking Business Models in a Disrupted World
For telecom operators, these changes present both challenges and opportunities. Traditionally, telcos have operated as infrastructure providers, focusing on connectivity and network services. While the connectivity market still represents the majority of the revenues for most telecom operators, the strategic growth areas typically include digital services beyond connectivity, new B2B ICT offers and many telcos are also entering totally new industry verticals with focused solutions and acquisitions. While strategic focus for telcos can be on these key growth areas, telcos should also think how to address and perhaps leverage some of the disruptions in the above mentioned commerce models and AI technologies that might have major impact to the way their core connectivity services are discover, purchased and consumed.
If you look at the recent announcements from OpenAI, for technologies like Instant Checkout, the ability to embed ‘applications’ into OpenAI ChatGPT experiences can provide opportunities for telcos. These advances combined with modern BSS platform capabilities, that can expose the needed commerce services towards these AI native experiences of leading horizontal AI players (via e.g. Model Context Protocol - MCP), it is easy to predict that we will see traditional telco offerings such as prepaid eSIM cards and other more advanced offerings being integrated to AI native experiences. Customers can search, find, compare and complete the purchase all inside their ChatGTP conversation. Just think of a situation when you travel to a new destination and want to quickly explore eSIM offerings. This will mean a new competitive landscape for many telcos. It will raise questions on how to compete, how to use branding, bundling, pricing and complementary physical retail experiences as ways to compete in this totally new digital market landscape.
While above is aimed at for B2C market, AI can also impact and improve how B2B customers buy goods and services from telcos. Traditionally, for a telco to sell advanced B2B services, such as a private 5G network solution using 5G SA slicing there needs to be extensive manual work for solution planning, validation and offer making – sometimes to the extent that it becomes even too complex to try to sell those solutions.
AI is removing the complexity, time and is automating the B2B sales process. Imagine a situation, where a telco B2B sales manager can have a Teams call with the client, and as meeting ends, there is a seamless transition happening from automatically captured business intent from the conversation, and “instant offer” is created by Agentic AI (using captured business intents and automating offer creation and AI driven simulation and validation of the offer using Digital Twin of the Autonomous Network). This scenario is more complex than the B2C “instant checkout” scenario but is equally automated using AI. This massively cuts sales cost and time for creating the proposal.
Naturally, similar “instant proposal” scenarios could be built to be part of B2B customer self-care, where the customer can express the need in natural language, and AI driven conversational experience will lead the customer to getting a personalised proposal to meet their needs.
Taking this one step further, imagine how also the B2B lead generation and sales process can evolve further using human like video agents. Imagine a photorealistic video agent engaging you into a relevant dialogue in social media, YouTube, or in the customer’s digital channel of choice. First opening your eyes for the value proposition in question, such as having a guaranteed connectivity for a large-scale outdoors sports event and all merchants there using 5G slice-based solution that connects electronic point of sales terminals to ensure smooth business throughout the event. As part of the interaction with the AI video agent, agentic AI workflows could prepare a solution proposal for the customer for instant initial proposal on the spot. Naturally providing the option for further discussion with human agents if so desired should also be provided. These types of AI video agent solutions are already emerging from companies like Synthesia, and Heygen, and integrating those video agents with backend workflows into telecom operator B2B sales processes is not far away – for those telcos that want to experiment the next evolution of digital commerce and sales using AI.
Conclusion: Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights
AI investments are reshaping the digital commerce landscape, creating both disruption and opportunity. Technology advancements like AI-shopping, Instant Checkout or instant proposal creation are setting new opportunities and disruptions for customer experience and operational efficiency.
Telecom operators need to evolve their business and operational models to be prepared for the future. Telcos have been used to deal with "known" customers, but now they will start to address "cold calls" when AI connects the dots between a prospect and a service provider. Marketing will transform to AIO and services must be built in an AI compatible way. This requires agility and willingness to experiment with emerging paradigms. The telecom sector’s ability to adapt and innovate will be critical. If telcos will be able to make the shift to the new AI commerce era, they will be able to address completely new pockets of value sources and customer segments.
Qvantel is actively exploring the new avenues for digital business, and use of AI. At the Innovate Asia event, Qvantel will showcase how part of the above is coming to life, especially in the context of B2B sales, and how telcos can create an Instant Proposal on the spot in sales meetings and call. These AI driven proposals contain the offer that has been validated by the digital twin that will ensure the service being proposed will work as expected enabling the telco to provide an SLA in the proposal. This will help telcos use AI to bridge the business and network and instantly create customised sales proposals helping unlock the biggest telco growth opportunity in B2B sales.
