Credit: Zulfugar Karimov on Unsplash TikTok is adding an AI shopping assistant and one-click checkout to its app. The two features let users buy directly from brands without leaving TikTok, the company said in an announcement at Advertising Week New York on Monday. Buy Direct is an in-app checkout. Users can buy from a brand straight from the For You feed with one click, TikTok said.
Shopping Assistant is a conversational AI agent that remembers what a user needs. It answers questions about product details, shipping, sizing and availability, and can complete the purchase in the same conversation. TikTok said it is building the features with commerce platforms and payment providers, including Salesforce, Shopify, Shoplazza and Stripe. It did not give a launch date. “AI is transforming how advertiser content is created and scaled,” said David Kaufman, TikTok’s global head of monetisation product partnerships.
Agents for advertisers TikTok also announced Agentic Leads, an AI agent that holds conversations with potential customers to qualify them as sales leads. It will run in TikTok direct messages and in lead forms on advertisers’ own websites. The TikTok Ad Network is now open to US advertisers. It lets them run campaigns across nearly 400,000 apps outside TikTok, the company said.
TikTok’s advertising tools now also work as a connector in AI platforms including Claude, Kimi, Manus, Perplexity and Replit. The connector uses the Model Context Protocol, an open standard for linking AI agents to other software. The number of advertisers using it to run campaigns has risen by more than 200% since launch, TikTok said, citing its own data for July to September. Other updates automate search ads, pull AI-generated and creator content into one approval step, and factor costs such as affiliate commissions into TikTok Shop ad campaigns.
Shopping beyond TikTok Shop The checkout and assistant work across the app, not only inside TikTok Shop, the marketplace TikTok launched in the US in September 2023. Market research firm eMarketer estimates TikTok Shop made about $15.8bn in US sales in 2025, TechCrunch reported. That is roughly 18% of all US social commerce. Other companies are also building shopping into AI tools.
Synchrony wants shoppers’ store cards inside ChatGPT. More than half of US consumers now use AI for shopping, according to NIQ.
