ChatGPT now reaches roughly 900 million weekly users. Little Caesars and Starbucks are among brands linking conversational AI to ordering, using chat to gather preferences before steering customers to their apps or websites to finish purchases.

Chains embed ordering inside conversations Little Caesars has launched an app inside ChatGPT that helps customers build an order through a chat interface, then sends them to Little Caesars’ mobile app or website to complete the purchase. Greg Hamilton, chief marketing officer at Little Caesars, described the feature as practical and focused on making ordering easier. Starbucks is testing a separate conversational AI that suggests drinks based on mood or weather, then moves customers to the Starbucks app or site for payment and fulfillment. The company says some customers begin shopping with a feeling rather than a menu. Both approaches use chat for discovery and preference work, and the merchant’s app or site for payment and delivery. That split reflects current limits on how deeply third-party AI assistants integrate with brand ordering systems while preserving transaction controls. How big the audience is OpenAI reported about 900 million weekly active ChatGPT users. That scale helps explain why restaurant brands view chat assistants as places to capture demand. OpenAI’s September study also found the share of conversations classified as “seeking information” rose from 14% in July 2024 to 24% in July 2025. The study showed roughly 2% of conversations were about purchasable products and about 1% involved cooking and recipes. Traffic and referral shifts Restaurant tech vendors report chat-driven traffic appearing in analytics. Sterling Douglass, CEO of restaurant tech firm Chowly, said the share of his clients’ website visits coming from chatbots rose to 2.5% in 2025, up from 0.3% the year before. He expects AI to become one of the top referrers for restaurant sites. Those referral numbers remain small compared with search and social, but growth is rapid. For chains with large footprints, a few percentage points of referral growth can translate into meaningful weekly orders. What the tech does — and doesn't do Conversational AI is strong at narrowing choices and turning broad prompts into specific recommendations. For example, a chat model can take a prompt like “a cozy pizza for two with peppers and a cheap wine” and produce a short list of matching items plus suggested add-ons. But the chat side often stops short of completing a sale. Little Caesars’ ChatGPT app gathers order details and hands off to the brand’s existing checkout flow, reducing friction while preserving established payment and delivery systems.

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Chat-driven referrals are still a small slice of traffic, but they're climbing — some sites saw chat-origin visits rise to about 2.5% in 2025 — and restaurants are banking on that growth to make chat a routine way customers begin orders.

This article was created with AI assistance.