Japanese home-appliance retailer Yamada Denki turned its associates’ sales expertise into a 24/7 multilingual voice agent built on OpenAI’s GPT-Realtime, OpenAI reported. “This is not an extension of the conventional chatbot,” said Akira Fukabori, CEO of avatarin, the artificial intelligence customer service company that developed the voice agent. Voice Agent Asks Questions Instead of Just AnsweringThe distinction that separates this from a chatbot is structural. Retailers are responding to that shift with real budget commitments: 43% of retailers are actively piloting autonomous AI shopping agents, PYMNTS Intelligence reported. For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.