en.Wedoany.com Reported - Poland's largest e-commerce platform, Allegro, released an official press release on May 11, 2026, local time, formally announcing a technical cooperation agreement with OpenAI. Allegro will gain access to OpenAI's latest AI technologies and models, with an expert team from OpenAI assisting in the design, testing, and deployment of AI applications tailored for e-commerce scenarios, covering core functions such as search optimization, personalized recommendations, and intelligent customer service.
Headquartered in Poznań, Poland, Allegro is the largest e-commerce platform in the Central and Eastern European region. The company's total GMV for 2025 approached 70 billion Polish złoty (approximately 17.5 billion USD), with over 21.1 million active buyers, including about 15.2 million users in Poland. Allegro holds an estimated 50% to 60% share of the Polish e-commerce market, boasts a brand recognition rate as high as 98%, and covers over 80% of Poland's online shoppers. Its Smart! membership program has reached 7.5 million subscribers, while the company also operates a logistics network of over 33,000 parcel lockers across Poland.
Allegro CEO Marcin Kuśmierz stated in the official announcement that the partnership with OpenAI "is just the beginning of the transformation," and the platform will continuously translate the most advanced AI technologies into perceptible service upgrades for consumers and merchants. This April, Allegro had already launched an AI assistant feature within the Sales Center for sellers; in May, the company fully opened the AI assistant to all shoppers, following a pilot program that began in December 2025. Currently, Allegro is planning to extend its AI capabilities to backend scenarios such as intelligent operational decision-making, fraud detection, demand forecasting, and supply chain optimization, building a full-chain AI capability from consumer interaction to operational decisions.
Allegro's pace of AI deployment has been accelerating in recent years. In 2025, the company launched Genie, an AI-based shopping assistant that provides product recommendations and shopping advice to shoppers. Simultaneously, Allegro introduced AI semantic understanding technology into its search algorithm, upgrading product retrieval from keyword matching to shopping intent recognition. This partnership with OpenAI signifies Allegro's shift from relying on its own AI capabilities and external general-purpose model APIs toward a systematic, deep integration focused on vertical e-commerce scenarios.
From an industry perspective, Allegro's collaboration also carries a competitive implication. Since 2024, Pinduoduo's Temu has rapidly captured the Polish e-commerce market with an ultra-low-price strategy and social media marketing, once surpassing Allegro in user numbers. Allegro subsequently launched a counter-offensive by strengthening its local supply chain, enhancing user loyalty, and introducing AI-driven experiences, managing to overtake Temu by nearly 1 million users as of December 2025. The partnership with OpenAI has been cited by several Polish local business media outlets as a key technological upgrade measure in Allegro's battle to defend its home market.
From a broader perspective, the integration of generative AI and e-commerce entered an accelerated implementation phase in 2026. In China, Alibaba's Qwen and Taobao achieved full integration on the same day, May 11, enabling users to complete the entire closed-loop process of product selection, comparison, and ordering through AI conversations. ByteDance's Doubao has also been integrated into Douyin e-commerce, launching a "Help You Choose" feature. Amazon was previously reported to be testing new ways of integrating AI search. TikTok Shop continues to broaden the boundaries of social commerce based on its short-video recommendation algorithm. Against this backdrop, European local e-commerce platforms choosing deep cooperation with third-party AI companies possessing cutting-edge large model capabilities is emerging as a third paradigm, parallel to the AI paths taken by US and Chinese e-commerce.
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