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Chatbots Turn Into Personal Shoppers
Chatbot checkout // Illustration by Kate Walker
Tech giants, AI startups, and even retailers are turning their chatbots into personal-shopping assistants… just in time for the holiday rush.
Why It Hits: Thanks to e-commerce, nearly every product is available at your fingertips… which means we’re all likely dealing with some level of “decision fatigue,” according to University of Virginia marketing professor Luca Cian. The promise of agentic shopping is that a chatbot will know you well enough to surface just the few options you actually want.
Behind The Purchases: The days of Google Searching for the right gift are going the way of the dodo, per The NYT.
OpenAI recently released an “Instant Checkout” feature within ChatGPT, in partnership with several retailers and marketplaces, while Perplexity just introduced a shopping feature that bases its product recommendations on past chats.
Amazon rolled out an AI tool that tracks price fluctuations and autonomously buys products when they fall within a shopper’s budget. Meanwhile, Google’s AI shopping assistant can even call stores to check product availability on your behalf.
Target and Walmart have launched their own chatbots that help shoppers find the right gift by asking about the recipient’s interests and age.
Fashion brand Ralph Lauren debuted its own AI stylist called “Ask Ralph,” which doubles as a personal shopper and a stylist.
Checkout: While many people report that these tools still need a lot of finessing before they’re totally reliable, using AI to score a last-minute gift for your impossible-to-shop-for dad or make sure you can get Christmas pajamas for your entire extended family at a reasonable price is about to skyrocket in the coming years. A Mastercard/Harris Poll survey found that about 42% of consumers are already using AI for holiday shopping, and Adobe predicts that AI-powered purchases will surge 520% this season.
‘Tis the chatbot season.
Next Holiday: You might soon find yourself keeping a running “gift log” for everyone in your life — and uploading it to your AI of choice each year. We guess “gifts from the heart” are now “gifts from the code.”
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Today’s email was written by David Vendrell.
Edited by Nick Comney. Polled and Copy-edited by Kait Cunniff.
Published by Darline Salazar.