Original Coverage & Source Attribution: wwd.com
Retailers and shoppers still have more than a month to prepare for Black Friday. Will AI play any role in the busiest shopping season of the year? Likely, yes. Will it be big enough to challenge traditional and online retail? Here’s what we know so far.
Surveys say shoppers only trust AI to an extent
So much of the success of agentic shopping relies on winning consumer trust. It’s been a subject of many surveys which have attempted to track the public appetite forAI that can not only think on its own, but purchase on behalf of the consumer.
What do surveys say about consumers ahead of Black Friday? More than one-third of U.S. consumers are either very or extremely willing to use generative AI tools and chatbots for holiday gift recommendations, according to a Gartner survey that polled over 1,000 U.S. consumers.
It’s a sign of AI’s growing influence on commerce, but the budding tech is still is not as popular as tried-and-tested methods such as recommendations from family and friends or traditional internet searches.
Retail is still a world that is largely split between online and in-store shopping. Gartner said 77 percent of consumers are planning to shop in-store and 75 percent plan to shop on Amazon.
That’s how consumers use AI to refine their searches, but what about the steps after? It seems an entirely different conversation. Out of over 4,000 U.S. shoppers polled for Accenture’s holiday survey, only 22 percent would allow AI to decide on what to buy, while only 8 percent would let it make the purchase on its own.
It’s worth noting that many of these surveys were conducted before the release of Meta’s Muse, a personal agentic AI that has lately been topping app shops. Muse can do all sorts of errands like a personal assistant, including shopping and buying. But whether people will trust the cute, fluffy AI enough to hold and spend their hard-earned money this holiday season is yet to be seen.
Many online stores are not ready to open their doors to AI agents
Many consumer surveys about AI revolve around their readiness. What is not as often queried is the flipside of that situation. Are digital stores be ready for agentic shopping?
The short answer is no. Only less than four out of 10 U.S. public e-commerce storefronts are ready, according to global tech company InMobi, based on an analysis of around 3 million digital merchants.
InMobi has recently launched a free online tool—named “Ready, Set, Agent”—that essentially grades how ready an e-commerce website is for agentic AI. It’s scored against 80 metrics, but the tool will see if AI agents can find a store, access it, read its catalog and ultimately check out.
Out of over 3 million digital storefronts that were analyzed, only 36 percent were technically set to support the entire journey of agentic commerce from discovery to payment.
Others only have it in bits and pieces: 15 percent can support cart and checkout but not discovery, while 12 percent are readable without a way for AI agents to complete the purchase. These numbers may still go up a bit since there is still 37 percent that haven’t been scanned.
Abhay Singhal, co-founder of InMobi and CEO of InMobi Advertising, said in a statement that this leaves a lot of room for improvement. “The first step is knowing exactly where agents can work with your store today, where they run into problems, and what will have the greatest impact if you fix it,” he said.
New AI tools this holiday season
Some of the season’s newest innovations will have practical implications for both consumers and brands.
More precise search
Algolia, a company that powers the in-house search platforms on brand websites, acquired Velou, a New York-based company that adds another tool to Algolia’s belt for a more precise search experience.
Product listings are often unstructured and manually inputted, and they may not reflect how people phrase their searches. For example, a shopper may type “machine-washable navy midi dress for a fall wedding” but she will never find the right dress if its product listing simply says, “blue dress.”
Velou uses AI to add those details automatically, extracting specific, evidence-grounded attributes from product text and images against a curated retail library, “so search and discovery perform out-of-the-box without months of manual tagging and merchandising rules.”
It’s also important for AI agents since they rely on structured product data. If a detail is not accurately reflected in the data, then the agent shoppers can’t see it, Algolia explained in a recent statement.
Phrasing the right prompts for the best deals
An AI result is often only as good as its prompt. Mint, an AI shopping companion, has launched a free tool that gives the user access to ready-to-use AI shopping prompts that are crafted to get them the best deal.
“Prompt to Save” provides a ready-to-use prompt from one of 250 (and counting) partner brands, allowing the user to fill in a few specifics and paste the text into Minty Chat, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Grok.
The sample prompt when a user selects Nike might look like this:
“Is this Nike deal worth it all-in? Check what this exact colorway has actually sold for recently, not MSRP, and check other authorized sellers. Give me one out-of-pocket number with a link, then say buy or skip and what you couldn’t verify. Use minty.com/s/nike.com for Nike’s current cashback, codes and exclusions.”
Amazon sellers go international
Amazon said only 30 percent of its sellers are present in more than one country.
The rest do business in domestic markets, either by choice or circumstance. Some are held back by the barriers that are typically associated with starting to sell in a new place, like learning new customs and speaking the language.
Amazon is promising upgrades for these sellers to make the process of diversifying markets as simple as possible. A gradual rollout of capabilities for sellers has been promised, starting with an expanded and unified view of expansion opportunities across the U.S., Europe, and Japan. Sellers will see where the greatest demand resides for their products, what the economics look like in each country, and what steps they must take before they can start selling.
By the end of this year, a seller will be able to utilize an Amazon-operated facility near their factory and reach a number of countries using a single shipment, instead of splitting the inventory into separate branches per destination. This capability will be available to the U.S., U.K., Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Canada, cutting storage costs by up to 45 percent.
