Shoppers asking AI about choices, prices

Major retail chains and technology companies are offering new or updated artificial intelligence tools in time for the holiday shopping season, hoping to give consumers an easier gift-buying experience and themselves an augmented share of online spending.

- By ANNE D’INNOCENZIO

RUFUS remembers information customers previously fed it, such as having children that all like board games.

(PETER MORGAN Associated Press)

Although AI-powered purchases are in early stages, the shopping assistants and agents rolled out by the likes of Walmart, Amazon and Google can do more than the chatbots of holidays past. The latest versions were designed to provide personalized product recommendations, track prices and place some orders through unscripted “conversations” with customers.

Those features are on top of shopping updates from AI platforms like Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini. In one of the season’s most talked-about launches, Google introduced an AI agent that can be instructed to call local stores to ask if a desired product is in stock.

San Francisco software company Salesforce estimated that AI would influence, in one way or another, $73 billion, or 22%, of all global sales from the Tuesday before Thanksgiving through Monday after the holiday, according to Caila Schwartz, Salesforce’s director of consumer insights.

The figure, which stood at $60 billion a year ago, encompasses everything from a ChatGPT query to AI-supplied gift suggestions on a retailer’s website, Schwartz said.

Despite the advancements, AI’s impact on holiday shopping will be “relatively limited” this year since not every shopping site has useful tools and not every shopper is willing to try them, said Brad Jashinsky, a senior retail industry analyst at information technology research and consulting firm Gartner.

“The more retailers that launch these tools, the better they get, and the more that consumers get comfortable and start to seek them out,” Jashinsky said. “But customer behavior takes a long time to change.”

Here are three ways the technology is poised to influence holiday shopping habits in 2025:

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