AI chatbots are becoming personal shopping assistants—What makes them good?
What's the story
A recent survey conducted by Adobe has revealed a growing trend among US consumers. They are increasingly using generative-AI chatbots as their personal shopping assistants.
The study, which involved 5,000 participants, found that 39% of them have already used AI for online shopping assistance.
Meanwhile, a significant majority (53%) said they intend to use these tools for this purpose within the year.
Pros
What enables AI chatbots to enhance your shopping experience?
Generative AI chatbots excel as personal shopping assistants by understanding natural language and user intent. They can interpret complex queries, including nuances in language, slang, and even misspellings.
These chatbots also have access to several product catalogs, specifications, and reviews to answer user questions of different kinds.
Generative AI can learn from user interactions, past purchases and browsing history to build a profile of the user and provide highly personalized product recommendations.
Consumer preferences
AI tools are more popular on desktops/laptops
Adobe's survey also found that when shoppers use AI tools, they mostly use them for general research (55%), product recommendations (47%), deal hunting (43%), gift ideas (35%), finding unique products (35%), and drafting lists (33%).
Notably, the report found that website traffic associated with these AI tools usually comes from desktops and laptops. This preference starkly contrasts with the overall e-commerce trend where desktop share-of-visits was just 34% during the same period.
Conversion rates
Are AI chatbots resulting in increased conversion rates for retailers?
Despite their growing usage, Adobe's analysis of one trillion US retail site visits from February 2025, shows traffic from the latest chatbots exhibits 8% higher engagement.
However, these visitors are also 9% less likely to convert than other sources of traffic.
This indicates that while generative AI is gaining popularity among consumers for research and consideration stages, it hasn't yet significantly increased conversion rates for retailers.