Name: How AI could upend shopping
Uploaded: 2025-12-12T17:39:10.222Z
Duration: 5 min 30 s
Description: AI is reshaping holiday shopping as consumers seek personalized gift ideas and deals from sites such as ChatGPT. Retailers such as Walmart and Target on the other hand are scrambling to stay ahead of the technology to help increase traffic ahead of the holiday season.

AI is reshaping holiday shopping as consumers seek personalized gift ideas and deals from sites such as ChatGPT. Retailers such as Walmart and Target on the other hand are scrambling to stay ahead of the technology to help increase traffic ahead of the holiday season.

The release of Open AI's ChatGPT has accelerated the development of artificial intelligence and warnings about its impact on society.

Rise of AI

Artificial intelligence platforms such as ChatGPT are increasingly influencing shopping habits, particularly during major retail seasons. Analysts predict that AI shopping assistants will drive billions in revenue, as consumers turn to these tools for inspiration and personalized recommendations, bypassing traditional retailer websites and apps. 

Retailers are responding by developing their own AI chatbots and optimizing product information for AI-driven search results, though early versions have shown mixed success in personalization. Companies like Walmart have partnered with AI platforms for instant checkout, while others like Amazon are developing proprietary solutions. The industry is rapidly evolving, with new rules and best practices still emerging.

How AI could upend shopping

Platforms like ChatGPT are poised to have a huge impact this holiday season, potentially driving billions in revenue. I'm Gabrielle Fun-Rouge. I'm a retail reporter for CNBC. I'm Melissa Repco, also retail reporter for CNBC. Every year we get a lot of predictions from analysts and we hear what the forecasts are for the season. And one of the things that kept jumping out is along with predicting how much spending they'd see, they were predicting a lot of shoppers would be looking for inspiration through these shopping assistants, kind of as a personal shopper. We've all been talking about SEO for what, the past 20 years now? This is having a big impact on marketers and how they're getting their products out to shoppers and how they're kind of changing, like thinking about their entire strategy. Everything was focused around Google. Now, a lot of it, it's early days, but now it's becoming focused on the agents. The challenge for these retailers and brands is they spend so much money on their websites and their apps and they want to have that direct relationship with customers. They want to build that loyalty by having them come to their app first. But what does it mean as people are skipping right over that and going instead to a chat GPT? And that's really determining what they find. It also creates pressure on the store experience, because when I think about the store experience, one of the things that really makes a retailer stand apart and makes it worthwhile to go in is when you're getting that kind of personalized experience with an employee at the store. And if you can get that online and you don't get that at the store, then maybe it kind of raises the bar and challenges retailers that are falling short with customer service. The data is mixed, right? You had Adobe data that showed that there was a lot of transactions coming in from chat GPT, showing that it's increasing conversion. There were some Salesforce data that showed that it's expected to drive billions in revenue this holiday season. So I think it's growing really, really fast. But consumers are mixed on it. You know, one person told me that holiday shopping always felt like a chore. Now it feels a little bit fun. One of the things that I've heard since I've been covering this beat is that the retail industry is, you know, so behind on tech, right? Like a lot of like their inventory systems, their POS, the way that the cash registers work is like the same kind of tech from like the early 2000s. So this is a challenge for them at the end of the day. You know, they have challenges managing inventory, which is the most basic building blocks of retail. Now you have AI coming in and kind of upending stuff. I know we saw a couple of the companies that you cover have their own chat bots and Target has one. We both tried it on Black Friday. It was not that good. And with that comes mixed success. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're able to offer those personalized answers. And so sometimes it can feel like a really frustrating chat bot, like a customer service chat bot where you're just getting answers that feel very scripted and not at all tailored to you. Yeah. Where it's like, press one for more information. Yeah. And I'm like, what is a book I should get for my niece who's four years old? It's like, please check our gift list. And so certainly a lot of room to grow there. Definitely. In the case of Walmart, they signed a deal with OpenAI and ChatGPT to be one of the companies where you can do instant checkout. So if you discover a Walmart product, you can then complete the whole transaction without even going to Walmart's website. On the other hand, Amazon has purposefully blocked a lot of these chat bots from scraping its website and from having its listings appear, which is a very different approach. And it's kind of going its own way to come up with AI tools. The other thing that we're seeing a lot of is that they're thinking about how to appear better in results. So it's kind of the AI version of SEO. How do you optimize your results and make sure you show up? And I talked to Target's chief information and product officer about this. And he said, you know, you used to write for a person. Now you're writing for an agent and you want to make sure you have more details. Because if you want to appear, you know, with writing for shoppers, they don't want to be inundated with words. But with the metadata, you do want to have a lot in there to increase your chances of being relevant and having that AI surface that result. It doesn't matter about SEO so much, having these keywords, which is what everything was focused on, the LLMs need content. They need like detailed information about products to be able to show that's what they're looking for. Authoritative information. So a good example of this is one of the brands that I spoke to. They're actually creating blogs, putting blogs on their website with all this detailed information about skin care. It's a soap line. And after they did this, they saw search from LLMs go up double digits. So this is a little bit, I wouldn't call it a wild west, but we're definitely, this is a whole new playing field. And we're going to have to come up with, you know, there's going to be new rules of the road, new boundaries in place. And those are not there yet. Exactly. There could be a chance for consumer feedback to really rise to the top, too. Reddit, for example, and the like, is where some of this feedback is being drawn from. So if that's the case, then maybe the truly best products rise to the top. And there is something refreshing about thinking that we may be in a world where quality wins or where personalization wins. And what kind of impact is that going to have on the shopper? That is the big question. Still too early to know.

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How AI could upend shopping

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Rise of AI