Stephanie Tully is a professor at USC who specializes in studying consumer behavior and how AI is playing a role in it.

San Diego

Artificial intelligence is being integrated into online shopping experiences, offering consumers personalized assistance based on their preferences and past purchases. According to Stephanie Tully, a consumer behavior expert at USC, these AI assistants are more advanced than typical chatbots, aiming to tailor recommendations to individual users.

A recent YouGov poll indicates that while over 40% of Americans are aware of AI shopping assistants, only 14% have used them. Experts suggest that established shopping habits and concerns about privacy and manipulation are significant obstacles to broader adoption. Many consumers remain cautious, preferring traditional shopping methods, though some anticipate increased use of AI in the coming years.

New trend of shopping that brings in AI as your personal assistant

I do use chat GPT sometimes when I have some questions about like what to do in a certain area. AI can be used to help you in many different ways. I definitely use chat GPT to just kind of like help myself out, like understand some things that I'm not too familiar with. But the tech is also being used to help you shop. When people are talking about AI personal shopping assistance, they are primarily talking about the types of things that you do type into a chatbot. Stephanie Tully is a professor at USC who specializes in studying consumer behavior and recently how AI is playing a role in it. Tully tells me these AI shopping assistants are a more complex chatbot you find on a website that's aim is to be personalized and have more information about you. They can know that, well, you've bought these types of things in the past or also incorporate things that you say during the chat. So you just say that you're specifically looking for this because you're going on a trip to this specific place in this specific month. And so they're going to incorporate that type of information. A recent poll by YouGov, an international online research group, shows a little more than 40% of Americans know about these shopping assistants, but 14% of people are actually using them. I'd probably use it a one-time thing just to see how it works and if it's convenient or not, but I'd probably just stay away from it, to be honest, and just probably do my own thing and just go to whatever I need to get. That doesn't come as a surprise to Tully considering how habitual shopping can be. They know how they look at the star ratings. They know which kinds of reviews they like to look at, right? And it can be hard to break those habits for a number of reasons. One might just be the effort involved, right? I have to think more about how I'm going to do it, which website I'm going to go to, where I'm going to find the personal assistant. Tully says it could be a trust factor too with the new tech, considering the information it's using to base its answers on. The knowledge of that can make consumers really concerned that they're being manipulated or persuaded in ways that they might not realize if they're relying only on these AI personal shopping assistants. Some feel it could take some time to warm up to things like these AI shopping assistants. I think in the future, you know, next five years, we'll be using a lot more AI than we do right now, but still like pretty unfamiliar concepts. So people just aren't really using it as much. Ryan Hill, ABC 10 News.

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