• by Colin Kirkland , 4 hours ago

TikTok has announced the launch of a new AI assistant for TikTok Shop merchants. The company describes its new “Seller Assistant” as “an always-on, AI-powered expert” designed to “help sellers navigate complexity, stay informed, and act faster” when operating their in-app business. 

Seller Assistant provides guidance to Shop merchants via “personalized, context-aware recommendations” in response to real-time questions, such as “How do I improve product visibility?” or “What’s the best way to handle returns?” or even, “How did my shop perform last week?”

In response to a performance question, the ByteDance-owned company says that answers may include key metrics such as sales, traffic, order breakdowns and more. 

By delivering answers to both “tactical and strategic” questions within seconds, TikTok is attempting to eliminate sellers’ reliance on forums and help articles when troubleshooting, utilizing the power of AI to save time and ideally influence more sales. 

Assistants powered by AI are inflecting a more data-driven approach on advertising and e-commerce, providing brands and sellers with immediate data points cited with examples from their databases and sales history. 

For example, influencer marketing platform Captiv8 recently partnered with Perplexity AI to provide its clients with an AI assistant, among other tools, that answers highly specific questions about their campaigns. 

Additionally, Shopify recently announced that its AI-powered commerce assistant Sidekick can provide sellers with advanced multi-step reasoning and image generation. And Meta has also improved its virtual assistant, which now provides Ray-Ban Smart Glasses users with more real-time functionality like song identification and translations.