• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

How much are you letting AI help with your holiday shopping?  Based on what I read over the last two days, a lot more people are relying on AI to do the heavy lifting, which will truly transform the way Black Friday and Cyber Monday deliver for retailers.

Rufus and Sparky (AI shopping assistants for Amazon and Walmart, respectively) are not typically the names of the first people I would call to help me with my gift-giving ideas. Still, it seem as if holiday shoppers are becoming comfortable with these tools baked directly into the UI of the two largest retailers. Recent reports suggest that users were adopting them this past weekend. 

Couple that trend with the broader use of ChatGPT and Claude as shopping assistants, along with retailers integrating their products directly into shopping searches from those platforms. All of which suggests the future is very near when LLMs become helpful tools in the ecommerce arena. 

What are the implications of such a transformation?

First and foremost, this could have a huge detrimental effect on those omnipresent email campaigns that overwhelm our collective inboxes this time of year.  I get retailers emailing two times per day, every day.  It actually creates the opposite of the intended effect, forcing me to engage in an unsubscribe effort every morning. 

The retailers left will be even less effective if my purchase behavior is left to an AI LLM.  The AI doesn’t see my inbox, and it doesn’t know where I may have purchased in the past.  The AI is influenced by its own training data and the data supplied by retailers.  That means AI-based shopping could become the dominant form of discovery, and email marketing for retailers becomes obsolete faster than you can say “click-through.”

Secondly, what happens to all those affiliate links we see that power publisher recommendations and gift-giving guides?   Affiliate links are the backbone of the ecommerce world, and publishers have integrated them en masse to their content, hiding their revenue streams in plain sight. They always mention that the links included will pay them a fee, but do publisher links feed the LLMs, and do they influence what is being recommended by an AI shopping assistant?  Does it all depend on the size of the publisher and the scope of their recommendations?  What about those gift-giving guides that game the SEO system?  Are they going to be as influential in the world of generative engine optimization?

Thirdly, where do true influencers sit in all of this?  Influencers make up a substantial portion of ecommerce recommendations, especially during key gift-giving periods.  Are influencers’ recommendations also feeding the LLMs?  Will LLMs assign value to a recommendation given by an influencer, or will it ignore them, recognizing these are incentivized recommendations?

The age of AI-powered shopping may not reach its apex for another year or so, but the signs are strong for a massive area of growth.  The ramifications of this transformation will mostly be felt next year and in years to come as marketers have more data, more insight and more time to plan accordingly. 

How are AIs influencing your shopping right now?